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Old 03-21-2014, 02:19 PM   #16
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So I ended up buying a Paperwhite 2, Aura and T3 for comparison purposes. I didn't buy an Aura HD because as far as I can tell the software is pretty much the same as the Aura but I've played with it a lot in the store.

Going in to this I thought I was going to like the Kobo Aura best because of what I had read about it online and the feature set it has. Keep in mind that I did most of my evaluation using sideloaded epubs (or Kindlegen'ed KF8).


Screen:

I found the Kindle and Aura to tend towards the yellow in most reading conditions, compared to the cooler grey of the T3 which I preferred. My bet is they did that purposely to offset the slightly blue frontlight so that the screen appears a balanced white when you have the light on. Since I don't like to read in dark conditions, this is a bad tradeoff for me.

Oddly, in some light the Kindle appears less yellow, but not the Aura. I can't see the improved contrast of the PW2.

All of the screens are decently sharp but I find the Sony and Kindle to be better than the Aura, especially for thin lines and so on in menus. The Aura seems to have a different screen refresh algorithm and I find it leaves lines looking kind of spiky or fuzzy looking sometimes.

The Aura HD is also a nice grey and the super sharpness compared to the other readers is appreciated.

For touch, I found all readers responsive, but the Kindle felt unpleasantly rough to me. I am guessing they wanted to feel close to paper. Luckily you don't have to swipe the Kindle, whereas the Kobo has two-finger swipe for brightness and Sony has swipe to turn page.

The Kindle I got is perfect with respect to pinpricks and has decently even lighting. My Aura has the fine scratches (I think these are meant to disperse the front light), has one obvious "pinprick" kind of centrally located along with a few smaller, non-obvious ones (I think these are dust particles that are trapped between layers of the screen which reflect the frontlight). The lighting is acceptably even but not as good as the PW2. It shows maybe half an inch of shadow near the edge.

Winner: Tie between Sony and Aura HD. If I came to care about frontlight then maybe the Kindle would win.


Rendering:

For the standard, included fonts, I put the Kobo in last place by far. The Aura includes Amasis (which is also on the Sony) and Caecilia (which is on the Kindle) and doesn't render either of them as well for my taste. For one, I find the letter forms not as attractive. Second the default weight is too heavy for my taste and although you can in theory adjust it lighter, I find that after a while it looks like the letters become greyer rather than thinner.

I think the T3 and Kindle are roughly equal with included fonts but on the books I tried with included fonts, I liked the way Sony renders better.

This was a big surprise to me as all three platforms seem to use the Freetype project and the Sony and Kobo should both be rendering sideloaded epubs using Adobe's SDK. I wonder if this has anything to do with patents for font hinting and whether the manufacturers are willing to pay those royalties.

On the Sony, I think I detected some use of ligatures, but I don't remember seeing any on the the Kindle or Kobo, which might have just been because of the fonts I used.

At the paragraph and page level, I thought that Kobo often left annoyingly large blank spaces at the bottom of pages (presumably in an effort to control widows and orphans). Justification worked well enough on all devices but the Sony also has hyphenation which I didn't see on the other readers. My feeling is that the Kindle shows the most text per page usually.

For graphics, I found the Sony and Kindle roughly equal (double tap and then pinch-zoom on Kindle versus pinch-zoom entire page on Sony). I couldn't figure out how to zoom on the Kobo. I also thought that Sony and Amazon used better dithering algorithms.

Winner: Sony just edges the Kindle because I often like to use my own fonts and because of hyphenation


Customisability:

None of the readers give you any control over paragraph spacing or indentation.

On Sony, you can only choose the font face and size. You can "crop" a page to reduce margins, but it doesn't really give you fine control and you can't do anything about line spacing. Landscape mode is handy for changing your grip or for PDFs. Sony also reflows text PDFs which can make them much easier to read. You can add fonts to the Sony in both internal memory or on SD card, but then you need to patch up your CSS within the epub to get them to display.

