Limitations of moving to kindle PW from kobo?

[Josieb1]

I have three ereaders. I used a Kindle Voyage, a Kobo H20 and up till recently a Kobo Glo HD. My main two readers (one in my handbag for out and about, and one at home) were the Glo HD and the Voyage however I was getting so fed up of the time it took me to manage the Glo HD with manually adding books and manually syncing that I sold it and replaced it with my husbands spare PW2.

I like Kobo and love my H20, which was bought for holidays as its waterproof, but the Amazon cloud system and the whispersync ability between devices makes the Amazon ereaers much more appealing to me. I don't have any issues with the typesetting or layout of ebooks on Amazon and I buy books from all over the place which is why I much prefer Amazon's eco system, I can send my books to the Cloud and just download them when I want them.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I have three ereaders. I used a Kindle Voyage, a Kobo H20 and up till recently a Kobo Glo HD. My main two readers (one in my handbag for out and about, and one at home) were the Glo HD and the Voyage however I was getting so fed up of the time it took me to manage the Glo HD with manually adding books and manually syncing that I sold it and replaced it with my husbands spare PW2.

I like Kobo and love my H20, which was bought for holidays as its waterproof, but the Amazon cloud system and the whispersync ability between devices makes the Amazon ereaers much more appealing to me. I don't have any issues with the typesetting or layout of ebooks on Amazon and I buy books from all over the place which is why I much prefer Amazon's eco system, I can send my books to the Cloud and just download them when I want them.

Exactly. I love my Kobo...it has a beautiful display. I just don't want to mess with loading books onto it.

I really really want an Aura One for the screen size. If it had an easy way for me to access all of my books remotely, I would probably buy it.

Unfortunately, I find myself using my Aura HD less and less these days. I really only use it for Pocket articles and the occasional book I buy from Kobo.

Shari

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by richstant

Blimey, this all got to be a bit longer & more involved than I expected while I was away!

Thanks all for your various opinions - in answer to all the comments flying around:

Me & my wife read very different genres of books, so formats etc not really an issue. Added to which, calibre makes format converting & DRM stripping essentially painless. So formats & access to stores isn't that big of a deal either way.

I really like my Kobo Glo HD, and would have bought one of those if I could. But I can't, so the options (within my price range) are either a paperwhite or a kobo aura. Virtually every review I'd read said that the lower resolution of the aura made it worse value than the PW. My wife's had an ancient kindle for years, and she's fine with it, so whatever the limits of font handling etc on the kindle, they don't really affect her.

At the end of the day, she's a basic user, who just wants a newer ereader with nicer display & a light. The resolution of the PW seems to swing it for me, it's me that ends up loading the books for her, so I just wanted to check i wasn't going to be too limited.

So, after all that (perhaps I should have been more specific in my original post), it really comes down to slightly easier collection management on the Kobo Aura 2 vs slightly higher resolution on the PW. I think the resolution issue wins, but if you've got experience of devices with both resolutions and think it's no big deal, please let me know!

With a Kindle your biggest issue sounds like it will be collection management. You can email books to your wife's kindle (if she gets one) in batches (not sure of the limit but i think its 25). Each book has to be added to a collection manually but once that is done then it only needs to be moved again once she has read it or if she decides to reorganize her collections. When I first set mine up (I have over 700 ebook personal documents in the Amazon cloud) I sent mine one collection at a time, that way I could add all the books to a collection in one go by pressing the Collection folder and choosing Add/Remove items, you can then tick each book and work through the pages if you have the list in Recent order. That should make setting up her collections quicker and easier. Then you only have to add each new book in as she buys them.

Manually creating and organizing collections on a kindle is not as difficult or as time consuming and some on here would tell you.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

With a Kindle your biggest issue sounds like it will be collection management. You can email books to your wife's kindle (if she gets one) in batches (not sure of the limit but i think its 25). Each book has to be added to a collection manually but once that is done then it only needs to be moved again once she has read it or if she decides to reorganize her collections. When I first set mine up (I have over 700 ebook personal documents in the Amazon cloud) I sent mine one collection at a time, that way I could add all the books to a collection in one go by pressing the Collection folder and choosing Add/Remove items, you can then tick each book and work through the pages if you have the list in Recent order. That should make setting up her collections quicker and easier. Then you only have to add each new book in as she buys them.

Manually creating and organizing collections on a kindle is not as difficult or as time consuming and some on here would tell you.

But when you email to a Kindle, you get Mobi format and sometimes that's doesn't do.

Collections will be a pain if you want to put on a lot of books in one go because you then have to manually deal with collections.

But dealing with Collections on a Kobo is as easy as typing the name of the collection and sending to the Reader from Calibre.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But when you email to a Kindle, you get Mobi format and sometimes that's doesn't do.

Collections will be a pain if you want to put on a lot of books in one go because you then have to manually deal with collections.

But dealing with Collections on a Kobo is as easy as typing the name of the collection and sending to the Reader from Calibre.

Collections are only a pain if you want them to be a pain. Mobi is fine for ordinary fiction ebooks and sometimes it's far easier with Kindle than it ever is with Kobo. And I speak from experience!

[barryem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But when you email to a Kindle, you get Mobi format and sometimes that's doesn't do.

I nearly always mail books to my Kindles, even if I've bought them from Amazon. They might come back to me in mobi format; I've never actually checked that, but they always work just fine.

