Kindle firmware update 5.14.2

[hleo12]

Day 2 of waiting for the update...

I'm keeping track of how long it will take, don't mind me.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by ck2875

Looks like Author sort is the same scroll bar. You do have options for ascending or descending, but are still reliant on dragging the scroll bar to quickly get anywhere.

It would be nice if they replaced the scroll bar with the list of letters like is used in the iOS app for Author sort.

Or they could just display the current letter on the scroll bar position indicator.

[tomsem]

The new Publication date sorting option is ‘interesting’, as the date is not displayed directly anywhere: you have to to See in Store to see what it is, and some titles do not have a Publication date, or have weird dates. For example:

Buddha: With Bonus Material by Deepak Chopra. It has a publication date of December 31, 2075. Given the size of my library, that’s probably about when I’ll get around to reading it. You would think this would float to the top of the list, but apparently the software ignores future dates and puts them at the end where the ‘no publication date’ books are.

Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell has a publishing date of October 22, 1969. I’m guessing it’s the publication date of the print edition that the digital is based on.

So I’m not sure how useful this is (I’m guessing it is up to the publisher to supply whatever date they want to assign), but it’s there.

But since this piece of metadata must be on device to use for sorting, they should display it somewhere (e.g. when you tap the triple dot icon for the book to see options and details).

[tomsem]

Another little issue: if you hold down the page up/down buttons on the scroller, it starts paging (relatively slowly, but probably too fast to identify the thing you might be looking for) but when you lift your finger it keeps scrolling instead of stopping on the current page, until it exhausts whatever touch event queue initiated by press and hold.

The paging rate is not constant, either, so sometimes 2 or 3 pages display in a very short interval. And every so often there’s a screen ‘flash’ (full redraw I guess). Some of the jitteriness seems to be with a background task to generate or retrieve thumbnails (which are now always shown).

It would be nice if they polished this behavior up so it was more useful.

In List view, the PW5 shows about 5 items (as before the update). But tapping a page button usually does not scroll 5 new items into view: one of the previous items is still there (moves from being bottom item to top item or vice versa depending on which way you’re paging. So it is not paging ‘fully’.

The height of each item is not constant: it depends on the height of the thumbnail, which depends on the aspect ratio of the thumbnail; what is more constant is the width of the thumbnail. Typically it is more like 4.95 items displayed, only a sliver of white space is truncated from the last one. That’s when you see repeat on previous or next page. But if you have a squarish thumbnail, that item is shorter, and you might get 5.2 items shown, so there’s no repeat in those cases.

It’s not an issue for 6” screens as there is always a truncated 5th item that needs to scroll into view. But hopefully they can adjust it to eliminate the repeats on 7” screens (when only white space is truncated).

[Paperbackstash]

All these changes don't sound bad, but if I'm understanding correctly that you can't sort authors the old way with letters and skipping pages and get to certain authors quickly, that will majorly be a downer for me.

Edited - screenshots showing the text in bubbles category looking very cluttered to me. :/ Sounds like they're already doing some UI changes from last time. Reminds me with the scrolling of the old Fire options with the ribbon scroll and the bubbles are a way to sort to advertise further on the library page. Hopefully the sideways scroll is only on the homepage?

And people keep saying you can't organize by collections anymore, but no clue what they mean yet.

I won't manually update this one and rush it lol

Edited again- Oh, man. Looks like its on library too, 5 books instead of 8 with endless type scroll. UGH. I'm really hating all this so far. I rarely sideload but otherwise I'd just leave wi-fi off all the time.

[tomsem]

Collections will do whatever they did before, and have some modest enhancements.

Earlier I said that they only display Grid mode, but it turns out that is only if you have the (new) Collection setting as Show only in Collections view (Collections View is new to Kindle, borrowed from the Kindle apps). Collections View displays as a Grid, and when you open a collection from there it is also in Grid mode. (I’ve updated the earlier post)

But for the other 2 Collection options, collections can be intermixed with Library items. If Library is in List mode, and you open a collection (or Series group) from there, it will also be in List mode. If Library is in Grid mode, the collection (or Series group) will be in Grid mode too.

The enhancements are that you can apply filters while in the collection. Before, you could only toggle between Downloaded and ALL. And as mentioned, there is now a new setting to control the presentation of Collections in Library.

Edit Feb 11: Whatever filters are in effect in Library will be in effect when when viewing a Collection or Series group, and vice versa. If you set a filter that excludes all items of a Collection or Series group, it will not display until you clear the filter. Filter options will be disabled if you don’t have any items of that type that match.

[Badcatalex]

This seems exceptionally interesting!
Only wish for me is support for Vella on e ink already...

[muzsielod]

I read on other treads that some of you managed to add dark mode after Jailbreaking the Kindle PW. Can someone do a full step by step demo on that. I really love that feature on my PW. It's way batter that the white background when reading in total darkness at night. Thank you!

[hleo12]

Day 3 of waiting for the update...

Btw, how long did the book cover thing take before it was fully implemented on all kindles?

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by hleo12

Btw, how long did the book cover thing take before it was fully implemented on all kindles?

Several months.

[DNSB]

My Kindle is still waiting for Series support.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Several months.

Originally Posted by DNSB

My Kindle is still waiting for Series support.

Ouch. I thought it would take a few days at most. Maybe a week.

I might be a bit too obsessed with this UI change. I even dreamt about it

What's the consensus on how Amazon rolls out these updates? Based on serial numbers? Region? Date of activation/purchase? Manufacturing date? Or they just randomly sort out the devices and pick a group who to give the update first?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DNSB

My Kindle is still waiting for Series support.

I am guessing this is because your storefront is amazon.ca, and not amazon.com.

When I go to the Kindle Store on amazon.ca, there is no Series information on the book listings for Series books (I checked Outlander). If you go to amazon.com, it does.

They need to add the series metadata in the storefront database before it can show up on Kindle. Apparently it took quite a bit of (non-automated) effort to do this for the US store, and I imagine it requires a comparable effort to do it for another storefront, because it’s effectively a completely separate catalog (different ASINs). Given the much smaller numbers of Kindle users in Canada, it’s not clear how high a priority it is for Amazon.

There seems to be support on amazon.co.uk, probably Amazon’s 2nd largest storefront in terms of Kindle sales. It might be the only other storefront that supports it so far (I also checked Australia and Japan; they don’t seem to support it).

[Atunah]

I didn't know there was another update. I was still on 5.14.1.
So I just manually updated with wifi on then restarted my Oasis again and I got whatever this new thingy is. Now to check it out.

[cvkemp]

I updated 2 or 3 days ago and still don’t have the updated home and library.