In praise of Kobo

[CAFlanny]

Originally Posted by Camellia

Odd little thread, but the folks in my life would probably just wonder when I'm going to stop rattling on about ereaders

I recently made the switch from Kindle Oasis to Kobo Forma, and I am blown away by how brilliant the Forma is! It links to my book club account at a local book retailer, I can use Overdrive and Pocket, it reads so many more formats without needing to convert them first (so now I only need to convert books from Amazon, not everywhere-but-Amazon!), it automatically sorts my books into collections, it presents manga and comics so much better (and without the need of the extra step via KKC!), and I was unlucky with faulty Oasis batteries, but have no such problem on the Forma!

That's to say nothing of the ergonomics! The Kindle Oasis always hurt my hands with that strange ledge, but the Kobo Forma has a form factor that fits to my hands much better, the buttons are less "intrusive" to my reading experience, and way the Sleep Cover folds into a little stand is perfect for catching a couple of pages between boss fights in my favourite video games...

This is honestly a much more user-friendly design for me! I am over the moon with this product, and I'll never be going back to Kindle. I know it's personal and subjective, of course - I have a friend who swears by Kindle and had an awful experience with her own Kobo device - but for me, this is perfect!

I have recently switched from a Paperwhite 4 to a Kobo Libra and I'm loving it, too! I never realized how much I love the warm light until I got the Kobo. The first time I side loaded my books onto the Kobo and all my Calibre tags came over as collections, I was thrilled. I've been wanting to do that with the Kindle for years. I'm keeping the Paperwhite for Kindle Unlimited books, but I'll be doing most of my reading on the Kobo.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Camellia

@ Pjama - My mother loves the Oasis form factor (and Amazon ), so I gifted it to her!

Too bad. You could have gotten your mom a Libra and helped her to get over Amazon.

[Camellia]

@ JSWolf - All things in time! I'll get her there by hook or by crook, eventually!

[imminent.clause]

OK, how about a me-too post?

I've tried reading on devices for a very long time. I think the first was my HP-200LX, which was a DOS-based "palmtop" machine. It was funky, and you'd have to read everything sideways. The screen was wide but short, so the reading program would display text rotated 90 degrees. It was a clamshell device, so you could open in much like a book, and while I thought the narrow column would be a pain, it was no different from reading a newspaper (if you remember those...) And they mapped the keyboard so that those keys which were "handiest" for the reader would navigate the book. Primitive, but OK.

Then I moved to Palm Pilot. That was a bit better, but still had negatives. But it was perfect for travel (I did a lot of that for work).

And I still told people that reading on a screen would never replace real books.

Many years pass, and I get a Sony PRS-T1. I've really never had a better e-reader experience than this. The hardware and software were "just right". Ultimately, though, it had limitations that forced me to look for other solutions. No backlight, and using a clip-on light made the thing too heavy. (I tend to read before going to sleep, and fiddling with lights after reading just wakes me back up.) And the screen was just a bit too small for my taste.

So I start looking around. I can't recall if I went Nook or Kobo next, but ended up with both. (I think it was the Touch.) Kindles were not a candidate, because I knew that Amazon would use it to imprison "customers". But the Touch was amazing. I later got a Glo (and a Mini, and one of the others...you'll see the pattern here).

Why I love Kobo: You can easily modify the device. One of my Kobos put the entire system on an sdcard in a slot inside the device. So you just had to open the case, extract the sdcard, and make a bit-copy of it on your computer. And no matter how badly you screwed up patches or hacks, you could just reflash the sdcard and be back to stock. I miss that on newer devices, but the rest of the openness is still there.

It's just a linux kernel, a Busybox, and the proprietary Kobo code. The features are right, and the software is fine. The only thing missing in my quest for the Holy Grail of ereaders is: size.

I use a lot of reference material. Cisco configuration manuals, etc. These do not do well at all in epub format. PDF is the way to go. But all ereaders end up doing things with PDF that make them a pain to read. So the Kobo was good for fiction and non-fiction, but not for technical material with tables and figures.

I then diverted to tablets. I found the Sony Xperia Tablet Z was just about right. Bigger screen, I could load my preferred reading software (FBReader), and PDFs looked good. Maybe a bit small for me. And it was slow at rendering those PDFs. I've tried some others; even a Pixel C (Google is about like Amazon in my opinion, so this was not an easy sell). They did fine.

But I'd really want a PDF reader to show me a US Letter or A4 page at 1:1. I want this to be like holding a sheet of paper. They've started to make these, but they are not general ereaders. They seem to be aimed at PDF-only, and "annotations". (I have no idea what the annotation craze is about; I assume it's for college students.) And they run $800-$1200, which is pretty steep for a single function device. And there's about zero chance we'll be able to hack them very well. Certainly nothing at all like the Kobo.

Enter Elipsa. It's only a 10-inch screen, but I was used to that from my tablets. And it does multiformat reading, nicely hackable, and it was $400. Still way to high for my taste, but half the price and 5x the features of the others, so I bought one.

I've had it about 1 week, and there's simply no going back. If they ever bring out a 13-inch screen, I'll be all over it. But I'm not sure the economics there would match Rakuten's business model.

In the meantime -- anyone want to by some tablets?

[Quoth]

The Digital paper "Print to PDF" and annotate are aimed at certain kinds of offices. Though well off students might be able to afford them, but College Texts in electronic form (PDFs are not ebooks) tend to have awkward DRM>

I agree that a really good PDF eink needs to be showing A4 and Letter 1:1 and using 220 to 300 dpi, so that's roughly 13.8" screens. But most (all?) 10" screens have the same number of pixels as my 7.8" Mars. The Kobo Libra IMO is the best compromise of size and weight and resolution for actual ebooks (not many of my PDFs).