[Defenderland]

After waiting five months for Kobo to deliver the promised functionality, I cancelled the purchase and returned the device.

I bought it because I have to read a lot of web articles with graphics. So color was very important because on the Kindle Paperwhite, for example, red lines cannot be distinguished from blue lines. Reducing the time spent reading on the monitor and doing this work outside when the weather is nice was an easy decision for the Libra Color.

Unfortunately, no one mentioned anywhere that after so many years, Kobo still has serious software problems:


1. The app that Kobo promotes the Libra Colour with and recommends for reading web articles on the Libra, doesn't work reliably. It often leaves out the graphics. That was a great experience right from the start. I put together a reading list of articles, put it in the green with cola, cake and Libra and then all the graphics were missing.

I could hardly believe that, because I had done a lot of research.

Unfortunately, it's all just advertising junk and fanboy chatter. Hence an absolutely useless "function" that is heavily advertised.

Before I bought the Kobo, I even checked that Rakuten was not a Chinese company, because my experience with Boox cured me of that forever. Rakuten is Japanese. Normally known for high-quality hardware AND software. Well, that's how it goes.

2. But all was not lost, because the Libra also has Dropbox integrated.

So I set up Dropbox on the PC. Now I just had to find a browser extension to create e-books from web pages.

While I have three solutions for my Kindle Paperwhite, all of which work flawlessly, it was a problem to even find an extension that reliably extracts the article and allows you to download it as ePubs (Send to Kindle is much more common and also much more practical: with a preview to check and then just a single click...).

After a long search, I found 'EpubPress', which works really well. Download to the Dropbox folder and the book appears on the Kobo after syncing.

Great.

2. But I hadn't reckoned with the terrible Kobo software, which ruins this solution too:

So I start reading happily and get to the first diagram. It's too small, so I try to enlarge it. Oops! Instead, the text is zoomed and the graphic stays fixed.

I couldn't believe it, but it's true:

The Libra Colour can't display ePubs properly, it doesn't allow zooming in graphics!

3. After fine-tuning the layout, the layout disappears every time you zoom: there isn't even the option to save layout presets like on the Kindle.

And to top it all off: the font size isn't even shown as a number, there's just a slider. Good luck finding the adjusted and fine-tuned setting again.

4. There is also no category for new books that have not yet been assigned to a category (I think this is an extremely important feature, because all new articles that you send to the Kindle automatically appear in the "uncategorized" category).
The Kobo does not have this. So if you read a lot of articles every day, you either have to laboriously assign 20 to 40 articles to a category first (have fun with the slow eInks), or you quickly end up in a huge mess.

Such features do not sound spectacular, but for everyday use they separate the wheat from the chaff...

Sorry Kobo, this is not a glorious page of Japanese engineering. This is more like Chinese planned economy.
I am glad to be rid of the device and am eagerly awaiting the Kindle Colorsoft.