[Prestidigitweeze]

Strategist:

Your first two posts appear on a calibre thread and pose questions to the developer about the calibre manual. They were posted a day after May 3, when you joined MR. Your last two, posted today, are ringing endorsements of Kobo which instruct people to use calibre and avoid ADE.

You've mentioned you don't work for calibre, and I appreciate your forthrightness. Most people on this site already know that calibre is the work of its creator and is also free, so we'd have sussed that Kovid Goyal doesn't astroturf this site and doesn't need to either.

But since you report owning two Kobo e-readers and have only recently gotten around to asking questions about calibre or being active on MR, I have to ask: Do you happen to work for Kobo?

OP:

I haven't found it difficult to add books to the Kobo Aura, and while I love and appreciate calibre, I try not to use it except when necessary because I don't want to add extra code to my books or convert ones that work well as is and are already in the correct format.

The only thing I had to learn about dragging and dropping from my laptop to my Aura was not to place sideloaded books in the same folder as books I'd bought from Kobo: one has to create a separate folder for that. Mine's titled books and is placed at the root level of my Aura.

The device will also file any visual content you place on the Aura -- jpgs, etc -- as books whether you place them in a dedicated folder or not. You can open and view your images, but the database will list them in your library as "read" and you can't use them as screensavers.

Beyond that, there's no getting around it: if you live in the States, Kobo's CS is pants. If you live in Canada or the UK, that isn't as problematic because most of your resellers are going support returns.

In the USA, Kobo's a harder sell because neither vendors like Powell's nor Kobo will support your purchase.

My experience with CS is this: Through creative misinterpretation, Kobo reps actively try to make the customer the guilty party so that the responsibility isn't theirs and returns are not effected. I don't know why they treat customers that way, but despite my appreciation for the commitment, creativity and specs represented by the Aura, I'm very unlikely to purchase another Kobo reader unless there's a dramatic change. I've asked everyone I could at Kobo about whether they will ever stock SleepCovers for the Aura again and no one has been able to give me a straight answer. Likewise my questions about a bright dot on the screen.