Quote:
Originally Posted by taming
I am pretty sure though that there is not a Chapters store in Canada that does not know about the 1.4 update, so something appears not not to be working well in Australia. Chapters-Indigo owns 58% of Kobo so the relationship between Kobo and chapters and Kobo and Borders AU is probably quite a bit different.
It must be a fine line to walk. I imagine that Borders really wants people in AU to buy e-books from them, rather than the "mother ship" so having Kobo itself keep a relatively low profile there may be viewed as a good thing.
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(I am not a Kobo owner btw) but I don't think what you are saying is inherently specific to the Kobo. I personally feel that here in Australia we lack any real great knowledge from sales staff in a retail presence. At rare times you tend to come across someone who really knows their stuff (usually in the smaller privately owned stores) but generally they are pretty poor. I recall when I bought my last laptop from a retail chain that are apparently experts in computers and technology. I had one simple question I asked about a particular laptop "how many cells is the battery?" Simple question in my view. The answer, "Oh you will get 2-3 hours of battery life".
Now in my view an expert would know "oh it's 3-cell, 6-cell....whatever". Part of it would be happening with the Kobo, it is there in retails stores but the sales people are really not that interested in it. I imagine part of it could also be that some A&R stores are privately owned franchisees who may fear once you buy an ereader you'll be buying your books online and they miss out on future sales (ebooks are bought straight from A&R, AFAIK no percentage of the sale goes to the local A&R store).
In my view Kobo would be better off fixing the firmware to allow the reader to update from a fat32 formatted SD card. Save them the hassle of trying to get all retails stores in Australia competent to perform SD card updates on peoples units, instead people could just use any SD card they have and do it themselves.