[junobeach]

About 6 months ago I bought a kobo touch for my father, thinking it would be an easier device for him to use with library software at the time.

I had not really used it myself in that time, I have a kindle and I really like it, but I thought it looked really nice from what I had seen, much nicer than my old kindle.

As it happens he doesn't use it very often and so I was preparing it for my mother to use, who is even less technically proficient than my father. But to be frank the thing is nothing but a headache.

For starters it is dreadfully slow to load pages, making me always wonder whether it has frozen or my touch didn't register only for it to skip more than one page.

Second, the fonts are just bizarre. Every book I load ends up looking completely different. Different margins, font, font size, spacing. Nothing is uniform even though I set the fonts a certain way. I have gone through deleting style sheets in epubs and it's still the same thing. It just seems to randomly decide how it want to display things.

Often times there will be entire chunks that look like the font went from black to gray, or bold to regular, when I reload it will be different sections and different letters doing it like the section of a book when the ink goes dry.

I've given up on trying to use the thing myself, and I can't recommend it to my mother to use. I am half tempted to just loan her my kindle, or hand it off to her and get one of the newer ones, rather than subject her to this thing.

Is this normal? If it's defective I would have wished i knew earlier to take it back. It's no wonder my dad ended up not using it all that much, it's a downright chore to operate this thing.