Quote:
Originally Posted by gavinjb
My other concern is that several of the Authors I read are only available from Kindle & B&N Stores (from what I can see) and I know that Amazon books cannot be accessed on Kobo (without running the books through s/w to remove DRM) and I have heard that you can't access B&N books on the Kobo.
Any thoughts on the Kobo would be appreciated (how well the store works, how it handles, performance battery life...), in particular from anyone who has moved from Kindle also any comments on how well you get on with the store etc..
Also does the Kobo have anything like the Amazon Cloud where once you have purchased a book, you can easily re-download it from the cloud on the device.
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I've gone through several ereaders over the years including one Kindle. The Kobo ereaders have become my ereader of choice. Partly since tools like Sigil make editing epubs almost enjoyable and partly because Kobo is/was a Canadian company (think David taking on multiple Goliaths).
Since the Kobo uses epub format books, you can purchase your books from many sources. You are not limited to using the Kobobooks website. I've purchased books from quite a few sites plus the public domain downloads from Gutenberg and others.
I can't speak to the battery life of the Aura but I've found the Kobos I own/have owned have, what I consider to be, excellent battery life.
The Kobo store is a bit of a pain since they keep changing the format but so far, my account with the few books (~18 at this time) that I have purchased from them has not had any issues. Once you purchase an ebook, it will show up in your account and you can redownload from there or by simply syncing your Kobo over WiFi. It's not as convenient as the Amazon cloud but works quite well for me. One caveat is that I current have over 1800 books in my personal library so only 1% were purchased from Kobo.
In this area, the public library system ebooks are in either epub or pdf format. You need to use a computer to download them and ADE on your computer to transfer them to your Kobo. At this time, they do not support Amazon's ebook formats or DRM.
Kobo ereaders will work with epubs that are not DRMed, use Adobe's ADEPT DRM or Kobo's own DRM used on their .kepub.epub format ebooks. An ebook from B&N that is not DRMed will work but B&N did their own DRM and ebooks protected by it will not work on a Kobo. The one time I was looking at the B&N store, there was no indication that an ebook was DRMed. The other ebook stores I've purchased from are either not using DRM (Baen for example) or use the standard Adobe DRM (Sony, etc.).
I have purchased several ebooks from outside North America when the ebook was not available in epub format from a North American site. Some stores will happily take your money while others will use geolocation to say the book is not available for your area.
Time to stop babbling...
Regards,
David