Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Maltby
We certainly must credit Kobo with bringing the device to market in the first place, in my case I have credited them three times, and think the credit they have received at the pricing they established ought to satisfy them. The others you mention are more deserving, in my mind. But the main reason I was pointing out Kobo's (probably fiscally prudent [see I didn't say greedy]) lack of response to issues of interest to their customers, was to point out the progress addressing those issues by the KoReader. I doubt that all those who have raised those issues and the likely larger number who also wished for those features/fixes, are aware of the strides made already.
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I think that the credit to Kobo should go a little further than the hardware and pricing. Especially since I think that the Touch is much better designed than the Aura.
(The Touch strikes me as being much more durable, even though the Aura definitely has better specifications.) I also definitely agree with "fiscally prudent" being used instead of "greedy" because they are a business that has to play within contemporary business practices in order to be competitive (even though I don't agree with current business practices because I value my privacy, particularly with respect to what I read). I also agree with those who created koreader and who adapted it to the Kobo deserving more credit simply because their purposes are more altruistic than those of almost any business.
Yet I also believe that Kobo deserves a bit more credit than they seem to receive at times. As far as I can tell, Kobo is a much more open system than its direct competitors. Modifying a Kobo device does require using a few tricks, but they are remarkably easy tricks to figure out. Once you figure out the basic trick (namely, how to obtain a firmware update) almost anything that a software hacker would want to play with is well documented by third parties. Yes, things could be better. On the otherhand, my recollections of my Kindle were that it's a hands-off device. I used mods to be sure. Yet I could not create my own mods nor modify the mods.
Overall, I wish that Kobo could meet my needs (and your needs) directly. Realistically though, I realize that we are both outliers. Realistically, I realize that my skills aren't quite up to par to do the deep modifications myself, so I depend upon others to do so. When I noticed that koreader was mostly based upon Lua though, I was overjoyed. I don't know the language, but I recognize that it is an interpreted language and it's far easier to tweak software based upon interpreted languages than compiled ones (e.g. there is no development environment to setup).
So kudos to everyone. Slightly more so for the modders because I respect what they're doing, but a great deal of credit should go out to Kobo for making their lives easier.