On Kindle, you have some limited ability to change margin and line spacing. To add fonts you have to either include them in the book (which I don't want to do for every book that I might want to display differently) or hack the device.

Kobo is clearly the winner here with wider scape to change spacing and ability to change font size and weight in very small increments. You can just drag fonts to the right folder and they mostly work.

Winner: Kobo


Hardware:

Kobo is sleekest and most modern by far. I like the flush screen a lot and the smallish bevels around the screen. It has a sliding power switch (ie: harder to turn on accidentally by bumping) with LED so you get some kind of feedback. The weight is good. The angled edges on the sides feel good and the back is nicely grippy because of the patterned plastic. Frontlight button is also handy.

In photos, the Kindle just looks kind of boring but in person it is good to hold in the hand. The smooth plastic of the front feels the most expensive of any materials used on these three and the velvety surface of the sides and back feels very good too. The rounded edges are also perfect for holding and feel very good. The Kindle feels the most premium out of these three.

However, it is also the biggest and heaviest and the only one that doesn't fit in some of my pockets. The soft touch back is wonderful to hold but attracts dust, lint and fingerprints like it was designed to do so. I found it impossible to keep the Kindle looking clean. It's also not as comfortable to hold one-handed for long periods.

The Sony's industrial design looks one or two generations behind the other two. The plastic of the case (I have red T3S) doesn't feel as high end, although the back cover is soft touch without the dust and fingerprint problems of the PW2. But I still like it a lot for how it functions. The rounded sides feel good to hold. It is lightweight and the narrowest so it is the easiest for me to carry around. There is an externally available reset hole in case something goes wrong. There is an SD slot, and unlike the Aura, your SD is behind the back cover so it doesn't stick out.

Best of all it has a physical page turn button.

Winner: Tossup for me. I love the sleekness and size of the Kobo. The Kindle feels great and looks the most expensive. The Sony appears very cost reduced but works great.


Page turns:

For me, the Kindle is the worst out of these. You can only turn the page by touching the large "next page" area on the right side of the screen. The problem for me is that the "back" area is wide enough that I have trouble consistently reaching over it with my thumb. Since the Kindle is the heaviest and has the widest side bezel, this means that many times I have to do a funny juggle with my left hand to slightly reposition the reader in order to turn the page.

The Kobo is also one touch to turn, but lets you choose between three options to determine where the target area is. This way I can set the "next page" touch target to the left half of the screen and hit it more consistently.

The Sony is swipe to turn, which is almost impossible for me to do one handed, but has a page turn button. This is my favourite option because it allows me to rest my thumb on the button, whereas I can't do that with the screen. This means I can keep my grip and just apply pressure. To touch the screen, I have to leave the reader supported only by my palm and fingers and that feels insecure in bumpy public transit environments.

Winner: Sony


Navigation:

I like the Kindle for having my library be the home screen. In list view, I can see eight books at a time, and in cover view I can see six. It has a nice book length, and reading progress indicator for each book. When you are inside a book, I found multi-level table of contents to be a pain. I couldn't figure out how to expand a top level section to jump to ones inside without having to open the table of contents again. The PW2 also has a handy feature where you can skim around in a book and then dismiss to resume from where you were previously.

On the Sony, the library is a step away from the home screen. But in list view I can see nine books and in cover view I can also see nine. Changing chapters takes a tap or two more, but you drill down into the exact section you want. If you want to jump around in a book, Sony lets you hold down a navigation button to do a high speed page flip. It also keeps track of your view history so you can jump back to where you were. You can also jump around by page number and I find epub page numbers are a more reasonable unit than Kindle locations.

My only frustration is that Sony drops you back at the beginning of your book list after deleting a book.

