[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mobama

When a review compares two devices side by side, the idea is to compare. It's a comparison. If the fact of a wide footer/statusbar on the Kobo as compared to the Kindle caught the reviewer's attention and he deems it noteworthy, then there's no reason to blame him for mentioning the fact. The more facts the better.

I agree that the idea is to compare. But the idea is to compare each device in the best way possible. The Kobo was set to be very poor. Wide margins, whide line height, poor font, no weight added to make the font stand out more. The reviewer did not do his job properly. He totally botched it. You do not take the better device and dumb it down to be like the other device. Your complaints are because the reviewer totally botched the review. So your complaints are invalid since the review is invalid.

In my view, it's a fair plan: Set the fonts visually to the same size and see how much more text the bigger screen can fit - dang! it cannot! This is noteworthy. And in this case the reviewer makes no big deal of it, he passes over it quickly, says there are patches to fix this and moves on. There's no bias there.

Again you don't get it. Sure, set the fonts to the same size, but don't set the Kobo so you have less text on screen by increasing the margins and the line height. That's just not the correct way to do it. The reviewer didn't do his job properly. He showed the Kobo in a very poor way when it could have been shown in a much better way.

Of course, I completely agree. Until you need to.

You don't need to ever. You can go into the CSS and fix a few things and be good to go instead of not being good to go by removing the CSS.

If you like things styled for you, good for you. My strong preference happens to be the opposite. I am old enough to already have eyesight issues, so by now I forcefully apply my own styles everywhere in ebooks and all over the web (a text-mode webbrowser in a terminal emulator is best for that), until I encounter indigestible markup that displays the way the designer meant it only in Chrome or the like. Or until I encounter an ebook whose inbuilt styles are truly gorgeous - this happens also, and I am actually looking forward to it, so I tend to test ebooks both ways before starting reading.

But as far as possible, all fonts and colors and styles everywhere must be possible to be set my way. It's a basic user-friendliness issue that happens to be in good line with accessibility. There is no argument against this.

Colors don't count. This is a greyscale screen.

As for styled, everything has a style even if you don't have a CSS. The defaults are a style. The idea is to find the style you like best. With a Kobo, you can apply your style. With a Kindle, you have a less control over the style. So if you want less left/right margins, a Kindle is not for you. If you want a smaller line height, a Kindle is not for you. You can change these things with a Kobo.

So please don't accept that review as the truth as the Kobo can display that eBook much better than the reviewer has set to display.