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

[Barty]

Marius your page looks great to me. I am using a tablet, FWIW, and reading in portrait.

Thanks for the in depth review. I'm very intrigued by the h2o. Since amazon has really clamped down on jailbreaking, my next e-reader will unlikely be a kindle as I absolutely need custom font and more font size and spacing options. That is much more important to me than the ecosystem. After all, I spend a lot more time reading books than getting them onto my device.

What gives me pause is how much bulk is added for that extra 0.8" (which I like). There is no place around here where I can go try it out. But it's nice to know I have an alternative should my jailbroken PW2 breaks.

Re calibre. Yeah it's not great to look at. It's pretty CPU intensive when converting books or running recipes. But it's great nevertheless because there is nothing else like it.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shalym

Who said anything about *having* to use the browser full screen? In my opinion, a website that doesn't look good at any screen size fails in the design.

I love the fact that people are designing web sites that look good on small screens such as phones and tablets, but they are forgetting that many people are still using larger monitors. I know that it goes against modern design principles, but for me, any image that stretches all the way across the window on a large screen just looks awful. Give me back my white space!!

Shari

A website should be usable at many resolutions. Some websites however, are designed to use at least 1280x1024, which is, in my opinion, far too large. A website should not have to require a width over 960 pixels wide if it can be helped. In that case, it exactly fits within half of a 1920 pixel wide monitor, while still not requiring a maximized window on 1280x1024. It even works on a 1024x768 monitor, when using the site full screen.

[Readirect]

Originally Posted by meeera

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

That different users have different preferences for formatting kind of makes the point, now doesn't it?

Jeff Bezos might be shocked that not all users share his particular tastes but there it is.

Now I can understand Amazon engineers not being sufficiently competent to build these choices into their software while Kobo's can, but to deliberately block Kindle users from putting KoReader on their devices via firmware??

That's just spitting in our faces.

[MariusMasalar]

Originally Posted by Barty

Marius your page looks great to me. I am using a tablet, FWIW, and reading in portrait.

Thanks for the in depth review. I'm very intrigued by the h2o. Since amazon has really clamped down on jailbreaking, my next e-reader will unlikely be a kindle as I absolutely need custom font and more font size and spacing options. That is much more important to me than the ecosystem. After all, I spend a lot more time reading books than getting them onto my device.

What gives me pause is how much bulk is added for that extra 0.8" (which I like). There is no place around here where I can go try it out. But it's nice to know I have an alternative should my jailbroken PW2 breaks.

Re calibre. Yeah it's not great to look at. It's pretty CPU intensive when converting books or running recipes. But it's great nevertheless because there is nothing else like it.

Thanks, Barty! And great point about the importance of the ecosystem. As a pure reading experience I think you'll be very happy with the H2O...I know I am. ��

While the size is noticeably larger than the Kindles, someone else pointed out that both are still a lot less bulky than an actual book, so with that in mind it's probably something you'll be able to get used to quickly.

[Stingo]

I love the kindle voyage and the paperwhite and I definitely love the Amazon ecosystem. However, I switched to the Kobo H2O for the screen and storage and much prefer the device. I keep my library on the sd card and keep a lot of references that otherwise I could not carry. Everything is organized by category automatically by Calibre. I still buy most books from Amazon and convert them. I guess for me, since I don't mind the added technical steps, it works nicely.

[radius]

Originally Posted by MariusMasalar

Radius, you've made me curious about the Kobo type thing: is it that you find Kobo text rendering ugly as well?

Yes. I no longer own a Kobo, but from what I remember, I had a few issues with it:

1) Control over whether pixels on the screen are full black/white didn't seem as good. If you look closely at the screen (especially visible on long black lines) you can see that the edges are noisier and not as crisp as on the competition. This makes everything look a little fuzzy to me.

2) Glyphs aren't as pleasing. Even with the stock, included, fonts the letters weren't drawn as attractively. This is puzzling since as far as I can tell, Kobo, Amazon and Sony all use the popular Freetype library for font rendering.