With the Kobo, you have to tap on library from the home screen and then choose books. In list view you can only see four or five books regardless of whether you enable thumbnails or not. And then in the cover view they don't print the title or author under the thumbnail. Since most of my books come from places like Project Gutenberg, Mobileread, Munseys, Feedbooks and so on, this means that they all look anonymously the same. This is a complete failure for my use. For jumping around in a book, I found the TOC OK, and the "next section" buttons are handy, but controlling the slider to get to a particular place is difficult and I couldn't figure out how to go to a particular page.

The nice thing about the Kobo is the library wraps around.

Winner: Sony. Kindle would be close if I could figure out how to use the TOC.


Sorting:

All of them allow you to easily sort by title and author and to do searches.

The Kobo also allows you to sort by size, which I like as a rough guide when I am looking for a shorter read, and by type. Being able to sort by type might make it easier to separate comics (whether PDF or CBR) from books which is nice.

On the Kindle, you can't sort by file size or page count, but you do get to see book length. The search on Kindle is type-ahead into a drop down list. This is awesomely convenient.

Sony doesn't let you sort by size but does make the distinction between recently read versus recently loaded and lets you sort by filename instead of title.

Winner: Tie between Kobo and PW2 depending on whether I value the file type and size sorting versus the typeahead find.



Speed:

All are mostly fast enough for me in normal use. Page turns are good, graphics are fast, long chapters don't lock the machines.

My only comment is that after side loading some books the Kobo did a little indexing dance, which the other didn't have to do.

Winner: Tie


Formats:

I have decided that HTML/epub is going to be my archive format so have decided not to care about RTF and LIT any longer. For the occasional PDF I really like Sony's text reflow. For manga I really like Kobo's native CBR support.

Now that Kindle supports almost-epub KF8 format and I have tried out KindleGen I am not as worried about reading on Kindle any more. However, I found that some epubs I tried from the library (un-drmed and converted for testing because I wanted to try some commercial books) lied about their text encoding and showed funny characters on the Kindle but were handled fine by the native epub readers.

Winner: Kobo if I decide to read CBR manga again


Sideloading:

All three allowed me to download books from my cloud storage using the built in browsers but without native integration. The process was marginally smoothest on the Kobo.

I think I would like the built in Overdrive library support on the Sony but I think I hit the device activation limit for Adobe, or I had my password reset because of their security problems so I haven't tried it yet.

My local library offers some books as mobi, but a much smaller number than epub.

I thought that I would preferentially load by SD card, but on the Aura it sticks out the side and on the Sony it is behind a really hard to open back cover so I ended up using USB cable all the time instead.

I wish there were an option to expose the internal memory on the local network through file sharing over wifi. Oh well.

Winner: Sony if I get library working, tie otherwise


Other:

Dictionary support is decent on all, but Sony includes some multi-lingual dictionaries by default.

The keyboard on the Kobo is horrible. The layout is bad, the letters are too small, and I think some punctuation is even missing IIRC. It was super duper difficult to type passwords for my wireless router, Dropbox etc.

Screen refreshes worked best for me on Sony. I found that if I turned off the "refresh on every page" option when I reached the end of a chapter, under the last text I could see grey rows on the Kindle and Aura but the Sony was very clean.

The general UI is best on Kindle by a gigantic margin. Pretty much anything it can do is easily discoverable and labels/menu items have clear and logical names. The icons are distinct and the fonts and windows are large and clear.

The Sony looks like it was designed in the era of Windows95 by comparison. Buttons and slider bars are very old fashioned looking. Things are sometimes tucked away in non-optimal places (e.g. Settings is under the "Applications" top level menu, I can dog ear a page by tapping the top right corner but have no idea how to see a list of bookmarks)

The Kobo uses a thin, spidery font with italics everywhere as the system font as well as thin lines and small icons. But it has the fuzziest drawing on screen so things are tough to read/use at a glance. I can appreciate the idea of whitespace and graphic design but it feels like the UX designers never looked at their work on a real device. The adjustability and customization optons are awesome, and are calibrated in very fine calibrations, but it is very hard to hit a number exactly using their finicky slider bars. The Kobo also didn't let me do anything at all before plugging into a computer with Kobo desktop software (which I didn't want to isntall) or joining my wifi network (which I couldn't type the password for using their unfriendly keyboard).


