Showing posts with label Kobo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kobo. Show all posts

Thursday, January 31, 2013

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