Aura HD Aura vs Paperwhite

[Lyn2012]

A few people, (including myself), have posted in various threads requesting people who have an Aura to measure the available screen real estate when inside a book. To my knowledge nobody has replied with this information, so today I went to a WH Smith branch with the Aura on display, armed with a ruler, SD card with sideloaded ePub and my Paperwhite.

My impressions of the Aura, in this very limited setting, are that the screen is lovely and noticeably sharper than the PW, the light a vast improvement on the Glo as it appears to dim just as much as the PW, (as far as I could see under store lighting conditions), and a far better Home page than the PW (IMHO). I should mention that my PW is not registered with Amazon, I don't use wifi and sideload all my liberated books.

Unfortunately, because of all the security devices in place, I wasn't able to properly compare the weight and balance of the Aura when reading one handed.

The screen availability for text when inside a book:

• Aura kePub: height 11.2cm, width 9cm, diagonal 14.4cm
• Aura ePub: height 11.7cm, width 9cm, diagonal 14.8cm
• Paperwhite: height 11cm, width 7.9cm, diagonal 13.5cm

Obviously the width will depend on the margins set, these measurements were taken using the same margins so they may be compared with each other.

It looks as though if you read ePubs you will have an extra 1cm width and 0.7cm height available using the Aura instead of the PW. Obviously how much extra text this gives you will depend on the font, font size and line height used.

For myself, I am very tempted - has anyone had any experience of buying online and returning the Aura, within say 7 days from receipt, if you don't like it?

I hope this answers some questions.

[jackie_w]

If text coverage is important to you, I think you can get a bit more out of the AuraHD than that.

I just received mine and took one of my home-built epubs (non-kepub, removed all internal hard-coded page margins/line spacing) and measured how much of the screen could be covered in text.

AuraHD full screensize: 10.3cm x 13.8cm
Std epub text coverage: 10.2cm x 12.4cm

(Aura L/R margins & line spacing = min,
font-size=9th
font=sideloaded Linux Libertine).

See attached. As you can see, the only part of the screen not available for text is at the bottom. It measures 1.1cm and is where the bottom menu (Page navigation, Annotations, Font settings) appears when you tap the screen. The top menu (Home, Book Title, Brightness, Wi-fi, Battery, Settings) which also appears when you tap the screen, covers the first 2 lines of the text you can see in the picture. It also measures 1.1cm.

Personally I wouldn't choose to read the book looking like this, but for those who like the 'wall of words' look, this is roughly what to expect.

For the epub css buffs:
- I did hard-code widows/orphans to zero in the epub
- the small extra spacing between each paragraph is purely my choice of a non-zero margin-top for standard paragraphs. It's not a Kobo quirk
- you would get more lines/screen by hard-coding a line-height < 1.3 in your epub and, obviously, by reducing the font-size.

For anyone interested in weight details.

Kobo AuraHD: 242g
Kobo Sleep cover: 104g
Total: 346g

[ShellShock]

Please note that there is a lot of discussion about the Aura screen space in the Kobo Rocks thread at the moment.