Is this Kobo defective?

[junobeach]

About 6 months ago I bought a kobo touch for my father, thinking it would be an easier device for him to use with library software at the time.

I had not really used it myself in that time, I have a kindle and I really like it, but I thought it looked really nice from what I had seen, much nicer than my old kindle.

As it happens he doesn't use it very often and so I was preparing it for my mother to use, who is even less technically proficient than my father. But to be frank the thing is nothing but a headache.

For starters it is dreadfully slow to load pages, making me always wonder whether it has frozen or my touch didn't register only for it to skip more than one page.

Second, the fonts are just bizarre. Every book I load ends up looking completely different. Different margins, font, font size, spacing. Nothing is uniform even though I set the fonts a certain way. I have gone through deleting style sheets in epubs and it's still the same thing. It just seems to randomly decide how it want to display things.

Often times there will be entire chunks that look like the font went from black to gray, or bold to regular, when I reload it will be different sections and different letters doing it like the section of a book when the ink goes dry.

I've given up on trying to use the thing myself, and I can't recommend it to my mother to use. I am half tempted to just loan her my kindle, or hand it off to her and get one of the newer ones, rather than subject her to this thing.

Is this normal? If it's defective I would have wished i knew earlier to take it back. It's no wonder my dad ended up not using it all that much, it's a downright chore to operate this thing.

[danskmacabre]

That behaviour sounds bizarre to me and is either some badly formatted ebooks or a dodgy ereader.

I have a Kobo Touch and I don't get any of that sort of thing happening.

Have you tried doing a factory reset and installing the latest updates? I agree with danskmacabre, it's probably due to badly formatted books, but there is no harm in cleaning up the Touch to see if it will work better.

[robko]

Originally Posted by junobeach

Often times there will be entire chunks that look like the font went from black to gray, or bold to regular, when I reload it will be different sections and different letters doing it like the section of a book when the ink goes dry.

This part could be due to the screen refresh (assuming you're talking the Kobo Touch). Go into the menu in the book and change it to refresh after every page and you might partly solve things. But I agree with the post above regarding the rest of it.

[junobeach]

I did a factory reset and let it charge completely (just in case it was battery related, it had been a while since it was used) got the latest updates and I've set the page refresh to 1.

So far I haven't noticed any problems except the formatting which I guess is from the books themselves. I have converted a few mobi's using calibre for use on the kobo maybe that's where the problem is occurring.

So far it seems to be working just fine. I have also been informed it was dropped on pavement once in its life, so who knows if that might have been contributing.

My mother has really taken to it now that it's behaving so that's the important part