Touch Kobo Touch future firmware feature request thread

[Lunchtray]

What I'd like to see come back for the Kobo Touch is the ability to see if you've finished a book or not. Possibly adding in the option to be able to mark it as finished or un-finished and see this status in the library when searching.

I've also found when reading in the sun Ghosting gets really bad and I have to set the page turns before refresh to around 2.

[SCION]

Originally Posted by Lunchtray

What I'd like to see come back for the Kobo Touch is the ability to see if you've finished a book or not. Possibly adding in the option to be able to mark it as finished or un-finished and see this status in the library when searching.

I've also found when reading in the sun Ghosting gets really bad and I have to set the page turns before refresh to around 2.

I'm new to Kobo land. What does "Mark as Finished" do on the Touch other than take the book off of the home screen? It doesn't update "Book Finished" in Reading Stats. On other Kobos is there a Library status that would indicate "Finished" so that you know you read the book?

[Lunchtray]

Originally Posted by SCION

I'm new to Kobo land. What does "Mark as Finished" do on the Touch other than take the book off of the home screen? It doesn't update "Book Finished" in Reading Stats. On other Kobos is there a Library status that would indicate "Finished" so that you know you read the book?

As far as I can tell that's all it does... And that's why I made my post that it should be improved. My older Kobo at least told me what was finished or unread.

[Joyful]

Totally agree, Lunchtray!
I really miss the "Finished" and Percent Read designations beside books in the Library. I don't really understand why they took that away in the Touch.
I don't understand the purpose of the Home page as the titles there change with every upload.

[Nina182B]

I've read two books on the kobo touch. My most wanted updates to the kobo are:

1. Ability to use the dictionary on personal epub files
2. I loaded my epubs into folders on the kobo so I hope it'll be able to show me those folder structures in a future update.
3. On the home page, ability to see last 5 books read instead of last 5 books read/loaded

I'm really enjoying the kobo touch.. I would just really really love to get #1 on my list. I had a cybook opus that I'm really happy with except it too, I couldn't use a dictionary on my epubs. I hope the dictionary is in the next release before my 30 day return policy on the kobo is over.

[FJames]

Counter-thoughts on multiple categories:
I know a lot of people have requested multiple categories to help organize large libraries on the KT, and it certainly wouldn't do any harm to have that feature. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure most people would actually have a use for it. You already have the most recent 5 on the home page. You can add books to your shortlist if you expect to access them frequently. You can easily and quickly search for any book by name or in alphabetical order of title/author. I suspect that more categories will just add clutter. Why would I actually need to access books by category when I have a shortlist? I have no desire to obsessively categorize my ebooks on the KT. I'm only reading a few at a time, and when I'm finished I'm done with them. I doubt I'll ever have more than a few reference books that I'd want to access frequently on the KT, or ones I want to remember (to let someone else read them, for example), and I can put those on my shortlist.

[SCION]

Originally Posted by FJames

Counter-thoughts on multiple categories:
I know a lot of people have requested multiple categories to help organize large libraries on the KT, and it certainly wouldn't do any harm to have that feature. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure most people would actually have a use for it. You already have the most recent 5 on the home page. You can add books to your shortlist if you expect to access them frequently. You can easily and quickly search for any book by name or in alphabetical order of title/author. I suspect that more categories will just add clutter. Why would I actually need to access books by category when I have a shortlist? I have no desire to obsessively categorize my ebooks on the KT. I'm only reading a few at a time, and when I'm finished I'm done with them. I doubt I'll ever have more than a few reference books that I'd want to access frequently on the KT, or ones I want to remember (to let someone else read them, for example), and I can put those on my shortlist.

What if I don't know the title or author? I simply know that I would like to read a medical thriller or a legal thriller, and I have distinct collections of each. I can't put anything on my shortlist if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. If you have a sizable library, present sorting capability isn't enough.

[robko]

I have a bunch of reference files as e-pub and pdf on mine and it would just be nice to have them somewhere separate to my books. I do put a "Z" at the start of all the titles on them to keep them together and somewhat out of the way, but it would just be neater to have "folder" for them to go in. Not so bad with the speed of the KT vs KW or KO not having this, but would be nice.

[JohnMorris]

Originally Posted by viviena

You can already do that though. Granted, you have to swipe and not tap, but as a right-hander, I find the KT easy to use with my left hand.

I tried that last night. You're quite correct!

For those still skeptical, as I was until I tried it, the trick is to hold the reader about half way up, thumb vertical on the front face, just clear of the screen. To turn the page swivel the thumb over the screen and drag it back into place, on the process doing a right to left swipe.

This is quite a different hand placement to the Sony for one-hand operation. On that one I hold it by the lower left corner.

[artifact]

I recommend licensing/grabbing FB Reader as the jetBook does. Its PDF handling is far superior to the Kobo's; I hadn't realized how superior until I started trying to read a technical PDF.

Zoom in/out of about 7 layers which sticks over page turns. Excellent reflow which makes reading an image-free PDF as close to painless as reading an ePub or txt file. Divide the page into sections and page up/down/right/left for each chunk (great if you have a multi-column PDF and/or or lots of graphics.)

Since its GPL I'm assuming Ectaco's source tweaks are available as well (if they tweaked it.)

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by SCION

What if I don't know the title or author? I simply know that I would like to read a medical thriller or a legal thriller, and I have distinct collections of each. I can't put anything on my shortlist if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. If you have a sizable library, present sorting capability isn't enough.

+1.

