MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Kindle vs. Kobo: a Long-Term, In-Depth Comparative Review

tomsem · 03-31-2015, 02:33 AM

Marius,

I think you are missing the point a bit on Send To Kindle. For most people (and certainly myself) it is a way of adding 3rd party or other content to the Kindle Library, whence it is backed up in the cloud, along with annotations, reading position sync, etc., you can read on Kindle/Fire/iOS/Android. That's quite different than just clipping web articles, though you can also do that. Kobo has no equivalent feature.

I clip web articles to Evernote for the most part, and Pocket would not work as well for me. Given the proliferation of hyperlinks in most web articles, I find reading them on a Kindle, with its awful web browser, is not the best device for consuming them.

My issues with Kindle typography are not so much about poor letterforms (I think the available typefaces are 'good enough' and I do not have any desire to customize them), but rather with lack of pleasant formatting (drop caps, initial caps look awful most of the time, no orphan/widow control, etc).

I typically use a small enough font that justification is fine, but the margins and line spacing can be problematic because there is not sufficient user control. Some of that can be laid at the door of publishers who don't bother to test on Kindle, but Amazon could do a lot more to promote best practices and be more consistent over their various reading engines. They need to support more ePub3 features, including MathML, FXL (for which their so called answer is PDF aka 'Print Replica'). It is really holding ebooks back when the largest vendor has the least capable format. kf8 was good enough for awhile until ePub3 got finalized, but now they need to catch up again.

Regarding Sharing on Kobo, one could set up a Facebook account that 'only you' can see, just as a way of getting notes out of Kobo ecosystem and into something else. On Kindle you also can do something similar with Twitter I think. I don't really think of kindle.amazon.com (for accessing notes/highlights you have made) as a very good solution, by any means, and it doesn't work with 'personal documents'. What is the point of making notes if you can't export them easily? Of course you can take photos with a smartphone and share them to Evernote/Pocket/etc.

Paperwhite fits really well in a quart-sized freezer ziplock bag, for those times when you want to make it 'waterproof.' Its capacitative screen is fully operational in there.

03-31-2015, 02:33 AM	#66
tomsem Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,959 Karma: 27060153 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: USA Device: iPhone 15PM, Kindle Scribe, iPad mini 6, PocketBook InkPad Color 3	Marius, I think you are missing the point a bit on Send To Kindle. For most people (and certainly myself) it is a way of adding 3rd party or other content to the Kindle Library, whence it is backed up in the cloud, along with annotations, reading position sync, etc., you can read on Kindle/Fire/iOS/Android. That's quite different than just clipping web articles, though you can also do that. Kobo has no equivalent feature. I clip web articles to Evernote for the most part, and Pocket would not work as well for me. Given the proliferation of hyperlinks in most web articles, I find reading them on a Kindle, with its awful web browser, is not the best device for consuming them. My issues with Kindle typography are not so much about poor letterforms (I think the available typefaces are 'good enough' and I do not have any desire to customize them), but rather with lack of pleasant formatting (drop caps, initial caps look awful most of the time, no orphan/widow control, etc). I typically use a small enough font that justification is fine, but the margins and line spacing can be problematic because there is not sufficient user control. Some of that can be laid at the door of publishers who don't bother to test on Kindle, but Amazon could do a lot more to promote best practices and be more consistent over their various reading engines. They need to support more ePub3 features, including MathML, FXL (for which their so called answer is PDF aka 'Print Replica'). It is really holding ebooks back when the largest vendor has the least capable format. kf8 was good enough for awhile until ePub3 got finalized, but now they need to catch up again. Regarding Sharing on Kobo, one could set up a Facebook account that 'only you' can see, just as a way of getting notes out of Kobo ecosystem and into something else. On Kindle you also can do something similar with Twitter I think. I don't really think of kindle.amazon.com (for accessing notes/highlights you have made) as a very good solution, by any means, and it doesn't work with 'personal documents'. What is the point of making notes if you can't export them easily? Of course you can take photos with a smartphone and share them to Evernote/Pocket/etc. Paperwhite fits really well in a quart-sized freezer ziplock bag, for those times when you want to make it 'waterproof.' Its capacitative screen is fully operational in there.