In spite of my prior arguments to the contrary, I would like to see a full screen reading mode. I like the idea that an ebook can present a story as a story without any distractions, such as the title or reading statistics. Reading statistics includes basic stuff, such as the current "page number". (Just to be clear: I like the idea. I also recognize that Kobo's market may necessitate features that I deem unnecessary, and I am not going to hold that against them.)

Even though I am more than willing to deal with ebooks as they are formatted, I like the idea of specifying how much white space I want. I like extra white space, within reason. I like indented paragraphs. I like blank lines between paragraphs. I like moderately sized margins. It is nice to be able to specify how much white space. I am not going to hold it against Kobo if they use reasonable system wide or document specified defaults.

I like being able to specify fonts for books. CoolReader is my favourite Android application because it allows fine-grained defaults for fonts. In reality, I don't need this much control. For me, I am happy so say "sans serif" for headings, "serif" for body, and "fixed width" when appropriate (e.g. code blocks in books on programming). Of course, I am also happy to deal with reasonable defaults.

Overall, I'm not too picky. Of course, I have preferences. I am also willing to deal with what I'm given. My preferences for fiction are described above, so I won't go into much more detail there. My preferences for non-fiction closely match my preferences for fiction, probably because I understand the limitations of the device, so I will avoid making demands there too.

Yet there is one thing that I will be more demanding about: documentation. I was highlighting and annotating text today and stumbled across a way to make it easier today, even though I've been using Kobo readers for about a year. A big part of the reason for the discovery taking so long is that I found a way that worked a year ago, and the documentation didn't describe the more effective way that I discovered today. That is not forgivable in my mind. I understand making it easy to discover a feature and I understand making the steps in using that feature simple. Yet it should also be easy for "power users" to use that feature more effectively, and the effective use of a feature really ought to be described in it's documentation.

So make it easy to discover and use a feature in the basic scenario, but also make the feature efficient to use (and document how to use it efficiently) for the more experienced users.

Then again, I'd be more than happy with a port of CoolReader and bypassing Kobo's software altogether. (Alas, I also recognize that probably won's happen. Sigh. The peril of being a realist is that you're also a pessimist.)