Which Kobo has these features?

[Kymmmm]

Hi, I am looking at buying a Kobo to go with my old Nook Simple Touch. Specifically with a backlight and SD card slot. My beloved ST has the Sd slot but no backlight so night reading is out. I am well out of touch with the latest in ereaders so can someone recommend the version of Kobo that has:
Backlight
Sd slot
Largish screen
Mid range price.

Thanks
Kym

[ottdmk]

Hmnn. Well, given your requirements, I'd have to suggest either a Glo (non-HD model) or a Kobo Aura. The Kobo Touch has no lighting. The Glo HD has no SD card. The Aura H2O (my current reader) is at the high end of the price spectrum, not the mid-range.

Both the Glo and the Aura have a higher resolution screen then your Simple Touch, so you'll be improving there. As you're used to InfraRed touch screen on the Simple Touch, the Glo should be a good fit. Or, if you'd prefer to go with a capacitive touch screen, the Aura.

Some folks around here say the capacitive touch layer on the Aura degrades the look of text, but most folks say it's only noticeable if you compare two readers side by side. As your Simple Touch is considerably lower resolution, I doubt you'd notice if you decided to go with the Aura.

If you decided that you could spend $179 CDN plus taxes (not sure prices in Australia, sorry) I would highly recommend the H2O. Love it.

[eschwartz]

Just how necessary is the SD slot? The builtin memory of most devices is about 4 GB, which should be enough for many thousands of books. Unless you are reading comics/manga, which takes up a lot more space...

Given that, you should have enough reading material for years. Even taking into account the need for a wide variety of reading candidates, a large collection of old favorites, etc.

Kobo is finally emulating Amazon and moving away from those useless SD slots.

[GeoffR]

I have about 700 epubs on my Glo, no manga or anthing like that, mainly fiction novels and a few non-fiction. They occupy a total of 2.2GB, including cover thumbnails, database space, etc. used by the ereader.

A 4GB device only has about 3GB left after the operating system and recovery partition, so at my current rate I would be able to fit less than 1000 books on a 4GB device.

I would consider the ability to expand the onboard storage an essential feature, whether an external microSD slot, or as most Kobo devices including the latest GloHD also have, an internal microSD slot.

If the device came with 16GB it wouldn't matter, but a mere 4GB is a significant limitation.

[eschwartz]

What is the average size of the books?

Or is the database+thumbnails using up most of that space?


It is not normal for the average size of a book to be 3 MB. Most of my books average ~350 KB. At three books per MB, I can fit 9000 on 3 GB, leaving some space for thumbnails and search indices as well.

---

Oh yeah, and 1000 books is still quite a lot of books, so unless you simply want to keep all your books on your ereader for the bragging rights, you will certainly be able to go a good few months without having to... connect your ereader to a computer and switch out the books.
Of course, I assume people add books to their ereaders that they at least tentatively want to read sometime soon, but I could be wrong.

[Jellby]

I have some books (not comic/manga, but illustrated) that take more than 30 MB, that skews the "average" quite a bit. I also appreciate having my library in an SD card, I back it up and access it independently of the reader.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

What is the average size of the books?

Or is the database+thumbnails using up most of that space?


It is not normal for the average size of a book to be 3 MB. Most of my books average ~350 KB.

It depends a lot on publisher, and whether I have replaced the crappy low resolution images in the original with higher quality ones.

Publishers like Baen are often less than 0.5MB, as are books that were published as ebooks a long time ago, but most recently published ones (including republished backlist) are 2-3MB, often 5-10MB. It depends mainly on the quality of the cover and other images, and on how many embedded fonts.

A publisher like Subterranean Press uses very high quality images in many of their books, so even their short stories can be 5MB+

Non-fiction can be 100MB+

[booklover6]

Just one volume of a Winston Churchill biography is 3.05 MB (epub) and 4.62 MB (azw3)

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

It depends a lot on publisher, and whether I have replaced the crappy low resolution images in the original with higher quality ones.

