Aura HD Kobo Aura HD Impressions Thread

[AnemicOak]

I'm playing with shelves right now. I appears that even after books are added to a shelf they still appear in the library list too? Or is there a way to have them not show if they're part of a shelf?

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I'm playing with shelves right now. I appears that even after books are added to a shelf they still appear in the library list too? Or is there a way to have them not show if they're part of a shelf?

Not that I can think of. But since Reading Life shows recently accessed shelves, I dismiss books I'm not reading to let the shelves fill my home screen. Much better than the five recent hooks display you get on the Mini/Touch/Glo.

As for the slipping question: not yet, but it's more slick than I prefer, even if the shape helps with gripping. Just put an InvisibleShield on the back tonight to add a tackier texture, while letting the nice chocolate leather brown show.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Yes, you can choose any number between 1 and 6, although so far I've seen no ghosting with it set at 6.

And actually you can manually edit the file where the setting is stored on the Kobo and take it up to 99..

[louden]

Originally Posted by flips01

I'm interested.
(I've been using Skim to do it. Crop then export with annotations.)

Skim works great! You can even drive it with AppleScript...

[taming]

I wrote my first post in this thread after I had only used the Aura for an hour or so. I have revised my thinking about some of what I wrote.

• I have gotten used to the new normal for Kobo in terms of how to access menus and "hidden" items and I am now fine with italics indicating that there are some choices that will display when the word in italics is pressed. It's not a happy thing for people using several different Kobo devices, but I'm OK with it.
• Now that I have used it for a longer period of time, I guess my muscles memory has kicked in and I am not getting having to double press at all. The downside is that I spent a little while on a Touch today and it seemed really clunky and I was double pressing a lot.
• It took me awhile to figure out what long presses do in various locations. The user guide was helpful there. Long press on a book in the library and the menu for putting books on shelves, deleting, etc is invoked. Long press on a shelf listing to rename or delete it. Long press on something displayed on the home page to dismiss it. That sort of thing.
• I still think the new home screen is too crowded and that the small size of some book covers makes them very difficult to read. Now that I have dismissed some things and opened a bunch of books, I have things arranged so that this is a bit better. I think that the new books on the homescreen are particularly annoying with tiny covers.
• I really like the fact that all of the preloaded fonts can be adjusted. That is new in this firmware, so not really Aura only.
• I continue to be delighted by the speed of the device. It's especially noticeable when processing new content.
• I really like the display. I know people complain about the bottom space, but I did a comparison of two pages set up exactly the same way on the Glo and the Aura. I found that the Aura displayed 4 more physical lines of text, but 8 additional lines worth of content (that is, 8 lines that were on the next page on the Glo appeared on the original page of the Aura).
• I think that some of the problems with spacing are kepub vs epub and that the font selected can make a huge difference. My solution was to install the calibre epub to kepub plugin and to use Georgia, for now. I have not seen any issues at all with this scheme. I also enjoy the information about progress, % read, in the kepub format.
• The higher density screen has resulted in a greater degree of satisfaction with reading with the light entirely off. With my glo I had the light on all of the time because the clarity of he text seemed better with the light on.
• From my perspective, the amount of text on the screen really does make the Aura look and read more like a paper book.
• I find the Aura very comfortable to hold. The shape of the back is part of that and after I got used to the feel of a nekkid reader, I found that it didn't actually feel slippery when using it, nor did it ever actually slip from my grip. I am not planning on getting a cover, at least not unless I find myself taking it out of my house more often than I am now. I read on a very big phone for the 15 minutes or so I have to read during the work day.
• I still think that Kobo traded some usability for elegance/wow factor in terms of the interface, particularly in terms of the number of items on the home page, but I can live with it.

[meeera]

taming: thanks a lot for the real-life usability info.

[samhy]

Thank you Taming for your feedback

[filmo]

Book covers on home screen not being readable makes them nearly useless and more so with decreasing size. Good looking design with poor function. Easily solved with title or author captions below postage stamp size book covers.

[taming]

It may be that younger users (with better eyesight) are not as bothered by this as I am. At 60, I see some things differently.

