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

[eschwartz]

That is pretty hardcore, I must admit.

code: SO BEAUTIFUL!!!! (!!!!!!)

[MariusMasalar]

Calibre is a tough app to re-style because you can only make it look better within the confines of how it already works. As soon as you make an actual design change (form + function) you'll have an explosion of hatred from those who are used to the way it current works and have no desire to see it revised.

Anyway, Calibre is Calibre. Still the only app in its class, still indispensable to many of us, and I'm ok to put up with its ugliness as a result. I've never found it sluggish, personally.

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

EDIT: Also, for those trying to save to Pocket and finding that the article isn't being parsed, I've just heard back from Pocket support—apparently it's an issue with their parsing engine and their engineering team is looking into it, so hopefully it will work correctly soon...like all the other articles on the site do. Not sure why this one is giving them issues.

[93terp]

Marius,

You had me at "As someone who grew up reading, I’m left with a deep-seated curiosity about where this past-time, obsession—whatever it is to you—is going"!

As someone who would read the nutritional information on the side of a cereal box just to have something to read, I was a self-described skeptic when it came to ereaders. For me, I couldn't imagine not having the tangible feel of paper in my hands while reading. But then I got a Kindle Keyboard and have been hooked on ereading ever since! I've migrated to the Kobo Aura H2O, and don't think I will ever go back to a smaller screen reader. It's more than portable enough for my needs.

One distinct advantage of Kobo over Kindle (IMHO) that I didn't see mentioned in your blog post is that it doesn't have ads/"special offers" cluttering the home screen. If you compare the H2O to the Voyage (3G + WiFi, no special offers), the Voyage is actually $20 more than the H2O, and has less internal storage capacity (2GB v. 4GB).

Thanks for sharing what is by far the most objective and clearly articulated comparison of 2 outstanding devices! By the way - the post displayed beautifully on my iPad Air!

[eschwartz]

The Voyage should have 4GB, actually. Amazon no longer specifies, but they bumped the storage back up halfway through... the PW2 I think?

And I don't (didn't) find ads very intrusive or cluttering at all, although they do prevent one from using the screensavers hack on a jailbroken Kindle.

[JSWolf]

But if you choose, you can get a Kindle without ads. It's your choice.

[tomsem]

Marius,

I think you are missing the point a bit on Send To Kindle. For most people (and certainly myself) it is a way of adding 3rd party or other content to the Kindle Library, whence it is backed up in the cloud, along with annotations, reading position sync, etc., you can read on Kindle/Fire/iOS/Android. That's quite different than just clipping web articles, though you can also do that. Kobo has no equivalent feature.

I clip web articles to Evernote for the most part, and Pocket would not work as well for me. Given the proliferation of hyperlinks in most web articles, I find reading them on a Kindle, with its awful web browser, is not the best device for consuming them.

My issues with Kindle typography are not so much about poor letterforms (I think the available typefaces are 'good enough' and I do not have any desire to customize them), but rather with lack of pleasant formatting (drop caps, initial caps look awful most of the time, no orphan/widow control, etc).

I typically use a small enough font that justification is fine, but the margins and line spacing can be problematic because there is not sufficient user control. Some of that can be laid at the door of publishers who don't bother to test on Kindle, but Amazon could do a lot more to promote best practices and be more consistent over their various reading engines. They need to support more ePub3 features, including MathML, FXL (for which their so called answer is PDF aka 'Print Replica'). It is really holding ebooks back when the largest vendor has the least capable format. kf8 was good enough for awhile until ePub3 got finalized, but now they need to catch up again.

Regarding Sharing on Kobo, one could set up a Facebook account that 'only you' can see, just as a way of getting notes out of Kobo ecosystem and into something else. On Kindle you also can do something similar with Twitter I think. I don't really think of kindle.amazon.com (for accessing notes/highlights you have made) as a very good solution, by any means, and it doesn't work with 'personal documents'. What is the point of making notes if you can't export them easily? Of course you can take photos with a smartphone and share them to Evernote/Pocket/etc.

Paperwhite fits really well in a quart-sized freezer ziplock bag, for those times when you want to make it 'waterproof.' Its capacitative screen is fully operational in there.