Publishers like Baen are often less than 0.5MB, as are books that were published as ebooks a long time ago, but most recently published ones (including republished backlist) are 2-3MB, often 5-10MB. It depends mainly on the quality of the cover and other images, and on how many embedded fonts.

A publisher like Subterranean Press uses very high quality images in many of their books, so even their short stories can be 5MB+

Non-fiction can be 100MB+

Well, that would do it.

I believe Amazon aggressively cuts down bloated images in direct contradiction to your habits. To which I say "OHMYGOD THANK YOU JEFF!!! "
If Amazon didn't do it, I'd have to do it myself. And you do the exact opposite???

I don't bother to remove embedded fonts, and I don't think Amazon has a particular vendetta against them, so that probably isn't it.
Most novels don't have a lot of images, so that basically leaves the cover. How big can one cover be? Why do you feel the bizarre need for an HD cover image on an ereader?

As for non-fiction and illustrated works, I suspect all those images makes them a losing proposition for reading on E-Ink anyway.



So sure. Not just readers of manga/comics, but anyone else who reads image-heavy books. Valuable lesson, that.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Most novels don't have a lot of images, so that basically leaves the cover. How big can one cover be? Why do you feel the bizarre need for an HD cover image on an ereader?

There are a lot more images than just the cover. Many fantasy books have maps, and it is important to be able to see the detail in them. Many nicely crafted novels have an image at the start of a chapter, or illustrations in the text. I guess it depends on what sort of novels you read.

If I wanted cheap and nasty than Jeff Bezos would be my man for sure.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, that would do it.

I believe Amazon aggressively cuts down bloated images in direct contradiction to your habits. To which I say "OHMYGOD THANK YOU JEFF!!! "
If Amazon didn't do it, I'd have to do it myself. And you do the exact opposite???

You don't get it. You really don't. With new devices such as the Voyage, H2O, HD, Glo HD all using very high resolution screens, having high resolution images is what we want/need. If Amazon is replacing high resolution images with lower resolution images then they are doing their customers a huge disservice. It was bad enough when we got images too small for 800x600 screens. Imagine those same images on a Voyage screen. Useless is what they would be.

[jackie_w]

... and what about when you want to read the same book on your large-screen hi-res tablet. I definitely want hi-res images for that.

[eschwartz]

All I know is the books that have maps are perfectly legible (and they aren't even the majority of books, and yes they do tend to be bigger than the average), and at the same time, Amazon books tend to be smaller in size than books sourced elsewhere.

I suppose it does depend on what you read, but honestly... most fiction doesn't have illustrations, and I haven't seen all that many that have images at the start of a chapter whether ebook or pbook.

And I still think 3 MB per book is ridiculous.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

All I know is the books that have maps are perfectly legible (and they aren't even the majority of books, and yes they do tend to be bigger than the average), and at the same time, Amazon books tend to be smaller in size than books sourced elsewhere.

I suppose it does depend on what you read, but honestly... most fiction doesn't have illustrations, and I haven't seen all that many that have images at the start of a chapter whether ebook or pbook.

And I still think 3 MB per book is ridiculous.

The average for my book collection is around 600KB. But then I look at the ~200 cookbooks and the average for them is well over 10MB with a couple of newer ones with hi-res images for each recipe that run into the 200MB range.

Like GeoffR, I tend to replace maps, etc. with the higher res versions just to make it easier to read them and to allow me to zoom in if needed. The cover images I'm not all that worried about since I seldom look at my Kobo when it is sleeping or powered off.

As for the images inside the ebook? One recent purchase by my wife had images for each chapter header plus images for scene breaks. The chapter images I left other than reducing their size -- lovely colour images that are now B&W. The 87 identical scene break images were replaced by a single image after I took one of the images and reduced it to B&W. Took a couple of seconds to find vignette01.jpeg-vignette87.jpeg and replace them with vignette01.jpeg. The epub file size dropped from 1.3MB to 650KB.

Originally Posted by Kymmmm

I am well out of touch with the latest in ereaders so can someone recommend the version of Kobo that has:
Backlight
Sd slot
Largish screen
Mid range price.

Perhaps a second hand Kobo Aura HD would fit those requirements?