Sage New Sage - Serious issues

[Cobalt]

I have purchased a Sage to replace my Aura One that I've had since its initial release.

It's a lovely device, but has some serious issues which I assume must be fixable.

Firstly, it's impossible to load books without corruption.

I tried the following:

1) Use Dropbox - since setup seems very keen that you set up a Dropbox account I assume that's the preferred method. File was readable, but corrupt.

2) Use Calibre, as with the Aura. I updated to the latest version of Calibre. The first time I tried it the book appeared, but when I tried to open it, the Sage said I was not authorised to read it. And yet the book was unprotected and would load and be readable on the Aura.

Later attempts resulted in the book appearing in the Kobo file system, but not in the book list on the device.

3) Copy a 'kepub' file from the Aura to the Sage. Similarly to 2, it appears in the Sage file system, but not on the device's book list.

4) Manually copy a Mobi file to the Sage. This works, but the file is corrupt. (Also, the book cover does not display correctly.)

The corruption takes the form of extra, inserted characters, every page or two. The characters are frequently copies of earlier characters, e.g.

"The case of the dog in the night"

would display as

"The case ocase f the dog in the night".

Some times the characters have not appeared in the preceding text.


Also, the dictionary dos not work at all. It will not even highlight a word.

I presume there must be a work around for these problems, but I haven't been ale to find it here or elsewhere.

Thank you for any help.

[DNSB]

Have you tried using either Sigil or calibre's ebook editor with the epubcheck plugin to check the ebooks for issues?

For kepub, to highlight, you need the added spans. A simple rename from .epub to .kepub.epub will open the ebook using the WebKit based renderer but highlighting will not work.

You may want to check the Kobo epub-spec page for more information.

I've seen that popup about DRM but found that it went away after restarting my Kobo. One thing you might want to do is to copy the activation.xml file from the .adobe-digital-editions directory on your Aura One to the Sage to make sure they are activated with the same Adobe ID.

As for the .mobi file, the mobi format supported by Kobo is an antique version for Mobipocket files. Amazon has made many changes over the decades to that format and .mobi files from Amazon will not work properly on a Kobo ereader.

[Cobalt]

It turns out that the Sage needed updating.

I thought it had done this during initial set-up, but no. The version of the software loaded could barely be called an alpha test version.

Everything seems to be working properly, now, except that it takes about eight seconds to open a book (not just the first time). Given the speed of the processor, this is absurd.

[Quoth]

What sort of book? That sounds very slow for a normal epub.

[Cobalt]

All books.

My Aura takes 3 - 4 seconds.

It's a bit of a mystery why it takes more than a fraction of a second to open a book - certainly after its initial opening. Any pre-processing that is necessary should be stored in a cache, somewhere.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cobalt

It's a bit of a mystery why it takes more than a fraction of a second to open a book - certainly after its initial opening. Any pre-processing that is necessary should be stored in a cache, somewhere.

How?
An epub is simply a zipped collection of files. It has to be unzipped. Then there are file(s) to be parsed. Then the "first" html/xml file has to be parsed and rendered.
If the ebook has all text in one file, or a very large first chapter, there is a bigger delay.
Also there are several ways a cover can be defined. Amazon tries to speed load time on azw3/KFX by skipping cover and front matter. Amazon KFX is a sort of data stream saved as a file so it can start loading during download or before a whole file is processed.

PDFs are different again and so many internals. They can be very complex and slow.

What exactly would you cache for about 16,000 epub books (which might easily fit on 32G), or even around 2,000 ebooks in about 4G flash?

How long would building the hypothetical cache take when adding 10 or 100 ebooks?

How much storage would it take?

[John F]

Originally Posted by Cobalt

...

Everything seems to be working properly, now, except that it takes about eight seconds to open a book (not just the first time). Given the speed of the processor, this is absurd.

Originally Posted by Cobalt

All books.

My Aura takes 3 - 4 seconds.

It's a bit of a mystery why it takes more than a fraction of a second to open a book - certainly after its initial opening. Any pre-processing that is necessary should be stored in a cache, somewhere.

Are the time you mentioned coming after a power up, after waking from sleep, from the My Books screen?

I just tried a couple of kepubs. Waking from a sleep (that was put to sleep) seems instantaneous. Waking to My Books and opening the last read book seems instantaneous. Waking from my books and opening another book took about 2 seconds.

