looking a gift horse in the mouth.....

[ux4484]

So.....I'm not a big MSReader fan (I'm mostly iSilo/ubook), but I did opt for all the MS free downloads this summer/fall which did certainly get me using MS reader more than I ever had before. The titles were great, and MSReader has been the only reader open (for books) on my PDA because of the promotion.....but only BECAUSE of the free books.

I can live with MSReaders limited feature set (compared to iSilo, Palmreader, and ubook) for this crop of books. But things would be different if I were paying for these books, not all of them.....just the one published by Rosetta.
My experience in reading these books on my Axim has been close to punishment in terms of speed and resources. The latest Rosetta title I'm reading: "The Blind Assassin" takes almost two minutes to open (even at full speed after a soft reset), it then takes another minute to go to the "furthest read" page from the books own title page. I had been storing these books in either the built in storage, or my SD card to conserve space, but of late I've been putting the currently read title in system memory.....and even then, the speed gain is only a few seconds. Besides the crawl to open the books, I've discovered another bug.....When you have a Rosetta ebook open (this does not happen with open source material or other DRM publishers books) eventually you will not be able to open your contacts.....I work around this by leaving contacts open all the time (old habit now). I really shouldn't complain because they were free, but HAD I PAID for these titles, I'd be fit to be tied! If this is an example of how Rosetta's .lit books typically work, I can honestly say I'll never buy one, no matter how much goodwill they try to spread by giving free ones out.

After about the third or forth title I experienced this with, I considered using "that" utility to strip the DRM and convert it to another format to make it better, but decided it was against the spirit (among other things) of MS's free promotion (which was to get you to use their reader more). I haven't crossed that line (and don't intend to), but If something I paid for worked this poorly, and the provider wasn't doing anything about performance issues.....I can see why some folks would.

Rosetta should fix this.

[dMores]

i have to agree with the speed issue.
but to be honest, MS Reader is the only reader that's appealing to my eyes. the other ones look like some private programmer fixed something up for himself, then distributed it.

however, since i leave reader and pocketinformant running all the time, i don't have any problems with the speed except after soft resets, which don't happen a lot.

it is probably comparable to the amount of time it takes for my t68i cellphone to load all my contacts into memory. i think it's somewhere in the 5 minute area.

do you think it's the DRM thing that makes things slow?

[ux4484]

It's not DRM, because I have no trouble with other publishers DRM books whatsoever......it maybe how Rosetta encodes their book, maybe it's even just for the MS freebies.....but I'm not going to spend money to find that out.

Has anyone paid for .lit DRM Rosetta books and had the slo-mo opening routine? (I'm gonna bet the answer to that is no one has).

[pocketpcfox]

My experience in reading these books on my Axim has been close to punishment in terms of speed and resources. The latest Rosetta title I'm reading: "The Blind Assassin" takes almost two minutes to open (even at full speed after a soft reset), it then takes another minute to go to the "furthest read" page from the books own title page.

That's odd. I have read the same book from that promotion on my 2210, and it's only a few seconds to load, ditto for the "furthest read".

[Thox]

"The Ultimate Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy" compromising 6 books (about 4000 pages as a .lit on my PPC) takes a few minutes to initially load the pages... but about 2 seconds to go to anywhere in the book once that's done.

That's the biggest ebook I've got, not had any trouble with my smaller ones either.

I'm not sure how 4000 pages compares to the ebooks you are reading (my Reader is set for the smallest font size).

[dh]

After about the third or forth title I experienced this with, I considered using "that" utility to strip the DRM and convert it to another format to make it better, but decided it was against the spirit (among other things) of MS's free promotion (which was to get you to use their reader more). I haven't crossed that line (and don't intend to), but If something I paid for worked this poorly, and the provider wasn't doing anything about performance issues.....I can see why some folks would.
I changed all my MS Reader books to Mobipocket format due to the same problems you had. Some of my books took up to seven minutes to open. In MP they open instantly.

I don't feel that Microsoft's intent was to get people to use MS Reader more, afterall the program is free. I think the intent was to get more people interested in eBooks in general and to sell more books in MS .lit format.

In my case they have succeded very well. I have purchased a lot of .lit books and will continue to do so. I just don't like MS Reader, so I convert them to a format that works better for me.

[ux4484]

dh,
Being that they are DRM books and free, I feel that stripping/converting them to someone elses format is unethical. Had I paid for them and had such performance issues, I would ask for a refund first, and if that was not possible, I would consider converting them.

I see your point on ebooks, but what purpose is there pushing .lit books, if you're not pushing MSReader too?

Thox,
I use the smallest font also

PPCFox,
I'm glad you've had no problems, you are one of the few I've run into that have not. Can I ask how many books you have in your PPC library, and where they are stored? (The more places you store books, the longer MSreader takes to load (IME), which is part of the reason I load my currently read book in memory. It does make it better, but it still takes over a minute (to three, depending on the size of the book) for me to open large Rosetta books. I have discovered that If I blow out all my books and the footnotes and only have a few books at a time that performance is much better, but I hate to be tied down to only a few selections.

Remebered another gripe:
One other issue I forgot to mention, when coming to a first chapter page, sometimes it takes as much as 3 seconds to load the page with the Rosetta splash graphic....and while you are waiting (thinking you didn't flip the scroll tab properly), you usually try it again and end up overshooting by several pages at the beginning of a chapter.

[Gee Mont]

I haven’t done controlled experiments with opening ebooks with MS Reader, but having read quite a few, I get the sense that the first time a book is opened, before pagination has been completed, the time it takes to open is longer then normal. Subsequent openings, even if the file was been closed, doesn’t take as long. I’ve never experience any more then a minute or two though.

I’ve recently I installed uBook to read public domain .html files without having to convert to a .lit file. I don’t like the Palm or Mobipocket formating, but Ubook isn’t too bad. I have noticed some lag time opening zip files, about the same as a new .lit file.





Being that they are DRM books and free, I feel that stripping/converting them to someone elses format is unethical.



Oh no, I see worms coming out of an opened can.

[pocketpcfox]

PPCFox,
I'm glad you've had no problems, you are one of the few I've run into that have not. Can I ask how many books you have in your PPC library, and where they are stored? (The more places you store books, the longer MSreader takes to load (IME), which is part of the reason I load my currently read book in memory. It does make it better, but it still takes over a minute (to three, depending on the size of the book) for me to open large Rosetta books. I have discovered that If I blow out all my books and the footnotes and only have a few books at a time that performance is much better, but I hate to be tied down to only a few selections.


Hi,
The problems mentioned really sound like MS Reader for my old Jornada... unbearably slow, especially when there were more than 50 or so books in the library.

My 2210 has around 200 lits (some purchased with DRM -- and others I converted from text, rtf and html files), all in the same location in my 'books' folder on a CF card.

Works like a charm. The only annoying thing is remembering to delete the book from MS Reader rather than from explorer. That way I don't leave an "orphan" annotations file in RAM.