So for example, if you look at some letters like 'o' the inside looks a bit squared off in some fonts when compared back to back with another reader or my Mac etc.

This is easiest to see with embedded fonts (and the Kindle falls down a little here too). This can manifest in some letters having a greater visual weight than they should. For example, I remember one book where all the letter 'y' on the page popped out at you because they were drawn slightly heavier than other letters.

Or it could take the form of some letters missing the more delicate lines, so that the loop in a 'p' or 'd' might not close fully.

The Sony PRS-T3 blows away the Kindle PW2 and Kobo Aura in this regard and even that doesn't hold a candle to a retina iPad.

3) The user-adjustibility is an awesome feature, but when you try to reduce the font weight, it looks to me like the text actually gets greyer and less black to some extent -- not just thinner. The reason this is relevant to me is because I thought the default weight was too thick.

You probably won't find many people on Mobileread agreeing with me on this last point. My impression is that a majority prefer dark, solid, blocky, heavy fonts at large size for reading. I remember many people loving Amazon's use of Caecilia when Kindles were new on the scene. And BookCreator(?) for creating Sony LRF books back in the day defaulted paragraph text to bold! (that's probably also why many people don't see any advantage to increased pixel density)

4) I'm hazy on this and can't test it, but I don't remember ever seeing ligatures on the Kobo (and come to think of it, I'm not even sure about kerning). I also didn't see the option to turn on hyphenation, so with full justification I often got rivers. Not to mention Kobo seemed to me to have aggressive widow and orphan control, which combined with the already large-ish bottom margin meant that sometimes the page looked strangely truncated.


Anyways, all that to say that purely as a manner of converting abstract binary symbols into physical letter forms for me to read enjoyably, the Kobo isn't my first choice. It does a bunch of other stuff perfectly well though.

[radius]

Originally Posted by shalym

Radius, I'm curious as to why you wouldn't use your browser maximized? (Although to me, it still doesn't look good when I look at it with the window set to half of the size of the screen)

Hi Shari, I don't maximize the browser window just because I don't want to cover up everything else on the screen.

Well, that and because I think it's the "wrong" shape for reading anything. I think someone quoted earlier in the thread that a line should optimally be a certain number of characters across. That is true in that lines which are very long horizontally seem to be harder for my eyes to track after a certain point.

But more than that, I just seem to prefer a block which is taller than it is wide. I have no idea whether that's just conditioning from a lifetime of reading books in that shape or whether there is a physical or psychological reason for it.

Furthermore, I could see your point if Marius' page was covered up by a big banner ad on top followed by the title and a boring stock photo, then further obscured by a sidebar of links and so on, reducing the initial readable area to a tiny box "above the fold". But in this particular case, I think the title and custom image serve as kind of a book cover or title page.

Myabe I would feel differently if it was taking up all of my monitor as it seems to do for you

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by radius

But more than that, I just seem to prefer a block which is taller than it is wide. I have no idea whether that's just conditioning from a lifetime of reading books in that shape or whether there is a physical or psychological reason for it.

The physical reason is that you can read more quickly when you don't have to move your eyes from side to side. That's why newspapers are printed in narrow columns. There's centuries of practical experience behind the reason why things are printed as they are.

[MariusMasalar]

Originally Posted by radius

Yes. I no longer own a Kobo, but from what I remember, I had a few issues with it:

1) Control over whether pixels on the screen are full black/white didn't seem as good. If you look closely at the screen (especially visible on long black lines) you can see that the edges are noisier and not as crisp as on the competition. This makes everything look a little fuzzy to me.

2) Glyphs aren't as pleasing. Even with the stock, included, fonts the letters weren't drawn as attractively. This is puzzling since as far as I can tell, Kobo, Amazon and Sony all use the popular Freetype library for font rendering.

