[JD Gumby]

Meh. Maybe I should've spent the extra $30 to get a second Touch (also on sale, at least at Chapters/Coles here in Canadia) instead of being cheap and buying a Mini for my backup (my 2 years & 6 days old Touch's battery is horrible at holding a charge now - at 4-5 sessions totaling an hour to an hour and a half a day of reading, sleeping the rest of the time, it gets to 50% charge in like 4 days now :/).

At a font large enough to be the same visible size as I use on the Touch (4-5 steps larger on the slider, at least), I don't even get half the text thanks to needing it to be larger to make up for the same resolution on the smaller screen size and because of the more than an inch (half up top, slightly more than half at the bottom) of vertical space lost to nothingness/book title and page numbers and, on three books I tested (one Kobo, two sideloads), more than 3/4ths of an inch of horizontal space wasted to margins I can't adjust.

Seriously, Kobo, let us have more space - put the title and page number on the same line at the bottom (more than enough room, and more than enough room to consolidate the top & bottom toolbars). That extra 3-4 lines at the top'd make a huge difference. And allow us to ignore publisher-set margins and line spacing (except for specially formatted bits of text, which would use different markup, there is no need to EVER lose almost a horizontal inch or have only 80% of the lines of text that could be there on each page - unless the *USER* specifies that's how they want it)

EDIT: Just tested now. At as close as I can get the font size to each other visibly, on the same book I get 15 lines of text on the Mini and 19 lines on the Touch. The lines are approximately 45 characters wide (allowing for justification and the non-fixed width Georgia font) on the Mini and 52 wide on the Touch. That is a potential 675 characters per page on the Mini versus 780 on the Touch (YMMV on all these numbers, of course, depending on your preferred font and size and the individual book itself). 105 characters is actually a rather large difference in how much information can be displayed at once when you have to adjust the font size up on the smaller screen.

Fortunately, I won't be using the Mini to actually read for a while - not until my Touch dies. 'Til then, it'll be powered off and sit around waiting to be charged every couple of months (I just noticed that it can't use a wall charger, unlike its older sibling; still might be charging, but there's no change in the battery indicator. Annoying.).