[Rojofo]

Prospective e-reader buyers*: Kobo dictionary warning*!

I thought it might be helpful for prospective buyers of an e-reader to share my frustrating experience with Kobo.

I am writing this with a very special reading public in mind, those who, like me, want to use their e-reader for improving their knowledge of a foreign language and particularly of foreign language literature.

Up until recently I had been very happy with my various Kobo readers and particularly the Kobo Glo HD which is my favorite. Kobos come with a collection of free dictionaries which are more than sufficient for most readers.

However, as my knowledge of Spanish improved and my reading choices became more ambitious, I discovered that I was constantly being told that the word that I wanted was not in the Kobo dictionaries.

When I tried to add more dictionaries, I also learnt that Kobo does not allow its users to side-load any of the very many excellent compatible dictionaries available. This is a rigidly restrictive policy and hard to get around. Nevertheless, I managed to get a couple of extra dictionaries working thanks to the generous help of members of the MobileRead forum (whom I would like to thank once more).

This work-around was destroyed by a recent firmware upgrade by Kobo so that only two basic dictionaries now work (monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English). Even the basic Spanish-French dictionary is no longer accessible. So I was back to linguistic poverty and the same frustrating situation.

From what I have read on the MobileRead forum, the dictionaries available for Kindles are considerably better for the purposes of people who want to read literature and I would advise prospective buyers to investigate this point before making their decision. I am now beginning to think about changing to Kindle as I face constant irritating frustration in attempting to read with the basic Kobo dictionaries.

Anecdotally, I should mention that I do not give up easily, and when I saw the disaster of the last couple of firmware updates, I sought advice on MobileRead forum. I was given two leads: to install Koreader which, I thought would allow unlimited dictionaries or to “jailbreak” the Kobo to allow multiple dictionaries.

So I tried the Koreader solution first. It was not too difficult to install and, despite the very spartan interface, works very well with a very pleasant rendering of the text. Delighted at the prospect of dictionary freedom, I installed four excellent Spanish monolingual dictionaries and two bilingual dictionaries. At this point the problems began. Only three of the Spanish monolingual dictionaries were accessible although all six dictionaries were in Stardict format and all came from the same reliable source. Unfortunately for me, I need a bilingual dictionary. So I took the monolingual dictionaries off the reader. Then only one of the bilingual dictionaries became accessible and after a couple of days this developed an amusing bug: it began to give me definitions that were in no way related to the word I had selected. The incongruity was fun for a while, giving me the occasion to break out laughing often enough, but, of course, I realized that I was worse off than with the basic Kobo dictionaries and decided to drop the Koreader experience. I might add that it is not easy to get help on these questions.

Finally, I am trying to get up the courage to undertake the “jailbreaking” solution but my lack of experience in computing is giving me serious misgivings and I suspect that after all the work and stress involved, the solution may be no better than my Koreader experiment.

I hope my experience will help other prospective buyers with the same literary interests as me to make their decisions.

Best to all,
Rojofo.