Quote:
Originally Posted by rashkae
b) be acceptable to the fact that Kobo's primary missoin is to sell content.
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I bought an eReader, not a subscription to a store. Not an invitation to be pelted with ads.
In Australia, Kobo really doesn't exist outside of their website, which you would only know about if you have one of their eReaders. I've seen no advertising for Kobo. If I wanted to be locked to a retailer, I would have bought a Kindle.
I didn't buy a discounted Touch, the one with the advertising. Now, I'm getting the advertising.
As it is, most of my books are sideloaded, and Kobo now has a history of treated sideloaders poorly. Each release has significant bugs related to sideloaded books. Bugs that should have been spotted easily with
any sort of testing. I mean, the top margin disappearing on sideloaded books (in 1.9.17)? Really? How could the most cursory testing miss this? Sideloaded fonts not rendering properly (in 2.0.0)? Really? How could the most cursory testing miss this?
Not to mention that this is the second release IN A ROW that Kobo has had major problems in the release, enough so that they have had to pull the release and reissue it.
Kobo clearly has a problem with testing. They clearly don't do sufficient alpha testing, especially on the sideloaded side of the product. They clearly don't do sufficient beta testing, especially on the sideloaded side of the product. Part of the beta testing problem may be that they've selectively chosen their beta testers from the cheerleaders for the product.
As it is, I'm starting to think that they really don't do any alpha testing, and use their beta testers for the alpha tests. Their real beta testers are their customers. They release buggy firmware with easy to find defects (I mean, the people in this forum found them in a matter of hours), and then don't fix these defects for months and months (it's now 4 months since the last release).
One of the main selling points, from Kobo at least, is the reading awards and social froufrou. How could they do a release that doesn't guarantee that this information doesn't get lost. I mean, logging out of their Desktop causes all your history to disappear? Really? Ok, while I think that this is a bad design bug, I personally don't care about the history functions: I'm well aware of how much I read.
In a perversity of the universe sort of way, I hope that the release of the Japanese Touch is as buggy as the rest of the world's version. Then, their new owners may realise that they are running a consumer electronics company and not a book store, and make changes to Kobo development process to reflect this. Amazon is totally focused on the customer experience. I have no idea what Kobo is focused on.
And finally, Kobo's communication with their customers is horrendous. We are forced to upgrade their software without notice or choice. We are forced to upgrade their firmware without notice or choice. They have at least 4 different sets of instructions on how to do a factory reset. None of their instructions for resets, either factory, basic, PIN, paperclip or otherwise, include what the non-technical consumer should see on the device, like LED activity or what should show up on the screen. I had to do an internet search to discover that when doing a factory reset, you wanted to see a Red LED, which meant that the reset request had been acknowledged by the Touch. And even then, it was some posts (not on any Kobo site) about the Libertine(?) that triggered that little, but very important, bit of knowledge.