Overall:

Judging purely by feature list I was ready to commit to Kobo's Aura. But it is worst at what I value most -- displaying crisp text in attractively laid out paragraphs. I'd think about the Aura HD because with more pixels to work with and a bigger, sharper screen things are better, but the ones I tried are too slippery for me to feel good about operating one-handed.

Between the Kindle and Sony I am pretty torn.

In regular operation I probably prefer the Sony even though it feels like it was designed a generation before the others. I like the way it displays books. It is the narrowest and is light enough. The page turn button turned out to be important to me. It is also the cheapest (though I didn't get in on the $79 dollar sale pricing earlier). Navigating the library and within a book are decent; no eink reader is outstanding at this yet.

I am disappointed that Sony is abandoning the North American market, and I wonder if I will read more in twilight conditions if I have a device with builtin lighting.

The Kindle Paperwhite2 feels like the most fully realized product by far. It has very good industrial design. The UI feels like it has the most thought put into it and that it has been highly optimized for the most common use cases of the US Amazon customer.

So far I have found myself reaching for the Sony more often, but as time goes on we'll see.

The Aura is going back to the store.
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Old 03-21-2014, 02:43 PM   #17
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Wow, that is quite the analysis. Thanks for getting back to us about it!

About Kindle multi-level ToC, if you hit the top-level text, you go to that entry in the book, but if you hit the arrow on the left, it will expand instead. When you are in a particular section, naturally it will start out expanded so you can see where you are -- I get the feeling this was how you ended up doing it? It might not be the easiest to hit it, though it doesn't really give me a lot of trouble.

And I think I mentioned before, the ability to jailbreak and install a Kindlet that lets you add books over WiFi/SSH? The USBNetwork hack, that is, which comes from the same thread as the jailbreak itself, here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=186645

EDIT: And about Sony Page Numbers vs. Kindle locations...

Unless the book has a Page-map.xml inside, those pagenumbers are auto-generated by the ADE engine, and correspond to 1 page=1024 characters of text. Kindle uses locations in much the same way, except that IIRC they are based on formatting as well, somehow. If a Kindle book is bought/checked out through Amazon's servers, it will likely include a sidecar "{boook-title}.sdr/{book-title}.apnx" file which contains pagenumber offsets that correspond to the actual page numbers (with actual accuracy/validity). I prefer the locations system since they don't lie to you about what they are, but if the Kindle book has Real Page Numbers, so much the better.

And calibre has a feature to automatically generate a pseudo-random guesstimate apnx when sending azw3/mobi to a Kindle. This can be refined by using a custom column containing the page count (most likely derived by hand from checking the paper version). If used, the Kindle book should have pagenumbers as well.

I hope this helps you come to a better idea of what you want. Please note any Kindle proselytizing/promotion/bias is entirely incidental.

Last edited by eschwartz; 03-21-2014 at 05:42 PM.
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Old 03-21-2014, 03:26 PM   #18
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CBR/CBZ reader in new Kindles is simply not usable anymore. Comics/manga need to be converted to MOBI.
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Old 03-21-2014, 05:20 PM   #19
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Before deciding finally, you might want to get/try Sony lighted cover. Does not add noticeably to the size and weight. The light is pretty good, (I don't like the built in lights because they hurt my eyes) and better than previous Sony lighted covers. What I like is the sleepcover function. No hunting around for the switch.

I understand Adobe will give you an additional authorization if you call them.

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Old 03-21-2014, 05:34 PM   #20
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I understand Adobe will give you an additional authorization if you call them.

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They might ... at their discretion.
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Old 03-21-2014, 06:23 PM   #21
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The Aura seems to have a different screen refresh algorithm and I find it leaves lines looking kind of spiky or fuzzy looking sometimes.
Did you try adjusting the frequency of refresh on the Kobo? It is adjustable down to every page if want.