There is one thing that I absolutely hate about the Aura HD: Amazon has spammed me twice in the past week because they're feeling heat from the competition. I rarely receive that much unsolicited email from Amazon in the span of a year.

[geormes]

Originally Posted by taming

I wrote my first post in this thread after I had only used the Aura for an hour or so. I have revised my thinking about some of what I wrote.

[*]I still think the new home screen is too crowded and that the small size of some book covers makes them very difficult to read. Now that I have dismissed some things and opened a bunch of books, I have things arranged so that this is a bit better. I think that the new books on the homescreen are particularly annoying with tiny covers.[*]I continue to be delighted by the speed of the device. It's especially noticeable when processing new content.[*]I still think that Kobo traded some usability for elegance/wow factor in terms of the interface, particularly in terms of the number of items on the home page, but I can live with it.[/LIST]

Totally agree about the crowded home page. Fortunately I spend only a small time there and find when starting a new book I sometimes need to go to the list view to make sense of what I am seeing. My previous device was a Kobo Touch on firmware 1.9.17. I will gladly put up with a crowded, cluttered home page for the enhanced reading experience of the Aura.

My wife has a Nook Touch, but a couple of minutes with my Aura and she has ordered one for herself, in spite of confusion on the home page.

[spanxmcb]

I wish there was more customization of the homepage. My library had a sync glitch and it marked all of my books that were finished as 1% read so now the order of my recently read books is all messed up. I wish there was a way to customize the home screen or to queue up which books you want to read next. The bookcovers are quite small, but I love the back - nice to hold - even in the sleep cover!

[Willa]

Originally Posted by taming

I wrote my first post in this thread after I had only used the Aura for an hour or so. I have revised my thinking about some of what I wrote.

• Now that I have used it for a longer period of time, I guess my muscles memory has kicked in and I am not getting having to double press at all. The downside is that I spent a little while on a Touch today and it seemed really clunky and I was double pressing a lot.
• I still think the new home screen is too crowded and that the small size of some book covers makes them very difficult to read. Now that I have dismissed some things and opened a bunch of books, I have things arranged so that this is a bit better. I think that the new books on the homescreen are particularly annoying with tiny covers.
• I continue to be delighted by the speed of the device. It's especially noticeable when processing new content.
• I really like the display. I know people complain about the bottom space, but I did a comparison of two pages set up exactly the same way on the Glo and the Aura. I found that the Aura displayed 4 more physical lines of text, but 8 additional lines worth of content (that is, 8 lines that were on the next page on the Glo appeared on the original page of the Aura).
• The higher density screen has resulted in a greater degree of satisfaction with reading with the light entirely off. With my glo I had the light on all of the time because the clarity of he text seemed better with the light on.
• From my perspective, the amount of text on the screen really does make the Aura look and read more like a paper book.

Great post! I got my sweaty little paws on a display Aura this week.

I was having to double/triple press everything to get it to respond.

I didn't like the home screen at all - very crowded and the thumbnails were soooo tiny.

I did like the display of books and the size of the reader - it didn't look big and clunky.

And the higher density screen was readily apparent.

[Sharkey]

Originally Posted by flips01

I'm interested.
(I've been using Skim to do it. Crop then export with annotations.)

I use Briss, which does a logical crop that only masks the content in the margins. Unfortunately, the Kobo viewer on the device seems to ignore the masking. This Ghostscript command will permanently remove the margin area:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dUseCropBox -sOutputFile=out.pdf - < in.pdf

Note the hyphen after out.pdf and the "< in.pdf"; ie, tell Ghostscript to read from stdin and then concatenate "in.pdf" onto stdin.

This works for me on my OSX 10.6.8 laptop; haven't tried on newer or earlier versions of OSX, nor on other platforms.

Originally Posted by spanxmcb

I wish there was more customization of the homepage. My library had a sync glitch and it marked all of my books that were finished as 1% read so now the order of my recently read books is all messed up. I wish there was a way to customize the home screen or to queue up which books you want to read next. The bookcovers are quite small, but I love the back - nice to hold - even in the sleep cover!

There are clumsy options. You can add books to your list by opening them from the library. You can remove books (or anything else) from the home screen by pressing and holding for a popup menu.