If text coverage is important to you, I think you can get a bit more out of the AuraHD than that.
I just received mine and took one of my home-built epubs (non-kepub, removed all internal hard-coded page margins/line spacing) and measured how much of the screen could be covered in text.
AuraHD full screensize: 10.3cm x 13.8cm
Std epub text coverage: 10.2cm x 12.4cm
(Aura L/R margins & line spacing = min,
font-size=9th
font=sideloaded Linux Libertine).
See attached. As you can see, the only part of the screen not available for text is at the bottom. It measures 1.1cm and is where the bottom menu (
Page navigation, Annotations, Font settings) appears when you tap the screen. The top menu (
Home, Book Title, Brightness, Wi-fi, Battery, Settings) which also appears when you tap the screen, covers the first 2 lines of the text you can see in the picture. It also measures 1.1cm.
Personally I wouldn't choose to read the book looking like this, but for those who like the 'wall of words' look, this is roughly what to expect.
For the epub css buffs:
- I
did hard-code widows/orphans to zero in the epub
- the small extra spacing between each paragraph is purely my choice of a non-zero margin-top for standard paragraphs. It's not a Kobo quirk
- you would get more lines/screen by hard-coding a line-height < 1.3 in your epub and, obviously, by reducing the font-size.
For anyone interested in weight details.
Kobo AuraHD: 242g
Kobo Sleep cover: 104g
Total: 346g