Quote:
Originally Posted by feebsjee
I was all set to buy an N96 for pdf's but then I found many posts by academics or people who also like me need to read pdf's whereby they say that the Aura One is the best pdf solution (although flawed) and I am trying to understand what it is about the Aura one that they found to be better
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I'm one of those academics. In my view, neither's inherently better. Both are sufficiently flawed to be rather irritating. The question is which one's flaws irritate you less. That's a very subjective question. I found the N96 marginally less irritating, but bought the Kobo Aura One simply because I don't think the N96 is good value for money at twice the cost of the Aura One (given the issues from which it, too, suffers and the very marginal improvement over the Aura One).
The Kobo Aura One's main issues out-of-the-box are:
- It is slow. I use it to read academic PDFs. Because of the field in which I work, some of these are purely text-based PDFs, while others have graphs, and still others have hi-resolution imagery. Page turns on a text-based PDF take a second or two per page (and after a few pages, you really start noticing the lags). PDFs with images take longer. I've had it take over two minutes when it's dealing with very complex images.
- Kobo's implementation of Adobe's RMSDK doesn't support text reflow. That means that you'll need to rely on zooming and panning when you magnify the PDF (which you'll need to do fairly often).
- Zooming and panning are sub-par. There are e-readers out there which automatically crop out margins. The Kobo doesn't do that, and it won't even preserve your centring when you turn the page. It'll start displaying the page on the top left-side margin.
- PDF handling has gotten worse with firmware upgrades, not better. It probably won't degrade significantly from where it currently stands, but it's very unlikely that it will improve.
The huge advantage the Aura One has is that you can fix most of these issues by installing Koreader on your reader. I have it on my Aura HD, but haven't managed to install it on my Aura One as yet. Installing it is a hack, however, with the level of fiddliness you'd expect to go with a hack.
The N96's built-in PDF reader is much better, and is free of most of these issues, and because it runs Android there are better ones available on the Play Store. The bigger screen size also makes a real difference. However:
- Its screen is noticeably worse, at least to me, both in terms of technology (Pearl as opposed to the Carta screen in the Aura One) and resolution. I found it obviously blockier and less pleasant than the Aura One's. Not everyone feels thsi way, however, so it may not be an issue for you.
- Text-based PDFs are much faster. When it comes to graphics, it isn't as slow as the Aura One, but it isn't much faster.
- Android works OK on e-readers, but it's not really designed for them. I've had problems with apps crashing, and losing annotations. This doesn't happen on the Kobo, and was a deal-breaker for me.
- Library management is not good - virtually non-existent, in fact.
The question you should ask yourself is which of these sets of flaws you can live with. I went for the Aura One, but only because I will install Koreader to fix its flaws. Your preferences may be different.