Anyone just got a forma?
 

Mine is on the way! I am excited, and not too worried about light banding. I saw on the kobo Reddit forum support told the OP that they were working on fixing the issue. that was a year ago. do any new users notice it?

nobody got a forma :(... thought there was a sale

I can only speak for myself: A fear of the "Band of Dark" struck too much fear into my heart. I decided to wait for version II, whatever it might be called.

Kobo do not do sales

Forma price has not changed since release, neither has libra. And none of the UK retailers discount them. Even used ones on eBay go for almost the full new retail price

And the light band along the thick edge is unfixable. It's a consequence of the case design. You either learn to like it, live with it, or buy a Kindle.
It does not bother me, it is outside of the area used for text, on default margin settings.

It was the approx €100 higher cost than a Libra put me off a Forma. I hardly ever use the "front light" on either of my Kobos or the Kindle PW3. Purchased Argos Ireland. North American imports add 23% VAT on price INCLUDING shipping. Over €150 (inc Shipping) can also involve Customs Duty, (VAT charged on that too!).
So I stick to under €23 inc Shipping for non-EU. Brexit isn't actually done till 31st December 2020.

Even pushing the text to the edge of the screen well beyond the default margin it’s not terrible. And if you invert the screen it’s even less noticeable.

You get a lot more screen real estate for that extra £100. But also in my case a very unreliable power button, which I bypass with a sleep cover.. and sometimes it is slow to invert the screen when rotated.
I bought both but am reading on the forma, will probably lend the libra to my son. He uses my old aura hd so when that dies he may get the libra

On a sample of 1 of each, the libra seems better made to me.

Inverting the screen makes little difference to noticing the edge band , for me. I experimented both ways around. Currently I am having the thick edge with the buttons on the left..

I mostly read real fiction in epub on the Libra, so the 7" is fine. Most of the PDFs I have are ancient magazines (some colour and all discoloured) or A4/Letter size data sheets or large old technical books, so my 10" Android tablet (cost €119) is fine for those. An 8" Forma would still be too small for those. It would be better for the approx. A5 size operator manuals, but I don't use those much and they are fine on the Libra.
I got the Android Tablet locally reduced from online price of about €175 + shipping at the end of December and then gave away the horrid x86 Win10 tablet with keyboard dock. PDF viewer and Browser hugely faster on the cheap 10" Lenovo ARM.

I wanted to minimise page turns. Did some basic math on screen areas, the expected increase per cent for text real estate is something like (8/7) squared. Subjectively it seems a lot bigger. Some folks have said that you may naturally select a larger font on a larger screen though which would reduce the impact.

Yeah, that's what I do. On my 6'' Kindles I used size 5 (custom sizes, not the default ones) and on the 7'' Oasis I use size 6.

For me 7'' is exactly right. My 7.8'' Nook is actually a bit larger than I'd prefer and 8'' would be larger than that.

Here in Italy (may be elsewhere in Europe) there is a special offer for Kobo Forma 32 GB: € 299,99 instead of € 329,99.

kobo does do sales, just bought one for 50$ of from kobo :)

Kobo certainly does do sales: The Forma - until March 11 - was $199 and available from a number of places. The sale is now over and they are back to a higher price, but lower than when it was initially released over a year ago.

This sale was the impetus for the OP's purchase.

ok

sales in UK are rare/ non existent

I tracked prices for months before buying, there was never a cheap day /week
checking kobo (Uk) site pricing for you now. the Forma is £239, same as it's always been.

what country was your sale price in ?

US and Canada. It was on sale in the US first (both Clara HD $99 and Forma $199).