Wanted features

[IndecisiveMe]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The Hanlin V3 and V5 ereaders (sold under many different names) have for several years offered LIT support. Flaky but real.

I was just going to say that. While it doesn't seem that the Hanlins have got LIT support right just yet, it seems possible that they could. I don't feel this request was unrealistic at all. We were asked what we wanted and we're letting them know. They can certainly tell us it's not possible, if that's the case.

[language gamer]

Two important features for me:

1. There needs to be an option to save notes as text. I honestly don't see the value of taking a picture of words.

2. Notes need to be stamped with either a static page number (for epub), a paragraph number, or both. It's important to have some way of locating passages according to a standard system.

I will also vote for any highlighting feature.

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by language gamer

Two important features for me:

1. There needs to be an option to save notes as text. I honestly don't see the value of taking a picture of words.

2. Notes need to be stamped with either a static page number (for epub), a paragraph number, or both. It's important to have some way of locating passages according to a standard system.

I will also vote for any highlighting feature.

I second highlighting. Or the ability to bookmark a particular word on a page. That would help tons when you find errors in an ebook that you want to correct.

-Marcy

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Whether it is a feasible use of the time and skills of the Guys in Kiev(tm) is a Pocketbook Global management decision. I'm not holding my breath (hence my blue sky comment) but I'm not giving up the hope that there's enough of us old PDA-reader veterans out there to make it worth their time to add LIT support.

After all, "maybe the horse will sing".

Fair'nough?

Peace!

Fair enough.

Admittedly, I still don't see that it should be necessary. I have a ton of books in .lit format as well. I simply ran them through Calibre into another format—into mobi back when I only had a Kindle and now into epub.

MS Reader has been all but abandoned by Microsoft—there hasn't been an update in almost 3 years, which is forever in software terms. Even though there are a lot of .lit books out there, it is a dying format. You might as well convert your books now, to something that will be around in 10 years and supported by the reader you buy in the future.

Just my opinion anyway.

-Marcy

[Guns4Hire]

Gif image support.

Since gif is considered more efficient because of size. A lot of hyperlinks of maps are in gif format in ebooks.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Marcy

MS Reader has been all but abandoned by Microsoft—there hasn't been an update in almost 3 years, which is forever in software terms.

Quite true.
But two minor points and I'll move on:

1- LIT isn't *quite* dead yet. Yes, it is currently fading into the legacy format category but... MS released an MS Reader update us a couple of months ago amid a flood of rumors that they might be adding it to Zune HD and WinMo 7 phones. And then, to add fuel to the fire, the various videos floating around of Microsoft's dual-lcd journal prototype, the Courier, show one of its functions is... ebooks. Finally, *many* of the ebook pundits talking of the things they saw under NDA at CES 2010 were saying the same thing: don't count Microsoft out yet. It is still early in the ebook gae and MS has some leverage to work with if they choose to take MS Reader to version 3 and run it on Zune HD, WinMo 7 phones, and the wave of upcoming Win7 Atom slates. Today, it's a legacy format. Tomorrow it might be dead. Or it might be a contender.

2- Conversion can be done, yes. And Calibre in particular is very fast converting LIT to ePub which is, clearly, the Pocketbook's preferred format, even under FBReader. However... while conversion doesn't alter the text in the file, conversion *does* alter the internal links and structures of the ebook. And Calibre's ePub conversion, because of the immature state of the ePub spec, which is loose and has tons of room for interpretation, is strongly biased towards Adobe's interpretation on Sony readers. This leads to issues with the output ePubs showing erratic behavior in other reader or cataloging apps. On Pocketbook, for example, we have the ongoing issue of covers not always displaying in the bookshelf. Other issues I've heard of are of weird hard-wired margins and font sizes, links that don't always work the way they're supposed to, etc. And these are all things that work okay in ADE so the baseline assumption is to blame the file or the conversion code instead of wondering if maybe ADE is at fault. Give it a while and this can come back to haunt the industry big time. My take on conversion is that it is not something to be avoided at all costs, like format conversion of digital music files which requires transcoding and is guaranteed to degrade quality, but it *is* something to be avoided whenever possible; if I have a book in Mobi format, I'll read it in that format even if it means run-on chapters or erratic TOC recogition by FBReader. Ditto for rtf or Html. Unlike many out there, I do not see it as a given that ePub is the end-all, be-all of ebook formats, much less the Adobe-specific ePub that Calibre tries to output.

If nothing else it is worth remembering that the publishers store their ebooks in their back-end servers in OEB format, not ePub. Last I heard, ePub-ing is done on the retail servers not at the publishing house. Nothing stops the publishers from switching their "industry-standard" label to something else.