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Luckily you don't have to swipe the Kindle, whereas the Kobo has two-finger swipe for brightness and Sony has swipe to turn page.
Unless the Aura is different to the others, you should still have the option of adjusting the light level in the menus as well as swiping brightness.
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Old 03-21-2014, 09:20 PM   #22
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About Kindle multi-level ToC, if you hit the top-level text, you go to that entry in the book, but if you hit the arrow on the left, it will expand instead.
I tried this a bazillion times but obviously can't hit the triangle accurately enough. Weird.

Oh and re: ADE page numbers, I know they merely count characters. But the amount of text they call a page feels about right (maybe a tad long but close). So a short-ish novel is about 150 pages or so and a modern novel is around the 500 page mark. I have no feel for what "locations" represents.
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Old 03-21-2014, 09:24 PM   #23
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Did you try adjusting the frequency of refresh on the Kobo? It is adjustable down to every page if want.
Yes I did. As a sole reader the Kobo is fine (and has a ton of great features) but in back-to-back comparison it isn't as good at rendering text and what it draws isn't as sharp. When I wasn't able to put the readers side-by-side I wasn't entirely sure, but going back and forth I could tell easily.
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Old 03-22-2014, 06:23 AM   #24
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Oh and re: ADE page numbers, I know they merely count characters. But the amount of text they call a page feels about right (maybe a tad long but close). So a short-ish novel is about 150 pages or so and a modern novel is around the 500 page mark. I have no feel for what "locations" represents.
Virtually all modern Kindle books have page numbers. If you send your books to the Kindle with Calibre, they'll all have page numbers (fake ones, similar to ADE numbers).
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Old 03-22-2014, 11:10 PM   #25
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Oh and re: ADE page numbers, I know they merely count characters. But the amount of text they call a page feels about right (maybe a tad long but close). So a short-ish novel is about 150 pages or so and a modern novel is around the 500 page mark. I have no feel for what "locations" represents.
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Virtually all modern Kindle books have page numbers. If you send your books to the Kindle with Calibre, they'll all have page numbers (fake ones, similar to ADE numbers).
Indeed, like I said:

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EDIT: And about Sony Page Numbers vs. Kindle locations...

...

And calibre has a feature to automatically generate a pseudo-random guesstimate apnx when sending azw3/mobi to a Kindle. This can be refined by using a custom column containing the page count (most likely derived by hand from checking the paper version). If used, the Kindle book should have pagenumbers as well.
They do a fair job of guesstimating, like with ADE and their 1024-character guess. Although I turned them off because pagenumbers mean nothing to me unless they represent a reference to a book -- I use percentages, since that's all pagenumbers do for me anyway. Oh, and the time left in chapter/book has replaced locations on my main view.
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Old 03-28-2014, 04:15 PM   #26
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Can one of you kind gentlemen please give me a screenshot of what a book looks like with page numbers? Will I see, for example, page 32 of 128 at the bottom of the page? If so, I think I will try to hack Sigil to make the index file for KindleGen's consumption.
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Old 03-28-2014, 04:49 PM   #27
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Yes, that is exactly what you will see. Here's a sample screenshot of HP-OOTP with page number showing.
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Old 03-28-2014, 05:28 PM   #28
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Thanks!

Upon further reading in the Kindle forum I see that the page map is not even used by KindleGen so adding it into the ePub is a waste of time for me.

Luckily, I can lift the work of user_none to generate APNX files and have my page numbers without doing any work at all... My favourite kind of solution!
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Old 03-28-2014, 05:37 PM   #29
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Yes, according to KindleGen kindlegen will use either PageList or Page-map.xml, but it will store the data in a special section of the resultant file -- Amazon's system is what extracts this APNX section into the appropriate .sdr/{book-title}.apnx
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