Quote:
Originally Posted by fezley
Hi all, this is my first post on the forum, but I have been scouring the threads for sometime now. Hopefully you can offer some friendly feedback. =)
I'm having a hell of a time deciding between the Nook Simple Touch and the Kobo Touch. The Kindle Touch is completely out of the question for two reasons: 1) I find the GUI fiercely unattractive, and 2) I'm not a fan of Amazon's proprietary format. My biggest concern is the GUI and in particular, the typography. I can't stand full justification. It seems as though publishers and/or Amazon/B&N/Sony etc. are trying to replicate the experience of reading an actual book and have forced justification onto us all because that's what we tend to see in books. The difference there is that a real human with some knowledge of typography likely formats the type in a real book, and e-readers use algorithms to format type. Without a real human behind the formatting (excluding the user of course, I suppose they don't want us to have that sort of power), the type is no longer considered and all I see on most e-readers is a valley of rivers. I seriously can't stand that.
I know the Kobo Touch now gives us the ability to control leading, margins, type size, fonts, and justification but I'm still not sure that's the right choice for me. Here are some of my needs and concerns over both the Nook and Kobo...
Me:
- I'll mostly be sideloading epubs but still want to easily purchase a book if I need to
- I'll be borrowing books from the library
- I'm not too concerned about PDF support
- I'm not interested in extras like text to speech, mp3 players, browsers, games, etc...I just want to read!
- I'm not a heavy reader now but am hoping this e-reader will get me excited about reading more often
- I live in the US
- I currently own zero epubs so I'll be starting from scratch
- I'm pretty handy with computers...so stripping DRM, using Calibre, formatting epubs with Sigil shouldn't be too much of a problem for me and I'll do it if it'll get my collection looking the way I want it
- Most importantly, the type needs to look nice and if I can poke around or hack things to get the type to look the way I want it to, so be it
Concerns/questions about the Kobo Touch:
- I've heard these break and malfunction pretty often and customer service is dismal. I live in the US and fear this will make fixing the Kobo, if I ever needed to, much more difficult than fixing the Nook. Are there any US KTouch users that haven't had trouble or have had problems resolved fairly quickly?
- I have no problem buying from the Kobo bookstore but did a bit of research and saw that some titles are $1 to $2 more expensive than on B&N and Amazon. I also vaguely recall reading somewhere that people have had issues with charges on the Canadian Kobo store when buying from the US. Truth or untruth?
- No page turn buttons. I frequently use my iPhone with one hand when eating, sitting at my desk, etc, and imagine I'd be doing the same with the Kobo. Is it that difficult to turn the page using one hand (the left)?
- How annoying and/or common is the unresponsive touch screen page turn issue?
Concerns/questions about the Nook:
- Not a fan of half the homepage being dedicated to B&N's bookstore. Don't know how often I'll be using it.
- I played around with one at B&N and noticed that choosing a particular type size didn't always yield the same results depending on the book. This was incredibly annoying. Has anyone else noticed this?
- The GUI isn't as nice as the Kobo
- They don't offer Georgia (a favorite of mine that the Kobo also has)
- There aren't many formatting options for the type either. I emailed B&N's customer service about this and they gave me some canned response about not having any plans for type updates in the future. Is B&N reliable with firmware updates? Any thoughts on whether or not they'll add this kind of functionality in the future?
- How difficult will it be to get books on this thing left justified/rag right? Can I do this in Calibre and have it stick after transferring to the Nook?
Sorry for the long-winded post!
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I own a Kobo Touch and have had no problems at all. A recent survey on MobileRead showed that only 2% of Kobo Touch owners regretted their purchase. Another 12-ish percent wanted more features. The rest were satisfied.
The genesis of the threads you see? I suspect it's because Kobo is actually very responsive to user requests, and thus they get more of them, since people know Kobo is listening. It'll be a cold day in hell before you see a Nook representative on the forum taking suggestions. But that's what Kobo does. The Kobo Touch has gotten 3 firmware updates since I joined MobileRead, which was only a couple months ago. The Nook has had none, as far as I'm aware.
Although it's worth noting there's no shortage of complaints on all of the reader's subforums. It's still an imperfect technology.
I can't tell you about the Kobo customer service via phone/email as I haven't used it. I've heard mixed results, but then... the percentage of people who are truly unhappy is very low. It may simply be that unhappy people tend to speak up more. I don't know.
As to your other concern, you can tap-to-turn as well. You don't need to swipe. So it would work just as if it had page turns buttons, but you'd be tapping the screen (tap the right side of the screen to go forward, left to go back - but you can change this with the new firmware, if you want).
I've had no problems with the responsiveness of the touch screen, either.
As to your needs, the Kobo Touch will do all of those things. You can even load your own fonts if you want to.