My Kobo Experience

With no January meeting this year, and thus no summary, I can't resist to take advantage of the space left on the book club blog and to jump in to share my Kobo experience. 
After a long private debate (Kobo - Kindl - or still something else - or no reader at all?) I gave myself a shove and my boyfriend the tip that the Kobo would be a very welcome Christmas present.
In the end the final decision maker for Kobo was the ePub format. Although Amazon permits to convert ePub into their propriatary format I take myself for to too lazy to do so.
And, probably even more important, rummaging already in advance on the web sites of the different eBook suppliers I got annoyed by Amazon's "Sorry, this book is not available in your geographical zone." Reading in Europe also American literature in its original language I would quite often be confronted with this message - so nope, bye bye Amazon and welcome Kobo.
Well, as dreamed of, I held my new darling on Christmas eve at 1am in my hands and had the first book loaded at 2:30 am. Not to mention that in the meantime the evening festivities were to finish, farewells to bid and the way back home to be taken. In other words: It is easy to get started!
Next surprise: The lighting came in handy sooner than expected (yes, it's a Kobo Glo!). Holidays mean staying long in bed, and while my other darling was still snorring besides me I could spend long and delicious hours with Zola, our next book club assignment. Since then my Kobo doesn't leave me anymore. During the time I would have just gotten through the next reading group assignment, I went easily through 3 books!
Handling is in general easy, although by professional deformation I can not restrain myself from mentioning some points which one might need to adapt to:

• Changing pages takes a small, but still a moment.
• Somtimes changing pages induces for whatever reason a change of two pages at once. Not yet found out why.
• Gosh, how wonderful to have dictionaries and translation dictionaries directly at hand (standard), but why aren't they fully furnished? No use to have a wonderful dictionary, if you can't use it, because three quarters of the words looked up are not available (happened so for English - German dictionary).
• Strange behaviour, indeed very strange behaviour when in comes to annotations and highlighting. Sometimes they are kept and sometimes they aren't. There's no rule... which was at certain moments a real test for the quality of our relationship...

And besides the fact that I can now carry around with me a whole library in the dimensions of a paperback, here some features I love about Kobo too:

• The charge is keeping very well, even using the light, but only if you stay disconnected from WiFi.
• The additional functions: Sketchbook, Sudoku (why are they hidden so deep in the menus?)
• The Kobo support team: Even at Christmas I had a personalized answer to my question (! - how often one gets an answer with no relation to the initial question...) in less than 24 hours.
• The sleep cover.

But there are two things Kobo can not deliver: The paper contact and browsing through the pages, I can not deny, one may miss on the long. And the pleasure of lending out a book to a friend.

If you would like to share your experiences with your reader, whichever it might be, you are more than welcome to leave a comment!

Maren