Kindle vs. Kobo: a Long-Term, In-Depth Comparative Review

[Katsunami]

To my eye, it's not entirely the OP's fault. He seems to be following a current trend, one I happen to dislike intensly, being:

- Huge headers
- Huge images
- Huge whitespace
- Huge line spacing
- Huge everything else....
- Tiny text in a light-grey color

The last point is not really true on this particular site, but it is for many others. Everything is huge and in-your-face, except for the text itself. Me, having poor eyesight, need to upscale the text to be able to read it, and even select it to get a white text on blue background, so I at least have some contrast. (I have seen sites that have text which is so light that it utterly disappears on many not-so-great monitors, which is, in my eyes, ridiculous.)

You can imagine what happens:
- Either I enlarge the text only, breaking the entire site layout.
- I enlarge everything, making the huge parts gargantuan.

In short, many sites are just wasting huge amounts of space, either by leaving it white, or using huge images that are overly big in proportion to the text.

[susan_cassidy]

You should be able to use JavaScript to change formatting based on whether the reader is using a mobile device or not. The browser type will be different.

[MariusMasalar]

Ok, making progress...

First of all, there are now 9 articles shown on each index page—easy. I also removed the reading time indicator. More importantly, I've adjusted the type to be a touch smaller, a bit less weighty, and significantly less spaced out.

Regarding the images, that's one area where I disagree, and that goes back to why I had set the type the way it was before to begin with: the audience I'm getting from this particular site is used to reading long-form pieces, but in general large compact paragraphs of small text are off-putting to a web audience. And I get a very balanced split between desktop/tablet/mobile viewers.

A lot of the decisions behind the design trends mentioned have less to do with pure aesthetics and more to do with reacting to how people read on the internet, which is not at all in sync with how print reading works. Much wiser people than I have spent good time and money researching this at scale, so all I'm doing is trying to find a middle ground between their findings, my aesthetic preferences (it is my blog after all), and what my particular audience prefers based on my own analytics.

The whitespace in conjunction with the images made it seem more accessible, and while I have made changes to make the text better, I think large images are a great help to break up the paragraphs and allow for a detailed look at whatever it is that I'm showing. And the analytics seem to bear this out—people like big images.

Anyway, hopefully these tweaks make it a bit more palatable to you fine folks

[MariusMasalar]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

You should be able to use JavaScript to change formatting based on whether the reader is using a mobile device or not. The browser type will be different.

I don't need JS when I can use media queries (which is what I'm doing).

[Xen]

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[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Xen

I'm not sure how this turned in to a critique of your web design vs content...

Because (at least in my eyes) there isn't much wrong with the article itself. It's just a guy's finding with regard to using both a Kindle and a Kobo e-reader, and they're well explained and well founded. In contrast to you, I do agree with most of the content.

(About Calibre being hideous: it's the most levelled complaint against it. The user interface *is* somewhat ugly and non-standard, but I for one don't really care. I've used programs that are *far* uglier than Calibre is. What the program can do is what counts, at least for me.)

[MariusMasalar]

Hey Xen,

I'm not sure how we got to talking about the site either, but hey, it's led to some nice design tweaks so I'm not complaining

Regarding the rest of your points, I hasten to point out that like any review it's going to reflect the needs and biases of its writer, which I am careful to acknowledge throughout. I don't express any of my preferences as fact, specifically because I know that others will have very different needs.

For example, I agree with you that games are useless, which is why I said as much about them, but to me a vocabulary builder and similar reading-related enhancements have clear value, even if not to me specifically. For people whose first language isn't English, or for parents nurturing a love of reading in their kids it seems great. And for the rest of us, the functionality is easily disabled or ignored.

I call Calibre hideous because, from a design perspective, it's pretty darn ugly. It's fantastic software, does what it says on the tin, but it has a very unpolished look to it that I've always wished they would improve upon at some point.

Not sure why you seem so worked up about the sizing stuff either...again, that's just my preference, and believe it or not it's possible to hold that view without being amongst "the most casual of readers." I can get my Kindle to show the same amount of text as a physical page on a novel, but I don't. Why would I? Turning pages doesn't hurt, and it's easier on my eyes if I set the text a bit bigger than on a physical book. And the fact that either e-reader is lighter than most physical books is neither here nor there—an iPhone 5 and a Galaxy Note are both lighter than a rotary phone, but I can still prefer the iPhone's size.

Anyway, thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. It's good to be reminded of how preferences can differ, and it's part of why I wrote the article: to help people figure out which device aligned best with their needs.

[robko]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

... the Wiki integration, ...

Other than not having 3G so you have to use WIFI, Kobo has Wikipedia search capability. If you select text you get search options that include Wikipedia, Google and just within the book.

One other note: all lit e-ink readers are FRONTLIT not BACKLIT. Since e-ink is opaque you can't backlight them.

[mr_nihilism]

I enjoyed reading your review. I certainly enjoyed reading it more so than what passes for a review on the majority of sites these days that tend to either have a strong Amazon bias or insist on comparing a eReader to a tablet device.

Edit - It might be worth mentioning that the English dictionary that Kobo provides really sucks in comparison to Kindle's offerings.

[MariusMasalar]

Thanks, Mr. Nihilism, I appreciate that!

As for the dictionary thing, I actually had it in my notes but I thought it might be a fluke with the words I had looked up. It was missing a few (grue, deodand, etc.) but it was usually obscure/non-standard words, not common ones that it was missing. Good to hear it wasn't just my imagination.

[jackie_w]

@MariusMasalar,
I, too, enjoyed your article Although your assessment of what features are 'most important' for you don't match my own, I thought you presented a fair comparison of the pros and cons of the 2 brands.

[MariusMasalar]

Thanks, Jackie! Out of curiosity, what would your list of most important aspects contain?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by meeera

...whereas I am so bothered by the line spacing on your article that I'm finding it difficult to read!

It's been typeset by Amazon.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MariusMasalar

Uh-oh, what's bothering you about it? I'm always making adjustments to improve readability, so by all means let me know what you'd prefer!

I have it set a bit looser than what's typical for print, but I find it more accessible for longer articles on the web this way. Maybe that's just me though.

The line height is too big, the article is too narrow and on a widescreen monitor it's a newspaper sized column (too small). Also, the headers for the different sections are not typographically set correctly. There should be more space above the header than below. You have the headers evenly spaced between the different sections.

Because of all this, there is a LOT to scroll through. More so then one should have. On a computer with a monitor of at least 1920x1080, it takes a long time to read. because of the scrolling.

The footnotes are yet another major issue. I click on a footnote and I'm taken to where the footnote is. That's fine. But then I have to scroll back to find where I was because however the footnotes were coded, the browser doesn't recognize it as a link so going back doesn't work.

And finally, it would look better if you could do full justify with hyphenation.

You complained about the poor typography on the Kindle and yet you make some pretty blatant typography mistakes here.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Double-spaced lines are very hard on the eye.

Exactly.