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Why are the readers are granted worse and worse home-screens from one release to the other? It is a mystery to me. There used to be a pretty good home-screen on Kobo. 6-7 books with reasonably big cover pictures - where the cover pictures could server as an esthetic delight as well - and you could also show 5-6 of your favorite books (shortlist) on the home screen. This is pretty much corresponded to the way people read books. A few currently read books around them, while the favorites arranged on a shelf, always nice too look at. Then first the shelf was taken away: no more short list on the home screen. Now the book covers shrunk to such a miniscule size that in total make up about %10 of the home screen. To make up for it a huge double (a narrow white and a very thick) frame added to each book on the home-screen. Wow! The area of the frames are bigger than the picture of the book. And what the frame has must be really important pieces of information in the eyes of the designer: the percentage of the book read, number of bookmarks. (Author, title, publication year. No way. Try to read them on the shrunk cover if it has them.) Now the home screen has the look of a productivity bulletin board with the performance figures posted. If it continues in this spirit I expect further reading statistics in the future. And now the whole thing is crowned with a huge search bar to further suggest the feeling that reading and books are really far from the heart of the designers. I wish at least they had the brilliant idea of (giving us the option of) opening the last book read when you turn on your Kobo, or at least allowing us to go directly to the library.
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