I've had my Kobo eReader for about 3 weeks now, and I'm getting more and more frustrated with each passing day. The hardware is adequate, from the blue button placement, it appears that it might be hardware from Astak, but the firmware and Kobo desktop software just plain suck! I've managed to delete (actually, I've just hidden them for now) the 100 free books included with the Kobo, fairly easy to do if you google it on the net, and after trying Kobo's desktop software, I immediately switched to using my favourite library tool, Calibre. The Kobo is my 6th eReader now, my last one died just recently, and I thought that the Kobo would be a good interim replacement until the new eReaders come out in the fall, at which point I was going to buy one with a larger screen, and pass the Kobo over to my partner.
Well, I've converted several of my old books into epub and pdf formats to try reading them on the Kobo, and I find it damned near impossible. The epub format appears to have major issues. When rendering the text, it drops major portions of the books, in some cases as many as a couple of hundred pages. With some books, the missing text is the entire end of the book, in other cases, it's text in the middle of the book, and in some cases, both. Another issue is the scalability of fonts. Unless you do some massaging to each epub file, you're stuck with the default "largest" font, which on any other reader would probably be considered "small". There's a piece of freeware called KoboBulkFixer.zip that does a very quick, neat job of resolving the issue, but you shouldn't have to.
As for PDF, well, let's not even go there. Suffice it to say that unless you have Superman's vision, PDFs are almost completely unreadable.
And that brings to mind the other limitations of the Kobo. Only PDFs and epubs??? Why not include the capability of loading and reading some of the "open" formats like .txt and .html. After all, and epub is basically zip compressed html with a stylesheet, and plain text surely can't be that hard to render. Next, no "goto" option, you can't jump forward or backward to go over something again, you actually have to turn pages to get where you want to go.
There also should be some easy way to delete books, both from the "I'm reading" and the library itself, built into the device. Having to plug into the computer just to delete a book I no longer wish to keep gets to be a little tedious after a while.
I'm a prodigious reader, I devour something in the neighbourhood of 5 to 6 books a week on average, but with the Kobo, I've managed less than one book a week. Very frustrating, and extremely annoying when I discovered that the book I'd just read was incomplete.
According to a posting I found yesterday on mobileread, Kobo plans to release a new firmware upgrade the week of the 28th of June, and I'm willing to wait and see how that goes, but unless they've done some major work and listened to all the suggestions and complaints from Kobo users, they'll not be getting any recommendations from me any time soon!
Dan