My Kobo Works Great / Or Not

[eythian]

Originally Posted by baker

The charge seems to last longer all the time. Overall works great with a few quirks.....the pluses far outweigh the negatives..no regrets buying it.

I wonder if the battery comes poorly calibrated, and it takes a couple of discharges before it really knows its limits.

Mine died last night just after I finished a book (good timing) that was about 360 pages long, which would be about ... 700ish page turns*, but it was still new and so I'd spent a bit of time playing with it beforehand, and it had only had the initial charge of a couple of hours. This time I left it on the charger overnight, so I'll be interested to see if it's any better now.

* I do wonder if people are sometimes counting the number of pages the book reports, which is typically less than the number of page turns involved in reading it, and that varies by font size.

[artificial]

Originally Posted by eythian

* I do wonder if people are sometimes counting the number of pages the book reports, which is typically less than the number of page turns involved in reading it, and that varies by font size.

I think most of the people who post figures in the 'battery life' thread have a good handle on the difference between a 'page' and a 'page refresh', but I'm sure you're right that there are some who get confused about the difference.

I've yet to see anyone post results of better than about 1500 page refreshes per charge. I suspect that even people who report 'no problems' with their Kobo Reader fare little better than those of us who consider our battery performance to be sub-par - it's just that they consider 1000-1500 page turns to be acceptable.

I would love to be proven wrong though! If there is anyone out there getting 2000+ page turns, please post your figures in one of the battery life threads so we know what a fully functional Kobo is capable of.

[Bittybye]

I'm having only one major problem with my Kobo.

After I plug in to charge or put in a new book the books I've put in sometimes don't work at all. Now I don't buy from Kobo so I have to put it in manually, but of 250 documents I have (some personal documents or articles I saved to HTML then converted to epub) only 150 show up on the Kobo.

I think the problems is something that I saw others complain about. That 1 or 2 books out of a batch cause a problem and the Kobo does not properly process the books and when you press the power button (because your tired of waiting 3+ hours waiting for it to finish processing) it can't 'see' the books there.
I simply don't have the patients to go though every single document to see which one is causing the problem. Nor do I think I should have to. I bought the Kobo to make reading a little less cumbersome, not irritate the living daylights out of me.

[cycles]

I voted "works great" because it is the closest to my experience. The reader isn't great (yet) but it is good. I wanted an inexpensive book reader that let me buy online books and that is what I got. The e-ink display is very easy on my eyes.

Maybe i am happier than others because I buy my books at Kobo. Difficulties with PDFs and e-pubs wouldn't affect me and I don't consider the need for a weekly charge to be an inconvenience. (i also have an iPhone and an iPad and have to charge those devices every day.)

[chlmccann11]

I buy my books at Kobo too, cycles. I've found, too, if I can't find a book I want there, I can usually get it through the Chapters.ca site.

I chose Kobo because I'd seen the Sony Reader in Future Shop and wasn't really impressed with its usability for the amount of money FS wanted. Sony was also offering books through its US website in US dollars, rather than me being able to see the prices in CAD.

I was looking at Kindle and learned that ebooks sold through Amazon in the US aren't necessarily available in Canada. The discussion is here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/forum/cd/di...TxCZPS5FWC2YJX

That kind of defeats the purpose of buying the reader, which is why I went with Kobo. Oh, yeah, I found too that Chapters had good prices on ebooks.

[wrenn1]

I love books. I have been known to caress books so I thought I wouldn't adapt to ereader format but I loved it first go. So, I am happy with the appearance of the text.

Although the forums like this one have helped me work out kinks I am not trusting the device to not stop (battery dead) when I am reading in bed and too tired to get up and boot my computer.

My biggest complaint however, is customer service. I have never experienced so much BS. Questions when they are finally replied to days later have nothing to do with my query but sound like canned sound bites.

They have also tried the old "it must be something YOU are doing wrong" bit on me several times.

They are inept, short staffed and even poor spellers. Almost each response I got used "your" instead of "you're" (I know small stuff) but after all the BS of them not stepping up to at least say they are working on it I have the dilemma of wanting to not support them by owning their product but also liking the reading experience when it does decide to work.

[wrenn1]

Oh yeah, One more thing. The availability of books. Did you ever go into one of those books stores where they sell thousands of books you have never heard of? I am finding it hard to find any I want to read. I have found a handful and have them on the reader and will hope they add something decent by time I have finished.

[MrTea]

Just picked mine up yesterday. As I'm 2/3 of the way through The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis I thought I'd download it on the Kobo for an immediate comparison.

I am initially a little frustrated at having to turn the page so frequently. Perhaps it's something I will get used to, however it is very noticeable that the Kobo takes a few seconds to change a page. That wouldn't be too bad if there was a decent amount of text on the screen but there isn't: it's all double spaced meaning frequent page turns.

I had a brief thumb through the forums earlier and apparently using Calibre I can change the line spacing. That is fine, I am glad that it should be possible to adjust the line spacing but it does lead me to my last two observations:

Maybe I am alone (or naive) but I would think that on an e-reader the ability to adjust line spacing and text justification would be a standard out of the box. (Yes I know it's a low end reader but these aren't hard things to do.)

Last observation is that I was surprised to find it easier to load new ePub content 'from the wild' than purchased content through the kobobooks.com site using the Kobo application. Just a comment to the guys at Kobo, but if it's easier to load non purchased content through shareware than your own application that is what many people will do. Path of least resistance and all that...

Great forums by the way, a wealth of information - keep up the good work!

[wrenn1]

Mine turns pages faster than I am able to turn a paper book manually and I like that I don't have to lick my finger when reading a library book. ick

[artificial]

Originally Posted by wrenn1

Mine turns pages faster than I am able to turn a paper book manually and I like that I don't have to lick my finger when reading a library book. ick

Hehehe. I like that I never lose the page I'm on, and that I can turn pages with one hand (very useful when reading while standing up during a train commute).

[artificial]

Originally Posted by MrTea

Maybe I am alone (or naive) but I would think that on an e-reader the ability to adjust line spacing and text justification would be a standard out of the box. (Yes I know it's a low end reader but these aren't hard things to do.)

I know a few people have voiced a similar complaint. It might well be the case that this is actually quite difficult for Kobo to implement, depending how their HTML parser works. I guess we'll find out when the new firmware is released...

If you are working with un-DRM encumbered ePubs, and don't mind getting your hands dirty with a little CSS editing it's easy to fix this on a per-book basis. Or, you can use Calibre and convert epub -> epub and change the justification to "left" or "justified" per your preference. (I prefer left justified text, since IMO the Kobo screen is too small for fully justified text to display properly).

If by line spacing you mean removing the top/bottom margin from paragraphs, again this can be changed in calibre during the conversion process. (My preference is to remove the margin from paragraphs and indent the paragraphs, to fit more lines per screen).

[leighisme]

Originally Posted by artificial

Hehehe. I like that I never lose the page I'm on, and that I can turn pages with one hand (very useful when reading while standing up during a train commute).

After reading 13 books on the Kobo, I went back to paper and hardcovers for a couple. But I kept losing my spot on the (paper) page! It's a lot easier to keep track of where I am on the Kobo. I think I've been spoiled now... :P

[LickTheEnvelope]

Very strange for the first 2 days, last 6 have been perfect.

[chlmccann11]

Purchased "Dust to Dust" yesterday evening. Can't wait to be reading it this weekend!