I picked up a Kobo reader at Borders yesterday, after weighing all the options it seemed like the right device for me, I wanted an elegant, no-frills reader.
I brought it home, already knowing that my first purchase was going to be
Snow Crash. I first signed up with the Borders eBook store only to discover it's not available there (what), so I search kobobooks.com and find it, so I make an account there and buy it. I go with the native Kobo edition and not the ePub because I figure, hey, it's going to look the best on the Kobo, right?
I spend the rest of yesterday and some of today reading the book, really digging the Kobo. I even post on Facebook about how awesome the thing is, and hype it up to a bunch of people. Tonight I'm finishing the book and I see this (major
Snow Crash ending spoiler ahead):
Now, this is almost the very end of the book. Past this chapter you don't hear anything else about this character, and you don't find out how the main plot of the story turns out. I hadn't read this book in years, so I was confused. I didn't remember it cutting off like that, I wondered if maybe the OCR was bad or something and the text had been cut off, hey, it's an eBook, it happens.
I load up the ePub version in ADE and discover something much more irritating:
Turns out, the official Kobo format doesn't render anything that isn't text only. Flipping through the ePub I noticed this book was
full of graphics and other things that not only added flavor to the work but sometimes were integral to the plot.
Last time I buy anything from kobobooks.com, borders.com, or anywhere else that sells the broken Kobo-specific format. I encourage others to do the same, until they stop charging a premium for an inferior product.
EDIT: Also forwarded this to Harper Collins, I guess it might interest them. I'm not sure if they have any control over these things, honestly I just did it in hopes the author sees it and gets a laugh out of it.