[johnnyb]

Good article, especially for the general public. I have many colleagues giving up on ereading entirely because text often looks just hideous on the Kindle (conservative profession)...
In general, it is in line my conclusions (being an owner of H2O and Paperwhite as well). Kobo needs *some* work on speed AND definitely needs to provide Much better cloud services (open up the ecosystem for third party content), although this might interfere with their business model (because their store is atrocious to search in, so they’d need to change that as well). Conversely, Amazon needs to improve their text engine and perhaps generally open up their ecosystem a bit more to third party content. If highlights and annotations of personal documents were available on kindle.com, there’d be no reason not to use the service (and thus the device and store as well).
Having said that, I really like that the H2O gives you the option of an expanded view of your annotations plus notes. Since I use Mac and iPad for work I have found that it actually helps to keep copies of my books in iBooks and just review all my highlights on the Kobo and add those that were actually important (along with expanded notes) to my iBooks copy. In my opinion, a workflow superior to just dumping the myclippings file in clippings.io and never looking at the stuff again (I do still dump the file but proceed in the same way as with Kobo highlights from the reader). Also, did you know that the Kobo software has a option that allows you to export individual txt files for annotations (must be enabled by a simple entry in a user settings file on the device, not completely trivial but not really hard to do either).
Pocket too is a great plus and one of the main reasons for using my H2O much more than my Kindle. Those books I have on Amazon I can load on my Kobo very easily, or just read them on the iPad
As for PDFs, well, there’s my iPad. But I disagree with both being crap. I actually found the PDF reader on the Kindle not too bad, considering it gives you and ok text size in horizontal mode and lets you highlight just like in books. That being said, I find it strange that Kobo isn’t so much better in this regard. Their engine supports standard Adobe annotations (try adding highlights and notes to a PDF on the Mac and viewing them on Kobo, it displays everything in the same neat way as in books), it just won’t let you add them. If Kobo could add that, they’d be so far ahead of the curve in terms of standalone features, it would be insane (there’s Koreader of course, but it seems that this is not the kind of reliable piece of software one would like to work with, although it may be fine for emergency cases, and it supports Evernote export of highlights, notes not possible).
Like I said, I’m currently a bit of a fan of the H2O, and this has much to do with the fact that reading is just SO PLEASANT on it. It behaves like a paper book in so many ways (down to the minor annoyance that annotations cannot be processed digitally) and seems like the perfect companion for me right now in combination with an iPad.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by radius

I am one of those people who think Calibre is too ugly to bear (and sluggish, and takes too many clicks etc) to the point where I do all my ebook management FROM THE COMMAND LINE. That should tell you all you need to know about the aesthetics of Calibre.


Marius,

I really like the formatting of your article (as of Mar 30, 2015). I wonder if many of the people who complained are used to surfing the web with their browser maximized at all times?

Sadly, you have such a different ereader usage pattern than I do that you mostly address things I don't care about (read-it-later, about-the-book, bookstore features) or disagree with you about (the quality of Kobo's text rendering and layout)

So I guess we've established that those who like the design of your website are the ones who think that Calibre is ugly. 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) Marius, one of the reasons it just feels wrong to me is that no matter what size I make the window, when I first click the link the entire screen is taken up with an image with the name of the article laid over the top. Someone else mentioned the "splashscreen" feel...I agree. To me, any time I see something like that, it feels like a marketing trick.

Shari

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by MariusMasalar

This is the first time I've received so much constructive criticism about the design itself, which tells me that either my usual audience isn't bothered, or isn't as willing to provide feedback as you guys.

Perhaps one major factor is that many of us are long-time e-ink readers and that automatically makes some of us:

• Hate scrolling
• Hate non-content elements on the page (headers, toolbars, footers, line spacing, margins, etc)... because that just leads to more scrolling
• Wary of fixed content and layouts... because it may undermine our efforts to reduce scrolling
• Get off my lawn... because, uh, scrolling!

I wonder if e-ink was never invented, would some us be printing articles to paper and complaining about how many pages are being wasted due to white spacing and how this silly large image is cutting across page boundaries.