The book was 2MB and 2800 "pages". I opened to page 228. Trying the same thing opening to page 2600, I had similar results to slightly slower (maybe 1 second to open the book).

[Sirtel]

No epub/kepub has ever taken this long on my Sage. Not even the omnibus edition of The Wheel of Time with its 17 000 pages.

Given your initial issues (which also seem pretty unique), I'd say something is wrong with your Sage. Maybe you were unlucky and got a lemon.

[Cobalt]

Originally Posted by Quoth

How?

snip

What exactly would you cache for about 16,000 epub books (which might easily fit on 32G), or even around 2,000 ebooks in about 4G flash?

How long would building the hypothetical cache take when adding 10 or 100 ebooks?

How much storage would it take?

I don't think you quite understand what a cache is (or can be).

It is an area of storage where you store information that you think may be used in the near future.

Whilst you can cache information from every instance of a data set, if it's impractical (e.g. speed, space), you simply don't.

In the case of an ebook, I would pre-render a few pages ahead (at any point during the read), and store a few <n> books worth, on a first in first dumped basis.

That way, when the user stops reading, for whatever reason, unless s/he opens n-1 or more other books, the one just left is available for immediate start.

I have implemented similar schemes for data-sets, including some where significant processing or decompression takes place, and it works flawlessly.

It's not really a problem for the first read (or reopening after a long pause) of a book that is a problem. It's if you have several books on the go and are swapping frequently, or you have some other reason to go to, say, the home page..

It's interesting that kindles don't have this problem.

[Cobalt]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

No epub/kepub has ever taken this long on my Sage. Not even the omnibus edition of The Wheel of Time with its 17 000 pages.

Given your initial issues (which also seem pretty unique), I'd say something is wrong with your Sage. Maybe you were unlucky and got a lemon.

As I said, the software installed was very old.

Immediately I updated, everything (that I've tried) worked perfectly.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cobalt

snip



I don't think you quite understand what a cache is (or can be).

It is an area of storage where you store information that you think may be used in the near future.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong. The kind of cache that is common is indeed information that's just used and might be needed again now. That would only at all apply to re-opening the same ebook you just closed. That may exist. It wouldn't solve the problem, if there is a problem. So I considered if the starting information to open all books could be cached.

A Kindle in general is much slower with PDFs and no faster at all for Azw3/KF8 or mobi/KF7, if everything is equal. Many are slower to wake or load a non-KFX ebook. I'm not sure about KFX because I haven't used those in a long while and have none.

A Kobo Sage is less than 1 second to open ebook from sleep.
At worst 4s to reopen same ebook at the cover and about 1s or less to reopen it or open another book.

So loading the cover can take 3 to 4 seconds (1072 x 1430). A kindle by default skips the front cover.

So indeed any properly formatted epub, not being opened at the cover, is probably less than 1s on my Sage. The Libra 2 I have seems slower at about 3 seconds.

I can't see how a conventional cache, or the less common cache table of all ebooks can help at all.

The cover size and structure of the epub has more impact. Also PDFs are very variable and worse on any Kindle I've tested (K3, DXG, Basic, PW1, PW3, PW4, Oasis (2nd version).

If people are seeing really slow opening epubs it's either got a giant cover or bad structure or both.

So my conclusion after testing right now is that there is no problem.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cobalt

It's not really a problem for the first read (or reopening after a long pause) of a book that is a problem. It's if you have several books on the go and are swapping frequently, or you have some other reason to go to, say, the home page..

It's interesting that kindles don't have this problem.

It's not a problem at all, unless less the cover is huge or ebook is bad.

Kindles might seem fast to open because they skip the cover. However I don't think the PW3 or Oasis 2 is faster than the original H2O or the original Libra.

[geek1011]

IMO, a cache may not actually be the worst idea. Even an in-memory cache of a screenshot of the current page of opened books would make switching books feel MUCH snappier (it'd load the book fully in the background), especially when using the new-ish top menu.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by Cobalt

It turns out that the Sage needed updating.

I thought it had done this during initial set-up, but no. The version of the software loaded could barely be called an alpha test version.

Everything seems to be working properly, now, except that it takes about eight seconds to open a book (not just the first time). Given the speed of the processor, this is absurd.

Does this book have everything in a single gigantic html document? A lot of OCR'd, books converted from certain formats, and lower-quality third-party do.

[Quoth]

Swapping two ebooks by top swipe down is faster than swapping two physical books and about 1s on the Sage. It also works to go between a notebook and an ebook.