One-touch look-up of words in foreign language book
 

Hello. I was thinking about buying a Kobo Aura reader on which to read French novels because the majority of modern French language books published in ebook format are in epub with the Adobe DRM system.

I am still learning French and it is only practical for me to read a book in French if one-touch word translation is available. That is that I can hold my finger down on an unknown word for a second and a definition pops up on the screen, which I can then dismiss with a single extra touch, to continue reading.

I am happy to buy a French-English e-dictionary to go on the Kobo if that's needed to enable that capability, as I would expect.

Note I do not expect it to be able to translate multi-word passages, like Google translate does. That is much more complex, and unnecessary for me.

Can anybody tell me if one-touch word translation like this is available on a Kobo? If not on a Kobo, are there other Adobe DRM-compatible readers on which it is available?

They would need to be readers, not tablets, as I don't like extended reading from a non e-ink screen. Plus I like to read out in the garden, and it's too hard to read an LCD/LED screen in sunlight.

Thank you very much.

It is available . French is one of the supported languages. The dictionaries are not the best. And you can't buy additional ones. But you can replace the default dictionaries. There is a thread here somewhere with alternative dictionaries for kobo.

If your language is English in Kobo's parameters, you'll get the Kobo French/English dictionary on your first call in a book itself parametered as French. You can change the dictionary for each book when you press on a word the first time - kobo memorizes the last choice for any following word, so all the following words will be single touch. For longer definitions you can swipe for following pages.

The translation dictionaries are mediocre. I'm French and always choose the single language dictionaries. There is only one alternative French dictionary in the thread mentioned below, the Littré, especially useful for classical works.

Even option to buy better dictionary would probably be ok for some users and profitable for Kobo.

Thank you for the replies. Encouraged by them I bought the Kobo today and loaded some of my free ebooks like Le Comte de Monte Cristo on it, and the one-touch translation works nicely.

The next challenge is to buy modern French novels for it so that I don't end up talking like a 19th century aristocrat. I was told that fnac.com was a good site, and it has a number of books I'd like to buy, but when I tried to register and buy Les Fourmis by Bernard Werber I got an error message:

"Nous rencontrons un problème avec votre compte fnac.com. Pour finaliser votre achat de livre numérique merci de contacter le service client fnac au 0969 32 43 34. Veuillez nous excuser pour la gêne occasionnée"

In the past I've had problems trying to buy ebooks from web sites based in other countries - I'm in Australia. I think they often only sell to people in the same country because of strange copyright rules.

Does anybody know whether FNAC sells online to people outside the twelve or so countries in which they have physical stores?

I've sent an inquiry to FNAC but my French may not be good enough understand the reply if it's complicated, and I thought maybe somebody on here would have experience of the rules and how it works.

This is a different subject from the original (although related) so I'll start a new thread if that is thought a more appropriate way to ask this.

Thank you.

Nothing specific to Australia, it's country/region-specific licensing. There are various ways around it. Kobobooks is one of the easiest sites to access geolocked books - just change the country name in your address.

I tried to do that but couldn't find an address in my account info, and can't remember entering one when registering.

It knows I'm in Australia though, because the URL when I log on is

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-au/

Can you please tell me how I can convince the Kobo website that I am in France?

The address is on the "Payment information" of the account settings. Select "France" as the country and entering a valid looking French address will do it. If you have stored your credit card details, these have to be cleared before the address can be changed.

Thank you David. It worked. I now have purchased, downloaded and transferred to my reader copies of Les Fourmis, L'Elegance de l'Herisson, and L'Etranger, courtesy of my address at Les Catalans in Marseille (where Mercedes lived in Le Comte de Monte Cristo).

Another strange little trick I noticed was that although I changed my address to a French one, it wouldn't show me those books in reply to my searches until I switched the language through which I was viewing the Kobo site to French. Fortunately, my French was at least good enough to be able to complete the purchase.

Merci.