Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
This has never happened to me. True, I've never used a Paperwhite. But it didn't happen even with the old basic Kindles years ago. While I don't use the dictionary extensively, I do look something up occasionally, usually a few times per book. And I've never noticed any slowing down. Very strange.
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Yeah, I posted about this I think about a year ago (or maybe more?) here on the Kindle subforum and if I remember correctly I wasn't the only one having this experience, but it was definitely very uncommon. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about occasional dictionary usage, like yours, but more like checking a couple of words
per page. As I said people probably wouldn't even notice if they weren't reading for the purposes of language learning as I do; but the Kindles as ereaders are, in general, not made to be turned off on a regular basis. It takes ages for them to reboot, so having to do it relatively often is definitely a bummer. And definitely a software bug, IMO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
I don't like big chunks of white space at the bottom of the screen. Unless I tinker with my Kobos (at the very least enable the Full Screen Mode) I get a lot of open space. Maybe most people don't mind. I don't know. I know it drives me nuts. This is one issue I've never had with my Kindles.
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Yeah, and that's perfectly valid: in fact I also patch my Kobo to have the page information closer to the bottom of the screen, so I can gain a couple of lines more. I use KEPUBs though, and dislike the full screen mode. I never had an ereader before I bought my first Kobo, and had never even seen a Kindle in real life, so what I saw there became my 'standard', I guess.
When I wrote that post I was referring to
@Atunah's concerns about buying a Kobo for someone else, fearing that they'd have to tinker with it to be able to use it; that is not true. Having the possibility to do so you might
want to tinker with its software, to get the optimal reading experience, but you don't
need to do it, because it works perfectly fine out of the box and is
not, in general, a difficult piece of tech to use.
99.9% of people who own a Kobo use it to read KEPUBs or borrowed EPUBs and don't care that they won't get a full-screen experience (the KEPUB screen looks more like a physical book anyway, so it's arguably easier to adapt to it, visually, than to the Kindle's); they probably only use a couple of fonts, and the same font size; they probably find it more immediate to connect a cable to the computer and copy and paste a book on it -- something that they are used to do with most of their devices, like phones, cameras, mp3 players... -- rather than uploading it to the cloud so that it can sync with their other devices that they won't use to read anyway; and so forth. I know plenty of people in real life who own ereaders, some of them older, some of them my age (20s) and you'd be surprised at how much people don't care about the technicalities. They mostly just want to know how they can read their PDF textbook on it, or "I have a Kindle but it won't read this book I copied on it (= EPUB), what do I do?". Probably not a problem that people in the US have, the last one, but the argument stands.
There are a lot of posts about hacking and patching here on Mobileread because we're a
very small minority of ereader enthusiasts who know what they like and want, and are willing to take some risks to get it; but 99,9% of "normal" users out of here don't know about us and they don't care. Some of the issues that are brought up here at times (one interface being slightly snappier than the other, full-screen reading vs. having a header and footer etc.) are only issues for
us, but not for the general public. It does seem, sometimes, that people forget this and bring up mere differences in features as huge, inescapable flaws.