MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Kobo Touch's page turns with ePub much slower than with Mobi

tlangner · 08-31-2012, 02:54 PM

Hey guys,

I've recently got myself a Kobo Touch and generally I'm quite happy with the device. And issue that has been bothering me, though, is the slow page turn when reading ePub books (slow at least compared to my old Kindle). It takes about one second for the device to recognize the touch event and then another around 0.7 seconds to turn the page. This alone wouldn't be too bad, but what got me thinking is that page turns on MOBI books are way faster. To this end, I converted the same book to MOBI with Calibre and loaded it onto my Kobo Touch. Loading the MOBI takes about 20 seconds (as does changing a formatting parameter) as compared to about 2 seconds for the ePub. But a page turn take less than one second which makes reading way more smooth. Does anybody know what this behaviour is due to? Does KT use some fancy caching for MOBIs, which would explain the slow loading, and not for ePubs?

I don't really like the proprietary MOBI format and would prefer to use ePub, but the faster page turn makes it really tempting to use MOBI.

Cheers, Tobias

08-31-2012, 02:54 PM	#1
tlangner Junior Member Posts: 4 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2012 Device: Kobo Touch	Kobo Touch's page turns with ePub much slower than with Mobi Hey guys, I've recently got myself a Kobo Touch and generally I'm quite happy with the device. And issue that has been bothering me, though, is the slow page turn when reading ePub books (slow at least compared to my old Kindle). It takes about one second for the device to recognize the touch event and then another around 0.7 seconds to turn the page. This alone wouldn't be too bad, but what got me thinking is that page turns on MOBI books are way faster. To this end, I converted the same book to MOBI with Calibre and loaded it onto my Kobo Touch. Loading the MOBI takes about 20 seconds (as does changing a formatting parameter) as compared to about 2 seconds for the ePub. But a page turn take less than one second which makes reading way more smooth. Does anybody know what this behaviour is due to? Does KT use some fancy caching for MOBIs, which would explain the slow loading, and not for ePubs? I don't really like the proprietary MOBI format and would prefer to use ePub, but the faster page turn makes it really tempting to use MOBI. Cheers, Tobias