Touch Kobo sideloaded books and Japanese dictionaries

[AColobus]

So after a lot of hassle, solved by friendly MobileRead denizens, I finally got my Kobo to play nicely with sideloaded Japanese books from Rakuten, and downloaded and installed the Japanese dictionary. And then discovered the dictionaries won’t trigger.

With English, including sideloaded books, long press triggers the dictionary for the word I’m touching. With Japanese sideloaded books, it doesn’t – I can’t select text at all, for any function. I don’t have any sideloaded books containing both languages so I can’t test that.

I have seen mixed reports about this; some sources (http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/201...eatures-video/) mention the issue being fixed so sideloaded books can now be used with the dictionary. It's a niche problem so there's relatively little discussion, which makes it harder to be sure.

I also don’t know whether this links in with complications around Japanese, as it’s reported widely that the Kobo Japanese dictionaries are weird in various ways, and I don’t know to what extent this may have changed, though there is at least now a J-E dict available and I have this.

I’ve tested changing the Kobo language to English, but this makes no difference. I’m not sure if there’s a way to designate a specific book’s language within Kobo – I’ve searched around but not seen anything. Mine were sideloaded via Calibre and are set as Japanese there.

Can anyone advise on this? I don’t know what kind of problem it is, so it’s hard to know what to do. This is a fairly big drawback, and that plus regular freezing is prompting me to consider dropping the Kobo entirely.

[anavin]

I am a Glo user, with firmware 3.2.0, on Japanse UI. I read Chinese and Japanese books. All my books are sideloaded, either oboked from Rakuten or converted by calibre's extended driver. And I manually "hack" my Chinese books to make them vertical-layout.

The Japanese dictionary works for me, on both Japanese and Chinese books (it's a little pointless to use Japanese dictionary on Chinese books, though). I do have some inconvenience on using it, e.g. no dictionary when text is on the edge of screen; inline search on Japanese dictionary can only select one character; etc. But overall, I think I can count that as a "work" case.

I did have the "unable to select text" problem on my hacked Chinese books, in between firmware 2.10.0 and 3.1.1. The sideloaded Rakuten books, on the other hand, didn't have the problem. And after I updated to 3.2.0, the problem was gone.

And I did have "regular freeze" when I upgraded my Glo to 3.3.0 or newer version (although I didn't find the text selecting problem on them.) In that case, I factory-reset it, then sideloaded the 3.2.0 firmware.