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Actually, the light is supposed to go on when it's charged if I'm not mistaken. And the fact that the light doesn't come on could, IMO, mean that the battery isn't getting fully charged. I.e., if the the light is triggered by, let's say, a combination of the battery's voltage (above a certain threshold) and charging current (below a certain threshold) -- or the latter criterion alone, or some other more sophisticated measurement of the battery's charge -- then the light not coming on could mean that the battery's no good.
I think there are other conceivable issues. Is the operation of the light, whatever it does, determined by firmware? If so, the problem might lie there.
The manufacturer says you'll get 8000 page turns to a charge. Now it's likely that I (and probably most people) will only get into that situation when we go on vacation (because otherwise we'll be plugging the thing into our computer to get books, etc., and we'll be too busy with other things to turn pages so relentlessly). I don't want to find out in a year, say, that my battery's no good.
And, batteries don't get better with age. If the brand-new battery in my Kobo won't take a full charge now, it won't be better in six months.
In regard to a battery discharging more quickly if it's not fully charged, well of course that's true; the less charge it has, the less it has to discharge. However, these aren't NiCads, and there's little or no memory effect, so although a full charge is a good thing, not fully charging the battery shouldn't cause any permanent reduction in capacity.
My concern with the red light not coming on (and my own experience now that even if I leave the Kobo plugged in for many hours the battery still starts showing a reduced capacity after <200 page turns) is that the battery just isn't any good. The hardware itself is from some other manufacturer, I understand, so presumably the charging circuitry itself is tried and true. Firmware? Could be. But I think the most likely answer is that a batch of bad batteries got put into these things.
This does happen. My wife has an implanted cardioverter defibrillator, which is kind of like a super-pacemaker, and cost, I don't know (woohoo -- I'm Canadian!) umpteen-thousand dollars. It was a new model when she got it. Fortunately this didn't affect her, but they put a big batch of the things in people only to find out the batteries were bad and they had to pull them all out again.
Anyway, I called my local Chapters store; they don't have any Kobo's in stock, but when they do they said I could exchange mine. My guess is that the batteries are just bad.
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