[voodoo.mutt]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Paperwhite fits really well in a quart-sized freezer ziplock bag, for those times when you want to make it 'waterproof.' Its capacitative screen is fully operational in there.

that's brilliant! i'm so testing this out

[MariusMasalar]

To me, the only thing about the ads that sucks is that they aren't the cover from the book you're reading, like on a Kobo. I really love that live cover screensaver thing.

As for send-to-Kindle, I don't know that I'm missing the point...I know that it's designed for sending third-party books and documents, but I'm talking about sending articles with their native browser extension, not the email address. It formats the article for the Kindle and doesn't use the browser. I don't care about the hyperlinks much (I just ignore them).

Not sure what you mean about kindle.amazon and the notes. Exporting those clippings/annotations doesn't happen from the site, they exist as a simple .txt file on the Kindle itself, which is super easy to copy off the device and save or use elsewhere. To me, the website is useful because I don't make notes, I just highlight certain passages, and it's very easy for me to copy the one I want from the site whenever I need it for something. I also keep the .txt file saved to Evernote.

As far as Pocket goes, I actually use it alongside Evernote. I send articles to Pocket, read them there, and whichever I want to keep get sent to Evernote for permanent storage, so for me being able to do that reading seamlessly on the Kobo is handy. I archive whatever I don't want to hold on to and the next time I'm on a smarter device I just shoot the keepers to Evernote.

I'm probably the wrong person to comment on PDF compatibility as I just can't justify reading PDF documents on an e-reader when there's a tablet available instead. No matter how good the PDF handling is on an e-reader, I seem to find almost any tablet option superior.

[MariusMasalar]

Originally Posted by shalym

Marius, one of the reasons it just feels wrong to me is that no matter what size I make the window, when I first click the link the entire screen is taken up with an image with the name of the article laid over the top. Someone else mentioned the "splashscreen" feel...I agree. To me, any time I see something like that, it feels like a marketing trick.

Well it is a splashscreen. :P

It's a stylistic choice, which I understand doesn't work for everyone. Not sure where you're used to seeing it, but in my case it's definitely not a marketing trick...I'm not selling anything. There aren't any ads on the site at all. The closest thing to it is an experiment with affiliate links in a few recent posts, which may or may not stick around.

badbob, you may be onto something with the whole notion of people being used to not having to scroll. It's a different paradigm, and I totally understand it being frustrating to those who are used to reading in a different fashion.

Really enjoying all these comments, guys. It's fun following the discussion and I appreciate your thoughts a great deal

[kyrilson]

FWIW, I read this article when it first came out via reddit and thought it was a very well done comparison between the two readers. No complaints about formatting or anything.
Marius, you can't please everyone with formatting choices, so stick with what works for you with regard to that. Content is most important, and your article content tends to be high quality, from what I have read on your site.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shalym

So I guess we've established that those who like the design of your website are the ones who think that Calibre is ugly. Radius, I'm curious as to why you wouldn't use your browser maximized?

IMHO, having to use a browser maximized is a design flaw in the website.

My current screen is only 1920x1200, and you would need to use a huge amount of content to fill that. On thing I often see is huge images, huge whitespace, but tiny text (I don't know what the fun in tiny text is, but... still).

I didn't use my browser full screen on a 1280x1024 screen, and I certainly don't on 1920x1200. What about people who have 2560x1440 (using it at 100% scaling) screens? You just can't fill that much space without wasting a lot of it. The only programs able to use it all on their own are content creation programs that have a huge content creation area. (Photoshop, Première, AutoCAD, Inventor, that sort of thing.)

There are very few programs I would actually want to use full screen, because they are just too huge, too spread out to use comfortably.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

IMHO, having to use a browser maximized is a design flaw in the website.

My current screen is only 1920x1200, and you would need to use a huge amount of content to fill that. On thing I often see is huge images, huge whitespace, but tiny text (I don't know what the fun in tiny text is, but... still).

I didn't use my browser full screen on a 1280x1024 screen, and I certainly don't on 1920x1200. What about people who have 2560x1440 (using it at 100% scaling) screens? You just can't fill that much space without wasting a lot of it. The only programs able to use it all on their own are content creation programs that have a huge content creation area. (Photoshop, Première, AutoCAD, Inventor, that sort of thing.)

There are very few programs I would actually want to use full screen, because they are just too huge, too spread out to use comfortably.

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