Kobo firmware still sucks

[Lucas Malor]

Originally Posted by PeterT

How about trying to select the top 5 Reading Experience issues and I'll do the best I can to get them reported to Kobo.

Peter, there's thread full of bug reports. I had no more time to update the first posts. So I'll be very grateful if you move it to a wiki and read the thread at the point I started to leave. You can make your own Bugs Thread and link to the wiki in the first post.

I know, it's a hard work, but I think it's a good thing to do.

Anyway, my more tedious issue, as I said, is the annotations, that are very hard to do.

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by PeterT

How about trying to select the top 5 Reading Experience issues and I'll do the best I can to get them reported to Kobo.

Sent from my moto g(7) power using Tapatalk

Ok,, I'll bite. 1 and 2 are recently created bugs. 3-5 are longstanding personal wishlist items.

1. I'll start with the issue that started this thread even. Adjustment of text selection with the 'handles.' Once text is selected, the selection can not be adjusted unless you know the trick to moving the handles. (drag once to 'unlock' them, then once the pop up menu is gone, drag again to actually move.) This was a regression added in an update at least 3 versions ago.

2. New regression affecting Epub files introduced with 4.15. In some books, if there are two TOC entries pointing to the the same internal file, (ex: Heading and subheading,), at some points in the book, putting the kobo to sleep or going back to home will loose your current page. Bookmarks and highlights are also impossible to create in these locations.

3. In Kepub, measurements of physical length are translated to a fixed number of pixels. For a very common example, text-indent 20pt. The number of pixes were adjusted back when devices were 160PPI,,,, on a 300PPI device, 20pt indent is barely distinguishable.

4. In Kepub, page numbering for the whole book jumps around out of order on some books (ie, display progress for whole book instead of per chapter). This is related to the reader using TOC entries instead of the epub spine to determine page numbers, and I realize you're only likely to see on 'unsupported' kepub sideloaded books. But there's no reason for it!.. the calculation for progress by Percent got it right, it should be possible to get page number ordering using the same logic.

5. For epub books, the font used does not fall back if the text has missing glyphs... for books that take advantage of Unicode characters, this means those characters will be missing entirely from the text, even if Kobo fully supports it. (Works fine with Kepub)

[Lucas Malor]

2. when reading a book, clicking the three points (the other options) is very hard. This seems to happen only on Kobo Aura One.
3. the virtual keyboard is highly unresponsive. it takes seconds to display the touched character
4. when I have the bad idea to read a pdf, I usually turn it 90 degrees and I zoom it a little, so I can read them better. The problem is that, when I reach the end of the page and I touch to change page, the next page is displayed at the same level of the previous page, ie the bottom...
5. sometimes, if I connect the Kobo to the pc and I edit a text file, like the nightmode ini, when I safely disconnect the device, it look like is completely reset. No books, nothing. I have to restart to restore the normal situation, after some heart attack and some profanity.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Lucas Malor

Because I'm forcing you to read my posts, and you're screaming "Using Ludwig van like that!"? As I said before, you're free to not read my posts. Adios.



...

I'm not familiar with the phrase "using Ludwig van like that". Doing a Google didn't seem to turn up anything? What does it mean?

[Lucas Malor]

Originally Posted by John F

I'm not familiar with the phrase "using Ludwig van like that". Doing a Google didn't seem to turn up anything? What does it mean?

Oh my God...
PS: are you still reading my posts? Is it not a torture to you, droog?

[Incanus]

Originally Posted by John F

1) Reliable tapping to turn pages.

2) Good library management, with reasonable response time regardless of library size or media memory (SD Card/internal) storage

[Lucas Malor]

People, please, no one wants to denigrate Kobo. Peter offered his time and patience to signal the bugs, so please, there's no need to signal the good thing of Kobo. I mean, if we dislike Kobo so much, we bought a Kindle or another device, no?

It's so difficult to understand that we LOVE this geeky e-reader and we are deluded by secular bugs and regressions? We have transformd this thread in a holy war between "haters" and "lovers", while we all love this crappy e-reader, for a dozen of reasons that Kindle dreams.

(and furthermore... I'm a cheap bastard and I don't want to spend money for another e-reader )

[John F]

I am still uncertain as to what

... using Ludwig van like that

means. Could anyone enlighten me?

Thank you.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Lucas Malor

... Is it not a torture to you, droog?

I'm not familiar with the term "droog". Googling finds:

noun informal

a young man belonging to a street gang.

Did you mean another word? I am neither young or in a street gang.

[Barbara1955]

Originally Posted by Lucas Malor

People, please, no one wants to denigrate Kobo. Peter offered his time and patience to signal the bugs, so please, there's no need to signal the good thing of Kobo. I mean, if we dislike Kobo so much, we bought a Kindle or another device, no?

It's so difficult to understand that we LOVE this geeky e-reader and we are deluded by secular bugs and regressions? We have transformd this thread in a holy war between "haters" and "lovers", while we all love this crappy e-reader, for a dozen of reasons that Kindle dreams.

(and furthermore... I'm a cheap bastard and I don't want to spend money for another e-reader )

And yet YOU started this HATE Kobo Thread

[issybird]

Let's stay on topic, please. Off topic posts and comments about Kobo in general and other posters will be deleted in their entirety henceforth.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

but I'll support the right to complain if helps keep Kobo on their toes.

Aye there's the rub. I'm not convinced it does anything of the kind. Reporting bugs directly to Kobo may be tortuous and annoying, and ultimately fruitless, but it has a much better chance of getting fixed than simply discussing it here.

AFAICS raising issues here has two benefits:

1) sharing experiences with other users who may have found a work-around or mitigation. Or even just knowing someone else has seen the same thing can be helpful.

2) having a good moan and letting off steam.

A few other random thoughts:

One of the things about firmware is that unlike software that's released and sold as software, it's part of a deal. No one buys Kobo software, they buy a Kobo ereader. Crucially no-one pays anything for ongoing support of Kobo software - that activity is subsidized from sales of readers and ebooks. In other words it's a cost, and so a wise business would try to minimise it, balancing the need to avoid a poor support reputation and bad PR, with the bottom line.

One of the first threads I started on Mobileread back in 2012 was whether and to what degree people expect firmware updates, if at all. Most people expected bug fixes but not much more IIRC.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

Stupidity like kepub and KFX doesn't help.

That's not stupidity. EPUB format is too complex to be parsed and rendered by an embedded device, so it must be preprocessed into a less taxing form, like predictable-structure kepub or lightweight binary KFX.

[Pajamaman]

Ive personally has nog great experiences with two kobos. But now I know a out koreader, I've been tempted to try again. My main concern is the tojch screen, but I tried typing in the search field and it seemed as good as an old nook st, so its seemed good enough for me. I might get one one day.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

That's not stupidity. EPUB format is too complex to be parsed and rendered by an embedded device, so it must be preprocessed into a less taxing form, like predictable-structure kepub or lightweight binary KFX.

HUH???? Kepub is epub format with added spans making the kepub structure, if anything, more complex than epub structure. So all these years I thought I was using RMSDK or ACCESS on my Kobo ereaders to parse and render epub2 and epub3 files never happened?