Aura HD Kobo Aura HD Impressions Thread

[PeterT]

You should be able to the subscriptions removed; I managed in the last few weeks to get Kobo support to delete about 7 copies of the New York Times that were on my account from a trial I had activated.

[ottdmk]

On my Touch I can zoom kepub pictures. If you call up the menu while displaying the picture there should be an icon that looks like a directional rocker. If you select it there will be zoom options.

[robko]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

On my Touch I can zoom kepub pictures. If you call up the menu while displaying the picture there should be an icon that looks like a directional rocker. If you select it there will be zoom options.

However that only works if the picture happens to be the only thing on the page. If you also have text on the page it won't let you zoom.

[louden]

I just got mine today - and after hearing some of these reviews, I figure I had to comment:

Build: Solid! No rattles whatsoever. It feels like a solid piece of hardware
Screen/Light: Awsome! - Text clarity is great, even with the light on in daytime
Slipperiness: Very! I need a case. This will slip out of my hands whenever I fall asleep reading.
Fingerprints: All over the back. It's a matte finish, but not rubbery. It is a grease magnet.
Store: I don't know, I just copied a bunch of epubs and pdfs right to the device

PDF Reading: Good - but could be beter with some software tweaks. I can easily read geek books (O'Reilly/Pragmatic/APress etc) - and I like it alot! Much easier on the eyes than my iPad, which, to be honest, I've wanted a pdf eink solution since I first saw an eink device...

[Mikeyboards]

Yay! Finally received my Kobo Aura yesterday; I love it!
For me, the size is just right. I have several other (6-inch) readers, and this is just the right amount bigger to make me really happy
But.... the darn thing won't fit in my Kobo Glo sleeves! (of course.)

So had to come up with an emergency sleeve, just to keep her safe after I'm done reading each night, and to be sure we're both tucked in snug and tight.
After a quick snip of the scissors (not shown), these snapshots show the official tucking in... And all is well

[filmo]

You win cheapest cover I have ever seen prize.
Let us know how it holds up long term.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Mikeyboards

So had to come up with an emergency sleeve, just to keep her safe after I'm done reading each night, and to be sure we're both tucked in snug and tight.
After a quick snip of the scissors (not shown), these snapshots show the official tucking in... And all is well

LOL, that's what I used for my Kindle Touch (inside a backpack) when I went to Florida last year. Worked great.

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by louden

Slipperiness: Very! I need a case. This will slip out of my hands whenever I fall asleep reading.
Fingerprints: All over the back. It's a matte finish, but not rubbery. It is a grease magnet.

It's not super slippery, due to the shape helping with the gripping (easier to grab something with curves/angles than a flat box)... but a skin is something I put on mine. InvisibleShield helped immensely with that. The slight rubberized texture is something that was really needed.

Originally Posted by louden

PDF Reading: Good - but could be beter with some software tweaks. I can easily read geek books (O'Reilly/Pragmatic/APress etc) - and I like it alot! Much easier on the eyes than my iPad, which, to be honest, I've wanted a pdf eink solution since I first saw an eink device...

It's a bit small, but surprisingly fast with non-graphic heavy PDFs. I've put some rule books on, and tables are rather readable. More so than the Glo.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to tweak it to remove the 2cm border at the bottom, or to minimize it?

Originally Posted by Mikeyboards

Yay! Finally received my Kobo Aura yesterday; I love it!
For me, the size is just right. I have several other (6-inch) readers, and this is just the right amount bigger to make me really happy
But.... the darn thing won't fit in my Kobo Glo sleeves! (of course.)

So had to come up with an emergency sleeve, just to keep her safe after I'm done reading each night, and to be sure we're both tucked in snug and tight.
After a quick snip of the scissors (not shown), these snapshots show the official tucking in... And all is well

Tried an old Kindle 3 sleeve? I had a Tumbuk2 one for a Kindle Keyboard, and the Aura fits like the sleeve was made for it.

[speakingtohe]

Just got mine.

Shelves
Still slow opening shelf menu with a mere 460 shelves
No slider bar but nice to have the go to page by number function
Nice to have the back arrow but would be nice if it went back to the page you were on in the shelf menu.

Display
Very nice
I count 78 words per page and 48 lines per page at the second font size.

Strange that the shelves go down to the bottom of the page and don't in the book you are reading. Not that I probably would have paid attention if it wasn't such a hot topic

Light
My first built in light.
Seems a little blue at a lower setting, very whitish at a higher setting but hurts my eyes.

Other than the shelf menu opening tediously slow it seems fast enough.

Probably I will keep it, not entirely sure yet.

Helen

[Mikeyboards]

Originally Posted by Haesslich

...
Tried an old Kindle 3 sleeve? I had a Tumbuk2 one for a Kindle Keyboard, and the Aura fits like the sleeve was made for it.

Is that Kindle 3 sleeve the one shown here?
http://www.amazon.com/Timbuk2-Quilte...f=cm_lmf_tit_3

I actually prefer no flap for sleeves (as it just sits by the bed, doesn't go traveling). But... does it take some force to release the velcro when opening the flap?

[Krytes]

I got mine a few days ago, and have been very impressed so far. I upgraded from a kobo touch.
Things that I liked:

• Resolution: excellent! Everything is beautifully clear, and textbook pdfs are now readable (though barely) without zooming, provided that margins are cropped.
• New home screen: I appreciate the shortcuts to recently-accessed shelves.
• Glowscreen: beautifully even, and I appreciate the wide range of possible light levels.
• Response time: seems less laggy than my Touch was when doing things like opening shelves.

Things that I didn't like:

• Physical design: I found the case design to be odd and rather ugly.
• Search bar: defaults to "bookstore" rather than "library" every time.
• Reading stats: keep popping up on the home screen, even though Reading Life is disabled. I'm not interested.
• PDFs: page numbers are always displayed on the bottom, wasting valuable screen space.
• Navigation: when reading a book, I can go directly to the home screen, but not back to the previous screen.
• Cover: there seems to be only one choice in covers, and it's expensive, and it wasn't even available in-store when I went to buy my aura.

I've made my own sleeve/cover with a layer of knitted wool as a shock-resistant layer and a layer of cotton over that. It's working out quite well.

[paola]

Originally Posted by taming

I'm in the middle of a really great book. I think I will go read and leave MR for tomorrow.

and let the Aura do its job

[savbeowulf]

Just had google notification with a few possible reasons why the Aura HD has neen so well received. I hopefully get mine tomorrow when the postie tuens up (fingers arms legs and eyes crossed)
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/a...set-not-amazon

[Lbooker]

Originally Posted by Sharkey

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.

In Linux there is a nice free software with a graphical interface to do this very precisely : PDF-Shuffler.
After importing the file, one can crop pages one at a time, as well as dozens or hundreds of pages at a time, indicating percentages of cropping for each side of the page, seeing in real time the result on the pages displayed at the zoom level you choose. Then "save as" and you are done ! A quick and clean solution.

[ballfresno]

Originally Posted by Lbooker

In Linux there is a nice free software with a graphical interface to do this very precisely : PDF-Shuffler.

Thanks for this! Just installed it, cropped all pages in an article I have to review and uploaded to my Aura. Worked very well: I can now read the document without zooming/scrolling thanks to the resolution of the Aura.