Sending/transferring a bloom reader book to another cell phone

If I want to send/transfer a bloom reader book to another cell phone, the blue tooth option works ok if the person is nearby. But if the person it not nearby, it seems that the only option is to send it by email. In order to do that, I need to download the bloom book from my laptop to my cell phone and then send it from my cell phone back to my laptop by email and then email it from my laptop to the other person’s laptop. It would be easier if I could just send it straight from my laptop without needing to download it to my cell phone first. Is this possible?

If I’m not fully understanding this issue, please let me know.

If transferring phone to phone (when they are nearby), the easiest options would be Bluetooth or SHAREit.

But it’s not necessary to transfer the book to your phone first. When you publish the book to Andoid, there are three methods: Serve on WiFi Network, Send over USB cable, Save Bloom reader file.

If you choose Save Bloom reader file, Bloom will save the .bloomd file on your computer (in a location you choose), then you can email that anyone.

This file can be shared using multiple methods – e.g. email, Google Drive, DropBox, Skype, WhatsApp, etc. (Use whatever method works best for you and the other person).

ok this helps. Thanks so much Liz

Craig,

  Yes! This is indeed possible. What you want to do in your laptop Bloom is under Publish to Android choose Save Bloom Reader File. It will create a file with a .bloomd extension. If you can then attach that file to an email, the other person can receive it. If their phone can receive the email directly, that will even save the step of them having to copy the file from their laptop to their phone.

Gordon

Thanks Gordon. I will try this suggestion. It seems to take longer to save this to a laptop vs saving it to a cell phone (for me anyway). Is this true for you?

Craig,

  I suppose that depends on what you mean by saving to a laptop and

saving to a cell phone. If you mean from the laptop Publish tab,
it shouldn’t make any difference whether you are saving it to a
.bloomd file or sending it to a cell phone via wifi or USB. If you
already have it on a cell phone then Bloom somewhere has already
created the .bloomd file and I would expect copying it to another
cell phone to be quicker than building the .bloomd file
originally.

Gordon

I’m not sure if this would be better in a new string, but I’ll put it here for starters.

We are trying to send Bloom books via WhatsApp, but we’re having problems with it. Whether you send it via a long-press on the book itself or use the hamburger menu in the top left, the share seems to work okay. However, when you download the book on your phone, it saves as a .bloomd.enc:

The book on the top in Devanagari is the one we most recently tried. Bloom won’t find it. When trying to open it on my phone, it opened Keyman, which told me it wasn’t a valid keyboard (at least that was true).

Does anyone have any input into this issue?

Hi @Matt_A ,
I think if we can get WhatsApp to hand the file to Bloom Reader directly, everything will work. The problem is that many (most) Android apps appear to not honor the suffix system where BR has registered that “.bloomd” belongs to it. Instead, they figure out that a bloomd is a zip file, and thus offer you only the files that claim to handle zip files. BR needs to start making that claim too, and then I think we’ll be good. Stay tuned.

Thanks for the feedback @JohnHatton.

I should have said this in my original post as well, but it seems that the only problem is this additional .enc added to the filename. When the file was renamed from XYZ.bloomd.enc to XYZ.bloomd, it opened okay. The screenshot above was from someone else’s phone, but here are a couple from mine:



Even selecting Bloom Reader didn’t work.
But then, after changing the file extension…


Success.

That just won’t be a straight-forward process for the average user. Thank you for your work on these strange and difficult things.

I have a trainee in Guatemala who is experiencing the same problem. I figured out that if you deleted the “.enc” from the filename, it works fine. However, most of the people he is trying to pass the app to (average users) don’t have any idea how to find the directory for WhatsApp downloaded files, and they don’t know how to change a filename to get rid of the “.enc”

Pedro told me it started happening about a month ago (late feb/early march) when he updated WhatsApp.

So, any progress you can make to resolve this issue would be appreciated worldwide! Standing by…

Thanks Marty. We have a pending issue for this.

Bloom Reader 1.3 (beta) has several improvements in this area of sharing books. Whatsapp, in particular, seems to be working great now. Bluetooth, not so great.

But, gotta be honest, we’ve had a lot of trouble getting consistent test results among our team, with our different devices & Android versions. We would appreciate your feedback on how BR 1.3 works for the way you would normally transfer Bloom books, be it ShareIt, WhatsApp, Bluetooth, email, google drive, dropbox, wifidirect, etc.

Note that the Release, Beta, and Alpha of Bloom Reader can all be installed on a device at the same time.

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry on this one! We are experiencing basically the same issue with Keyman – .kmp package files are also .zip files internally. So I would like to follow progress on this issue; we will then likely implement a similar solution to the one Bloom has.

Well Marc if you do decide that this kind of thing brings you laughter, you can have fun with our massive manifest and chuckle at the days of internal test reports. Personally, I’m firmly in the crying camp.

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