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the prs+ open alternative firmware promises great things for sony ereaders. But some of it sony should've added standard. I'd like to see kobo add some "cool" but in fact really essential stuff:
1. proper support for right to left languages in epub.
2. not only allow you to use the english dictionary on any readable text document, but especially epub, but also, more "fun" but essential:
allow the user to load a dictionary of their choice.
either sold by kobo if they insist on catching the money, the way amazon sells a few obvious choice dictionaries which can be read like a book or used as an in-document lookup tool (french, german, spanish, italian).
or give a target format so users can create their own dictionary for any language.
it can be hard for a slower computer to "look up" words where the morphology changes significantly (arabic, several indian languages, hebrew). But for stuff like russian, chinese characters, anything that's just a straight alphabetical or database lookup, you should be able to load any free, big spreadsheet list of words (e.g. stardict). If they don't want to develop it to sell b/c there's no market, then just make a simple standard and let us add it ourselves. That serves many individuals as hardware users (and hence more likely to buy kobo ebooks as they're already using the hardware) who can not be catered to profitably, b/c more work and money goes into making a commercial-industrial product to be sold than revenue for that product can be found. Then again, it's hard to imagine that there's "no meaningful market" for a dictionary of chinese characters, or even russian. Well, maybe there isn't. A few tens of thousand college and advanced placement students, with a fraction of them using kobo as their dictionary of choice at 5-15 dollars, would not be much of a market, perhaps even with an effective ad campaign to convince people to "learn chinese" that way. So you see my point about open standards.
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