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Originally Posted by Nate the great
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Yes Nate, but I've had my Kobo Aura in hand for two weeks as well and I must disagree with your conclusions. Here's what I think happened.
eInk had a new product coming: a 6.8 inch screen. Coupled with a newer screen controller and a faster CPU it had the potential to drive high resolutions on a bigger screen and still maintain excellent screen redraw speed. So they gave the new device to a bunch of geeks like us and asked: what would you do with something like this? Is it worth developing? What can you do with it that people will want to use or is eInk passe?
What Kobo produced strikes me as really innovative. Admittedly, I'm new to the Kobo products and their firmware continues to evolve, but I think what they came up with is focused on how books are presented more than simply about the screen or the coating (I like the new coating better myself) or about the back--the way you hold it works fine for me but I always put any new eReader in a cover right away so I'm not able to evaluate that very well.
My Aura provides better support for ePub3 than we get with eReaders using the Adobe rendering engine (Kobo has both the Adobe rendering engine and their own with advanced support for ePub3). Kobo uses their advanced engine to display the pages of the book I'm reading with a look more like the the best designed print books. Kobo has an SD card so I can store my whole library. They give me more fonts and the ability to load my own fonts without having to hack the eReader to do it. They support accent characters in a variety of languages. They support standard Adobe DRM and B&N DRM through ADE so I can load my old books. And they support independent bookstores (at least in the US and Britain) and they sell their eReaders and eBooks worldwide.
I have a Nook Glowlight and it's a worthy eReader but it won't do most of the above. It might have been a good idea for B&N to build a new eReader around this screen but it would have been an entirely different device. So I must disagree with you about the Kobo Aura.