With that in mind, I favor ebook readers that let me read my accumulated content in its native file format as much as possible; I don't demand support for every last obscure format out there as I don't use it. But support for formats with significant commercial ebook history such as Mobi, LIT, and PDB is a *nice* feature to have. I might even be suggesting eReader support along with it were it not for the fact that my exposure to the issue on the Aztak/Hanlin forums has made it clear it can't be done without B&N suport and B&N is not particularly interested in helping Aztak and co. Much less Pocketbook Global.

Ultimately its not about the format but rather about the books themselves. Being able to access them with a minimum of muss or fuss.

Hence my request for LIT support.
I love my PB360 a lot. Lack of LIT support isn't going to change that. But adding it would make my whole month...

[IndecisiveMe]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

I love my PB360 a lot. Lack of LIT support isn't going to change that. But adding it would make my whole month...

Ditto It's not a pain to convert our LIT files at all, but it would be even easier to be able to load up a LIT file and read it straight away. I won't be horribly upset if it's not possible, but it'll probably make me squeal if it does happen!

[HarryT]

Can we PLEASE have a "back" button for coming back from a hyperlink. At the moment, you have to remember to look at the page number and memorize it, jump to the hyperlink, read it, and then use "goto page" to get back to where you were. A simply "back" button, as so many other readers have, would make life a lot easier.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Can we PLEASE have a "back" button for coming back from a hyperlink. At the moment, you have to remember to look at the page number and memorize it, jump to the hyperlink, read it, and then use "goto page" to get back to where you were. A simply "back" button, as so many other readers have, would make life a lot easier.

Well, it's there. When you have jumped to a target, just use the link button again and press okay and back you go.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Well, it's there. When you have jumped to a target, just use the link button again and press okay and back you go.

I'm sorry to be dense, but I'm afraid I don't understand you. "Down" on the nav button selects hyperlinks on a page. I jump to a page via a hyperlink by selecting the link with "Down" and then "OK" to activate it; how do I get back to where I was, if there isn't a "reverse" hyperlink to get back? To clarify, this is reading ePub books with ADE.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm sorry to be dense, but I'm afraid I don't understand you. "Down" on the nav button selects hyperlinks on a page. I jump to a page via a hyperlink by selecting the link with "Down" and then "OK" to activate it; how do I get back to where I was, if there isn't a "reverse" hyperlink to get back? To clarify, this is reading ePub books with ADE.

Yep. Down and "Ok" should bring you back where you came from.

[HarryT]

Unfortunately it doesn't. "Down" simply displays an error message "There are no links on this page", following which "OK" brings up the menu, as usual.

[HarryT]

Can someone else with a PB360 try this and see if it works for you, please:

1. Using ADE on the PB360 ,open a book with hyperlinks (eg use the hyperlinked table of contents in any of my ePub books).
2. Go to a page with hyperlinks on it, press "Down" to select one of the hyperlinks, and "OK" to activate it.
3. On the page you end up at (preferably a page with no hyperlinks on it), press "Down" and "OK" again. Do you get back to where you were, or do you get the error message that I report in my previous message?

Thanks!

[Ea]

Originally Posted by Marcy

I second tags!

-Marcy

Originally Posted by mimosavj

I vote for tags too.

I do, too. Think I'm no. 5.

What I would like to see, was some more user-friendly documentation. You can find things here that you can't find in other places - or perhaps it only exist in Russian. Things like that. It's not easy to find out where to start looking and it's easy to miss information that might make a good device work much better for the user. The start-up guide that came with the device was so-so. A few more illustrations would make things clearer. When I downloaded a firmware upgrade, the link had 'TEST' in it, and I wondered whether I was actually downloading the right software, but I couldn't find anything else. In short, product support could be improved somewhat. I'm sure there's a lot of great information available, but it's not all easy to find.

[Anders Eriksson]

Originally Posted by Ea

I do, too. Think I'm no. 5.

What I would like to see, was some more user-friendly documentation. You can find things here that you can't find in other places - or perhaps it only exist in Russian. Things like that. It's not easy to find out where to start looking and it's easy to miss information that might make a good device work much better for the user. The start-up guide that came with the device was so-so. A few more illustrations would make things clearer. When I downloaded a firmware upgrade, the link had 'TEST' in it, and I wondered whether I was actually downloading the right software, but I couldn't find anything else. In short, product support could be improved somewhat. I'm sure there's a lot of great information available, but it's not all easy to find.

For me it seems like the "Add category" (a long press on the OK when you are in Favorites) is a bit like the Sony's "Collections" that are used by Calibre for its tags.

I have tested to create multiple categories and then added the same book to multiple categories, you can even add a folder as favorite, so for instance if you sort your books under a separate folder for each author, then you could add multiple author folders to a category.

I know this is done on the device, and I haven't checked how the Favorite's are stored on the device, but I would be surprised if it is impossible to do this from Calibre.