Aura Kobo policy in Japan

[giyomunice]

Hi,

here are some recent news as I have a Kobo Aura (bought in Japan 2014/4), that could be useful. In one word : , so please consider this information and know what you buy !


Kobo devices (at least Aura) bought in Japan does support English, Spanish, French (FR,CA), German, Portuguese (PO, BR), Dutch, Italian.

When I bought it it was really cheap (13700 Yen vs 137 € in France, for an exchange rate 1€=140€). It is one of the reasons that made me buy it, as well as access to Rakuten shop, and easy support for Japanese books (I hoped). I really like the hardware and the interface, the reading is smooth, battery long, etc etc. Nothing to say about it.

However, after some use, I had dislikeable surprises.
- Some dictionaries allow you to lookup a word (for ex, in Spanish if I looked up tenía and it doesn’t find it, I can manually correct to tener and get the definition), others won’t (actually most of them).
- I had trouble to select words on some books, or parts of books (the selection will work perfectly on a page in Spanish, but not at the end of the sentence for instance). In Japanese books downloaded from Kobo store,（ 青空文庫走れメロス, aosorabunko, Hashire merosu）it is impossible for me to select a word ! It only selects one character below or a completely different thing.
This is really annoying when being in Japan and learning Japanese, come on !
This is solved with the firmware 3.3 ! Well done guys ! Text selection in Japanese is now as sweet as other languages !

So I thought, like a naive guy, that might be a firmware problem. And I found out, after many forums and a call to Kobo support, that they do not provide access to recent firmware updates in Japan ! I am stuck to 3.1 whereas 3.8 has been released !
No way… Luckily I found this post from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=228951 that seems to work for others.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Connect your Kobo to your computer, look in the .kobo directory for a file called affiliate.conf. Open the file with a text editor and you should see one line in it. Try changing that line to:

affiliate=KoboIndigo

and see if this has any effect.

Regards,
David

And… IT WORKED ! I am now firmware 3.3 (maybe 3.5> have to be installed manually for now).


Briefly, Kobo is really nice when using it, but I was really pissed off not having been aware of these problems when I bought it, not receiving any actual support from Rakuten/Kobo (I wanted to have someone directly check that I can’t select words in Japanese but on the phone they told me they won’t take any product back ! https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=212508) and most of all by the constant Japanese "lightyears after everyone" policy on firmware (and movie releases etc but this is ) .

Hope this helped

[Canuck_in_Japan]

The price must have gone up. I think I paid 12000 or something like that and it came with a cover.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by giyomunice

- Some dictionaries allow you to lookup a word (for ex, in Spanish if I looked up tenía and it doesn’t find it, I can manually correct to tener and get the definition), others won’t (actually most of them).
- I had trouble to select words on some books, or parts of books (the selection will work perfectly on a page in Spanish, but not at the end of the sentence for instance). In Japanese books downloaded from Kobo store,（ 青空文庫走れメロス, aosorabunko, Hashire merosu）it is impossible for me to select a word ! It only selects one character below or a completely different thing.
This is really annoying when being in Japan and learning Japanese, come on !

Selecting Japanese text has always been a pain. With recent firmwares, however, I feel it gets more more difficult. I can somehow handle it with FW 2.6.1. It is far from perfect, but it works somehow.

I am providing the EDICT dictionary for kobo there. With the older version, you can even modify the searched string, e.g. hashire > hashiru, or search for anything you like. See the first spoiler of the above link. I did not check whether this is working with more recent firmwares, but I guess it does. Typing Japanese into the search field of lhe dictionary is easier, if you select Japanese as user language.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by giyomunice

Unluckily I am on a Linux Ubuntu 64 bits system and for an unknown reason it doesn’t mount my Kobo

It should. I have Kubuntu 14.04 and it works fine. Try different USB ports and different cables. And remember you have to plug the Kobo, tap "Connect" on the screen, and then mount it; and if you unmount it, you'd have to unplug and plug back.

[giyomunice]

Thank you all for your quick answers ! I am impressed as a newcomer on this forum !

@Canuck_in_Japan
Probably with the yen decrease… Do you remember when you bought it ?*

@Jellby
Well, you’re right ! it was just a USB cable problem I guess. Before I changed the cable it did not even show "Connect" on the screen, now it does
Never trust 100Yen cables

@tshering
Thank you, it sounds cool ! I’ll check that soon But weird that support for Japanese is worsening in a Japanese company…… Now text selection is really nice with the firmware 3.3 ! The only thing missing is to lookup for text manually, so I will try your dictionary anyway