NooN, you DO realize that no one has yet confirmed that it works with arabic?
The right-to-left may be a fail for the kobo, as it is with other similar readers released this spring that may use similar firmware (notably, adobe digital editions on board).
I'm going to try and go to the indigo store tomorrow and try out arabic, hebrew and just for kicks, a webpage and its conversion to epub that has a couple vertically arranged kanji characters. I just saved them on my microsd and I'll see if they let me test.
I'll report back. These epubs are all properly formatted on calibre on my computer.
Whatever the results, the "enthusiastic" (although perhaps not substantial) improvements in multidirectional writing noted for epub revision 3 this year may result in firmware updates for many readers to allow the new epub 3 epubs be readable.
And given kobo's ongoing support and firmware updates for all generations of kobo, I would be shocked if, when the time came, they didn't update everything they've already released. So you COULD buy it to read non right-to-left languages and then, if they're honorable, do a firmware update later for arabic/hebrew/persian etc when it's available. It's not like there are too many ereaders out there that can currently do proper right-to-left languages anyway. I think there are only a couple and they're really pricey. And their screens aren't as good, etc.
I'm not sure but I think I've read that the korean pageone papyrus or some model of it, seems to display hebrew in proper right-to-left in israel (an israeli book seller on here mentioned it) so if you can use arabic fonts, then it'll probably do right-to-left for arabic, too.
But it may be a special localized version for the israeli market, who knows?
see something about the papyrus here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/arc.../t-105910.html
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95723
more on directionality of writing systems, kind of "east versus west":
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/arc...p/t-79709.html
http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-...s-content-docs
http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-...changed-xhtml5
(the last link, about "changes" from 2 to 3, doesn't say anything specifically on language direction, which leads me to say it signals an insubstantial change because it's called "changes vers 2 to 3" but it DOES explain maybe why all its new features, such as language writing direction, are available, namely:
the switch to html5. But I'm just guessing.)