Touch Kobo Touch Firmware 1.9.17

[taming]

I think we are just beginning to see how the money coming into the company from the Rakutan purchase translates into improvements in the development end. Certainly the recent update to the iOS app and the Kobo Vox would tend to support that perspective.

I am expecting great things from the next Touch update in terms of stability and, perhaps, features.

I tend to agree that marketing was driving development this past year. It wasn't great for customers who were not aching for this, but it is what made the company attractive to a buyer that had the deep pockets to ultimately give us the great product Kobo should be.

[PeterT]

I'm not sure but I believe few (if any) software firms advertise a schedule for bug fixes.

[filmo]

Only open source software has bug lists that anyone can see, test and help fix.

[murg]

Maybe we should start a pool on when the next release will be released.

Kobo can provide the prize, eBooks from their store...

[plib]

Originally Posted by murg

Maybe we should start a pool on when the next release will be released.

Kobo can provide the prize, eBooks from their store...

With top margins?

Also I'd like an update that doesn't crash every time I try to do more than one operation in Calibre.

[murg]

Having seen the following, it looks like Kobo has been concentrating their Touch development efforts on the Japanese language version.

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/economy...AJ201206210037

[taming]

Kobo has been released in a number of countries this past year and definitely plans to roll out in others, including countries where language differences require some capabilities that are probably different from what we see on the Touch right now I don't see the challenges of preparing for a Japanese version as reason enough to say that this is why there have been no recent updates.

That being said, the Asian market in general and the Japanese market in particular is huge and Rakutan both owns Kobo and is the Amazon of that region of the world. No doubt that being big there is a huge priority for them.

The question I would be asking after reading this is if means that we will see an update or new reader in July, as I cannot imagine that adding the capability to handle Japanese will be the only thing we will be seeing from Kobo.

[kumaryu]

Interesting...

The main technical challenges facing Kobo in getting EPUB format ready for the Japanese market would be the following features currently unsupported by the format.

Vertical layouts
Line breaks
Ruby characters

I would imagine they're not insurmountable but the larger issue would be whether they would be accepted as a standard and whether they can accumulate enough content to make the format and their offering viable as a competitor to Amazon/Kindle.

The quickest way to achieve this would be to provide support for XMDF, the defacto standard in JP on Kobo devices. This is the format in which much of the book content on Rakuten's own site is provided.

In a market where a large propotion of publishers' revenues come from graphic novel-type formats and the line between traditional text and graphic novel is not as clear as in other markets, having a viable format for text is not enough o its own.

[taming]

The support does seem to be in Adobe 1.8. Perhaps we will see the change to 1.8 in Kobo.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions1-8/

Digital Editions 1.8 preview 2 (version 1.8.1) includes the following new features:

Japanese text layout support —Added support for Japanese text layout of EPUB documents authored to the EPUB3 specification. It does not support all of EPUB3. However, it does support many critical features, such as vertical mode, TCY, Ruby, Kenten and Kinsoku.

[Xennex1170]

Originally Posted by taming

The support does seem to be in Adobe 1.8. Perhaps we will see the change to 1.8 in Kobo.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions1-8/

Excellent.. I'd love to see that support.. Making do with just the unicode font at present.

[terminus]

Originally Posted by _pietro

i found that pdf now have notes/bookmarks

Hi, Can somebody else confirm this? Lack of PDF Highlighting/notes is what
is keeping me from buying the Kobo Touch. However, I've seen nary a
mention of pdf notes/bookmark support elsewhere on the web.

Ankur

[pkj]

First time posting -- apologies in advance if I am inadvertently running afoul any rules by posting this here. I have read through the thread in order to understand why, since I was forced to update to .17 four or five days ago, my KT has been riddled with bugs and glitches, and as of last night is quite literally unusable.

Initially the problems I noticed were also experienced by others here. This, for example, is not an exhaustive list:

Originally Posted by pdrewcock

When I launch tthe browser and go to favorites, the first favorite selection opens fine. The second time I try to open a favorite, the reader re-boots. Every time, no misses.
Customer service only managed to delete my favorites list, but it didn't fix the problem.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Anyone else try this yet?
Oh yeah, and another thing:
Sudoku locks up constantly! Maddening!
I know both these apps are not officially supported, but they used to work well.

Originally Posted by dioioib

Currently I experience:

Device resets during content processing.

Since .17, it would randomly re-boot itself probably three or four times during a reading session. But last night it randomly reset itself to its factory settings (!), and evidently froze in the process. So now I have the 'Restoring Device to Factory Settings...' screen frozen onto the screen of the KT, and no combination of switch sliding, home button pressing, or paper-clip probing will cause it to respond. Nor does it recognize my laptop (or vice versa) when I plug it into the USB. It is dead as a doornail. I suppose the battery will run dry eventually, and presuming it is still functional at that point, it seems pointless to use it under the threat of random factory resetting.

The most galling thing is that I got the KT in Dec. 2011, and up until the firmware update it was absolutely perfect -- I had no technical problems, and no complaints. My father-in-law had some freezing issues with his KT and he complained to Kobo; he sent it back, they fixed it, and they sent it back to him. But my problems are not hardware-related; I have to conclude that they are 100% derived from .17, and the experiences of others here confirms that. It's baffling that they would botch this so spectacularly.

[taming]

If you read through the thread, then you would know that most of the issues came about when folks processed a great many books at one time, and generally was with a specific book sideloaded onto the device. Once that book was identified, the problems went away.

The only issue that most people see with .17 is the top margin problem. Some folks continue to have double tap issues.

I doubt you would get many people using .17 to agree with your statement that they botched it up spectacularly.

[John F]

Originally Posted by taming

...

The only issue that most people see with .17 is the top margin problem. Some folks continue to have double tap issues.

...

And dead taps.

[taming]

I was actually thinking about dead taps when I wrote double taps, John. You were definitely more precise.