I'll often buy a book on the go and start reading it when it downloads, then back it up, mail it back and download and read that. I have a number of devices and this helps me avoid being trapped by the maximum downloads. So that gives me a chance to compare the originals with the mobis I download and if there are differences I've never noticed them.

I should mention that nearly all of these are novels. It might be different with non-fiction.

Barry

[barryem]

Collections are only really a concern if you put too many books on your Kindle. You can tell if you have too many books if you find yourself being concerned about collections.

Barry

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

Collections are only a pain if you want them to be a pain. Mobi is fine for ordinary fiction ebooks and sometimes it's far easier with Kindle than it ever is with Kobo. And I speak from experience!

Mobi is not always good enough for fiction. I have an ePub that has an embedded font that's there just for some special characters. If the font used on the Kindle doesn't have this character, then the book won't work as it should.

As of easy, I find the H2O to be very easy to use. I use it with Calibre and making collections is trivial.

[RobertJSawyer]

The Kobo Aura HD's replacement is NOT the Kobo Aura (2nd edition) or even the Kobo Aura One (which has an even larger screen), but rather the 6.8" Kobo Aura H2O; it has the same screen resolution and feature set as the Kobo Aura HD, but is also waterproof.

https://ca.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-aura-h2o

All best wishes.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But when you email to a Kindle, you get Mobi format and sometimes that's doesn't do.

Actually, you can email a dual-mobi, and you will get an AZW3 if your device supports it.

Shari

[barryem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mobi is not always good enough for fiction. I have an ePub that has an embedded font that's there just for some special characters. If the font used on the Kindle doesn't have this character, then the book won't work as it should.

For the first decade and a half that I read ebooks they were in plain text files or in .pdb doc files which were plain text compressed for the Palm. There were a few formatted files but such things as font choices and variations are a fairly new thing in ebooks. I never heard of anyone complaining about plain text files in those days. I sure read a lot of books that way.

There are books where tricks are played with the text. A good example of that is Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination". He did some very fancy things with text in a couple of places that worked nicely in the context of the story. Most could be duplicated in plain text files but usually they weren't and when they were it was clumsy and not very reliable, depending on the screen size. It was nice to have those effects but the story worked just fine without them. Nothing important was lost. I read it first in paperback with those effects and then years later without them and again since then with them on my Kindle. I can't really say it mattered much.

Barry

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by barryem

There are books where tricks are played with the text. A good example of that is Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination". He did some very fancy things with text in a couple of places that worked nicely in the context of the story.

I've only ever read the graphic novel adaptation of the book, which was quite nice in its own right. It was more an illustrated novel than a comic book.

I do need to read the original some day.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mobi is not always good enough for fiction. I have an ePub that has an embedded font that's there just for some special characters. If the font used on the Kindle doesn't have this character, then the book won't work as it should.

As of easy, I find the H2O to be very easy to use. I use it with Calibre and making collections is trivial.

Mobi is good enough for me. But aside from that normally I agree making collections on a kobo is trivial but since we got the last firmware update, 3.19.5761, I've had nothing but trouble with both my Kobos and collections. Only last Friday I sent 500 books to my Kobo H20, after yet another factory reset, and even though my settings on Calibre are correct to setting up collections not one book actually went into a collection. I had to remove them and send them again, which then worked. No idea why it worked the second time, it just did, but the time I spend 'managing' a kobo device I'm not reading.

For me collections are vital, I have far too many books, far too many genres, not to need collections, and for me a) I don't like the direction kobo is taking with its devices and b) certainly this year the software is not stable.

Circling back to the OP and ereader choices. Regardless of any of our preferences the reader that works is the one the user wants and works for them. For some it is kobo and for others it is Kindle. I wish Amazon wasn't so powerful but it is, but for me Amazon is the easiest and most logical choice.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

Mobi is good enough for me. But aside from that normally I agree making collections on a kobo is trivial but since we got the last firmware update, 3.19.5761, I've had nothing but trouble with both my Kobos and collections. Only last Friday I sent 500 books to my Kobo H20, after yet another factory reset, and even though my settings on Calibre are correct to setting up collections not one book actually went into a collection. I had to remove them and send them again, which then worked. No idea why it worked the second time, it just did, but the time I spend 'managing' a kobo device I'm not reading.

I'd be interested in knowing what happened to cause the factory reset. 3.19.5761 was rock solid for me for all the time I was using it. But, that is a topic for a discussion elsewhere.

The collections should have been set up when you sent them. But, it is a while since I sent that many books in one batch, so there might be something happening I haven't noticed. If it happens again, don't remove the books. The collection management is done every time you connect. Reconnect and let them be set up. If that doesn't work, put a post in the calibre forum so I can look at it.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I'd be interested in knowing what happened to cause the factory reset. 3.19.5761 was rock solid for me for all the time I was using it. But, that is a topic for a discussion elsewhere.

The collections should have been set up when you sent them. But, it is a while since I sent that many books in one batch, so there might be something happening I haven't noticed. If it happens again, don't remove the books. The collection management is done every time you connect. Reconnect and let them be set up. If that doesn't work, put a post in the calibre forum so I can look at it.

I can't remember now, but I it was either because collections wasn't working or error communicating with device. I have a Mac and have been getting that a lot this year, since 3.19.5761. Unfortunately this year has been bad for me and Kobo's, I have done about four factory resets over the two devices I had, and why I have decided going forwards to stick mainly with Kindles. I have raised a few threads this year about my issues.

I love my H20 but i'm not sure i'd buy another Kobo over a Kindle.