Thread: 7 best e-Readers of 2015 in the UK
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Old 02-25-2015, 05:16 AM   #30
davidfor
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Posts: 24,905
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Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Sydney, Australia
Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz View Post
Not only has B&N put considerable effort to abolishing sideloading, Kobo is not exactly a wonderful friend of sideloading either. From what I've heard, the separate EPUB renderer is quite inferior to the KEPUB renderer... and you have to do jiggery-pokery to an EPUB to make it use the KEPUB renderer.
If you are simply comparing the rendering of the book, there isn't much difference between them. The kepub renderer was probably ahead until Kobo updated the version of RMSDK they were using. This fixed some bugs that were making some people prefer kepubs. They both still have problems, but they are different ones.

The real reason to choose between the two is the extras. The in-book reading stats in kepubs are nice. But, you have the book title taking space. And there is a little more margin on the sides. Per-chapter page numbers or for the full book have been another deciding point until recently, but, the kepub reader now supports both. The one place the kepub reader is much better is in the handling of footnotes. Kobo are probably paying more attention to the kepub reader, but not that much more than the epub reader. The differences all up will improve the reading experience for some people, but for others it's just rubbish that is getting in the way of reading.

As to the "jiggery-pokery" needed to use the kepub renderer, that's true. And Kobo do not actually support sideloading kepubs for general use. It is suggested as a way for authors to check formatting uploading them to Kobo. who then do the conversion to kepub. But, they do a good job of sideload epubs. As well as PDF, CBZ, CBR, TXT and basic MOBI.

Quote:
(Even changing the filename is more than happens by default requiring you to do special stuff that many perhaps are not aware of.)
Something about that sentence doesn't parse. I'm not sure if you are saying that the device makes changes without the user knowing, or that more changes are needed then the users know about. If the "special stuff" is wrap spans with id around sentences, then the latter is true, but the former definitely isn't.

And to make my position clear, I'm using both about equally. But, I don't usually sideload as kepub. If I buy a book from Kobo, it will appear on the device, and I'll read it. If there are any problems with the text or formatting, I'll fix it in the epub version, sideload that as epub and read it instead. If the book comes from somewhere else, I'll just sideload as an epub and read that.
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