There's a reason why libraries of any size sort by subject, then author. I even tend to do this at home, even without something like the dewey decimal system guiding it. It's how we naturally approach books. Much like with music you think of artists as a way to drill down into albums, books you think of subjects as a way to drill down to the authors. With computers, folders have given us a way to arbitrarily sort and shuffle.

But what I think is crucial to the next step of e-reader user experience is auto-organization by metadata. It makes music libraries that are quite big manageable if imperfectly so (see: iPod), and it leverages computers to do what they do best while reducing the level of menial tasks the user has to perform to use their device.

Although it really helps if book publishers start actually using this metadata for something useful rather than leaving most of the fields blank.

[KevinAndrews]

I'd like to see

- Ability to darken PDF text (have alot of papers that I read where the text is grey)
- Set a crop for PDF's to eliminate consistent margins
- Hold the main button to go home, click it to go to the next page (dirty screens suck, also annoying to go to the next page when zoomed in). You can make it an advanced option, not the default.

[TonyToews]

Originally Posted by Joyful

Totally agree, Lunchtray!
I really miss the "Finished" and Percent Read designations beside books in the Library. I don't really understand why they took that away in the Touch.

Agreed. I quite liked that feature as well.

[readingglasses]

the prs+ open alternative firmware promises great things for sony ereaders. But some of it sony should've added standard. I'd like to see kobo add some "cool" but in fact really essential stuff:

1. proper support for right to left languages in epub.

2. not only allow you to use the english dictionary on any readable text document, but especially epub, but also, more "fun" but essential:
allow the user to load a dictionary of their choice.
either sold by kobo if they insist on catching the money, the way amazon sells a few obvious choice dictionaries which can be read like a book or used as an in-document lookup tool (french, german, spanish, italian).

or give a target format so users can create their own dictionary for any language.
it can be hard for a slower computer to "look up" words where the morphology changes significantly (arabic, several indian languages, hebrew). But for stuff like russian, chinese characters, anything that's just a straight alphabetical or database lookup, you should be able to load any free, big spreadsheet list of words (e.g. stardict). If they don't want to develop it to sell b/c there's no market, then just make a simple standard and let us add it ourselves. That serves many individuals as hardware users (and hence more likely to buy kobo ebooks as they're already using the hardware) who can not be catered to profitably, b/c more work and money goes into making a commercial-industrial product to be sold than revenue for that product can be found. Then again, it's hard to imagine that there's "no meaningful market" for a dictionary of chinese characters, or even russian. Well, maybe there isn't. A few tens of thousand college and advanced placement students, with a fraction of them using kobo as their dictionary of choice at 5-15 dollars, would not be much of a market, perhaps even with an effective ad campaign to convince people to "learn chinese" that way. So you see my point about open standards.

[pyrokamileon]

I read through the last couple pages and a couple things I are firstly: I would LOVE to be able to turn the page using the home button, I really wish they hadn't ditched the directional pad in this newest model of Kobo in the first place,but since they did letting it's only button have more than one function would be superb.

2 of course if I were to use the home button to advance the page turn then I think holding the Kobo landscape as an option would go really well with that :-D

3 I think we all agree that bypassing the Kobo's database for a simple file structure tree has been sorely missed through every firmware update..

4 I think it would be nice to have some sort of screen lock feature that would make it so that you couldn't accidentally bump the screen and make you lose your place in any book or menu.. I'm just not sure how exactly that would work..

5 i agree that an easily accessable clock (like on the center-tap menu screen) is kinda puzzling that it actually has to be asked for. Although I had considered that maybe that was left out on purpose, like maybe they figured you wouldn't want a clock on your ereader?

6 the desire for a clock on my ereader made me think that maybe some sort of timer system would be nice. like maybe you could set it up so that it alerted you after exactly 30, 60, 120 or any user set amount of minutes had passed so that way you couldn't loose track of time and show up to your friend's on time maybe try to not get to bed too late..

7 I read somewheres someone had the idea of having the Kobo boot to the current book your reading and I really really like that idea. I mean instead of turning it on and considering do I wanna read something from my top five, or my short list (mine isn't very short: not being able to use a file tree led me to keeping a library and adding any book or article that I want to read more than the other books or articles in my library to my short list "playlist", the only playlist the Kobo currently allows me to make) or even do I wanna browse the library I think turning on my Kobo and being put back right into the exact page of the exact book that I was previously reading sounds a lot more focused and might help me go through my library in more of a straight line rather than a web of unfinished books..

8 I definitely support the idea of turning the page by tapping on the left side of the screen. I wouldn't need it personally but I think it would be a good option to have!

9 I also agree that being able to view your collection (by database or file tree) as a simple title and author list would be much nicer if for no other reason at least you could fit many more books on any one screen

10 last thing I can think of for now: I wasn't the biggest fan of the five pictures of books on your home screen thing to begin with, part of the reason for that is the fact that I can't define which books go on there, but since I started adding a bunch of txt articles to my Kobo (I know, I know I'll probably be better off just converting them to epubs..) I ended up with a bunch of blank book covers on my home page, which was very very unhelpful! I'm not sure I know what the better way is but I guess maybe letting us choose whether we want to have a top five books on our home page that is based on judging our books by their covers at all or least being able to customize the way our home page is laid out might be a good way to go. if they're going to make us wait a while longer before giving us a file tree then maybe they could let us have multiple playlists that we can self title. the next thing they could let us do is define what books go in which playlist through the desktop app (that way we wouldn't have to sit and poke at the touch screen all day) all so in the end we can have little blocks on our home screen (or icons of some other shape or symbol) and each different one was a different user defined playlist, each with the names featured of course.

on second thought maybe it's time for someone to get serious about making some custom firmware for this thing! :-p