So for example, if you look at some letters like 'o' the inside looks a bit squared off in some fonts when compared back to back with another reader or my Mac etc.

This is easiest to see with embedded fonts (and the Kindle falls down a little here too). This can manifest in some letters having a greater visual weight than they should. For example, I remember one book where all the letter 'y' on the page popped out at you because they were drawn slightly heavier than other letters.

Or it could take the form of some letters missing the more delicate lines, so that the loop in a 'p' or 'd' might not close fully.

The Sony PRS-T3 blows away the Kindle PW2 and Kobo Aura in this regard and even that doesn't hold a candle to a retina iPad.

3) The user-adjustibility is an awesome feature, but when you try to reduce the font weight, it looks to me like the text actually gets greyer and less black to some extent -- not just thinner. The reason this is relevant to me is because I thought the default weight was too thick.

You probably won't find many people on Mobileread agreeing with me on this last point. My impression is that a majority prefer dark, solid, blocky, heavy fonts at large size for reading. I remember many people loving Amazon's use of Caecilia when Kindles were new on the scene. And BookCreator(?) for creating Sony LRF books back in the day defaulted paragraph text to bold! (that's probably also why many people don't see any advantage to increased pixel density)

4) I'm hazy on this and can't test it, but I don't remember ever seeing ligatures on the Kobo (and come to think of it, I'm not even sure about kerning). I also didn't see the option to turn on hyphenation, so with full justification I often got rivers. Not to mention Kobo seemed to me to have aggressive widow and orphan control, which combined with the already large-ish bottom margin meant that sometimes the page looked strangely truncated.


Anyways, all that to say that purely as a manner of converting abstract binary symbols into physical letter forms for me to read enjoyably, the Kobo isn't my first choice. It does a bunch of other stuff perfectly well though.

Fascinating feedback, thanks Radius!

It's interesting you talk about contrast because that's one aspect of the screens that I didn't end up including in the article but that I spent some time comparing. To my eyes (and with these particular units) I found the contrast on the Paperwhite 2 to be significantly better than the Aura H2O, which is interesting since they ostensibly use the same generation of e-ink tech.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by radius

4) I'm hazy on this and can't test it, but I don't remember ever seeing ligatures on the Kobo (and come to think of it, I'm not even sure about kerning). I also didn't see the option to turn on hyphenation, so with full justification I often got rivers. Not to mention Kobo seemed to me to have aggressive widow and orphan control, which combined with the already large-ish bottom margin meant that sometimes the page looked strangely truncated..

Just FYI... Current Kobos do support ligatures, kerning, hyphenation and widows/orphans css styling. Some of these are better supported in the Adobe renderer ('normal' epubs) than in the ACCESS renderer (Kobo's kepub format). Ligatures and kerning also depend on which font you choose. Interestingly I sideloaded the 3 built-in Sony PRST1 serif fonts to my Kobos. One of them (Really No.2) contains ligatures which didn't display on the Sony but they do on the Kobos.

[Stingo]

Originally Posted by MariusMasalar

Fascinating feedback, thanks Radius!

It's interesting you talk about contrast because that's one aspect of the screens that I didn't end up including in the article but that I spent some time comparing. To my eyes (and with these particular units) I found the contrast on the Paperwhite 2 to be significantly better than the Aura H2O, which is interesting since they ostensibly use the same generation of e-ink tech.

Unit variation may be a factor. I thought the voyage was sharper and had better contrast than the PW2 and I thought that the Kobo H2O was more or less the same as the voyage but with a nicer tone (ivory rather than the voyage blue). I just put my H2O side by side with my old PW2 and the contrast and sharpness are definitely better to my eye. I wonder if we put three PW2s or three H2Os side by side how much they would vary.

[MariusMasalar]

Interesting...yours seem to have the opposite calibration compared to my units, because for these ones the Kobo's screen is definitely the one with the blue-ish tint, whereas the PW2 has a nice pearly white glow.

Makes me want to try a Voyage even more to compare.