The Kobo Aura

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Kobo Aura

Comments

[thewayne]

I always wanted a Kobo. Had two different generations of Nooks, the full Android version plus an earlier one, but was never really satisfied with them. Finally got an iPad Mini and am tremendously happy with it. So now no need to get a Kobo: itch scratched.

Now I just want an iPad Air.... CURSE UNEMPLOYEDNESS!

[viktor_haag]

I use both my kobo and the iPad -- I find that the e-ink display in the kobo aura, even backlit, is much easier on my eyes at night than the iPad, and the heft/weight of it much more convenient than the iPad (even the mini).

I use my kobo to read pretty much exclusively when I want to read in very low-light conditions (bed time reading) or when I want the really light heft in a cramped place (like airplanes).

That seems like a silly reason for having a kobo as well as an iPad, or reading on one's phone, but for me, it's definitely value worth the expense.

At one point I thought it was a drag I couldn't sync my reading points between my devices, but in retrospect, this hasn't really been a problem -- I always have a bunch of books on the go, and now I just seem to segregate the one I pick up based on the device I pick up.

[elusis]

Seconded. I find similar with my Kindle - Kindle is dark enough, even when reading in the dark, that I can wake for a while, read myself back to sleep, and doze off again, without being awakened further by light. Or waking up my partner.

I can sync my Kindle reading point to the app on my iPhone though. Useful when I find myself stuck somewhere but don't have the Kindle.

[thewayne]

I've never actually seen a Kobo.  I got the Mini because our full-size iPad is five years old now, long before the Airs, and it's far too heavy for me for reading in bed.  I find the weight of my Mini acceptable for that.  As far as the display, it doesn't really bother me.  The new full-size Airs are lighter than my first gen Mini, and I covet one deeply, but it'll wait. I don't do much reading in bed anymore since I had cataract surgery.  I don't like wearing reading  glasses in bed because if I lay on my side, it distorts and makes reading harder.  I can play sudoku on my iPad without my glasses, so I play it until I get bleary and put it away and go to sleep.  I tend to do my reading on my iPad over solo lunches or at other times around the house.  I quite enjoyed it when we flew to Europe for a river cruise from Prague to Berlin, though I spent a lot of those flights sleeping.  I had LOTS of ebooks loaded from Gutenberg and from the Baen Free Library.

Also, my iPad has that 'blue night mode', but it doesn't make a difference for me.  I've never had a problem getting a good night's sleep when using my iPad right before closing my eyes.

[magedragonfire]

I've had a Kobo something-or-other for at least five years - old enough that it doesn't have a backlight (which is slightly irritating), but new enough that the page advancing is done through touch. In all that time, the Kobo web store has never not been terrible, awful, very-bad, no-good. Searching is not a hard problem, and yet, and yet...

However, I have used my Kobo for taking PDFs on the road with me - it's handy for things like toting around tabletop rulebooks without breaking one's arms, and taking fanfiction to the beach. I've never noticed much of a problem with PDF reading, personally, but I think I usually convert the PDFs to epubs in Calibre first.

[viktor_haag]

I used to have just the wifi model, and I upgraded to an aura because (a) the battery life on the older model suddenly got pretty dodgy, and (b) the backlight really does make a big difference for reading at night. I like that I can read effectively without a bedlamp on that disturbs me (and my wife) more than just the aura.

[magedragonfire]

Yeah, the battery life on mine has also gotten noticeably terrible over the past year or two. I probably should get a newer model myself one of these days.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Most of the pdf rule books I have are double columned and the last time I tried to convert a double columned pdf to epub, Caliber treated the two columns as one continuous one.

[viktor_haag]

I don't try to read anything PDF or RPG-ey (because they're almost entirely PDF, and even when they're ePUB or Mobi, they're horribly made) on my kobo. The iPad or hardcopy are the only ways I read that kind of stuff.

[magedragonfire]

Hrrrm. I haven't actually looked at the Pathfinder rulebooks that I have on there in months, but I'm fairly sure they're normally formatted into double-column PDFs, and I do not recall having had that problem.

Then again, I transferred them over to the Kobo long enough ago that perhaps all the formatting was different. Or maybe I had the problem and found a way to fix it? Now I'm curious.

[ffutures]

I'm using a Nook Simpletouch, which has a lot of the same issues. e.g. I currently have 1000+ separate ebooks on there and finding the one I want is a total pain. I used to have a Sony ebook reader which at least simplified things a bit by having a "browse by author name" thing, rather than "browse through the 20+ works by this author before you get to the next one" of the Nook.

I hear that it's possible to jailbreak the Nook and put in a better ebook reader, maybe you can do it for the Kobo too. When and if the Nook starts to get really tired I'll give it a try.

Agree that iPhones (and to a lesser extent iPads) suck as ebook readers - I'll be going to Finland next week and I'll have all three with me, the iPhone mostly for its maps, the iPad for my internet needs, and the Nook for reading.

[glaurung]

I used to have a Sony ebook reader which at least simplified things a bit by having a "browse by author name" thing, rather than "browse through the 20+ works by this author before you get to the next one" of the Nook.

I've run into this problem time after time with e-reader apps on the ipad. For every app that has a "group books by author" setting, there are dozens that don't. The only way I can grok this is by concluding, as James does, that the coders who program these e-reader apps don't actually read very much and cannot conceive of someone having more than a few dozen books in their app at the same time.

There are people who think of themselves as great readers because they have a hundred books. Those are, sadly, the people who are responsible for creating the ebook infrastructure and the ebook software that those of us who actually do read a lot and do own a lot of books have to depend on.

I doubt you will find that jailbreaking the nook helps much, but if I am wrong I would be happy to hear of it.

[viktor_haag]

It's possible that "you are not the target market"; i.e. the fat part of the market demographic does have "100 or fewer" books on the device, and so the devices cater to that part of the market first.

But I agree, the search facilities in almost all the e-reading software I've seen leaves a lot to be desired (sort of like assuring all novelists that of course they can write their books using notepad or textedit or vi).

[(Anonymous)]

No, no you don't get it. Bookstores would not exist without the support of voracious readers. Other readers might but a dozen books a year, we buy hundreds. We are a tiny demographic, but booksellers fail to remember us at their peril. It's like how the liquor market would not exist in nearly the form it does without the 10% of customers who are heavy drinkers.

I am reminded of how in the "Read or die" anime, booksellers have a sign next to the cash reminding employees to be extra nice to the protagonist, a bibliomaniac who spends her entire income buying dozens of new books every day. That's not how Kobo, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon treat us. I expect no less from Amazon, since they aren't actually in the book buisiness except incidentally. But the other two should fucking know better.

Plus, our needs are not out of line with the needs of the lighter readers who make up the rest of their clientele. All we need is for the software to work well with huge libraries as well as small ones. "Show a list of authors instrad of a list of books" and decent searching including searching within search results would do it. "Put these books on a 'shelf' of their own, never mind what the metadata says," would be a nice extra.

[glaurung]

Sorry, that was me. Did not realize I was logged out.

[scott_sanford]

I've got an ebook reader for my tablet (Aldiko on a 7" Galaxy Tab) and it allows me to browse by author, title, tag, or collection. The tag feature is terribly abused by composers, but users can whack away at the mess and edit them as needed. I'm probably wrong to be using the tags both for classifications such as 'history' and to organize collections together.

I have no idea why tags are case sensitive, so that Fantasy and fantasy are two different groups. On the other hand I can understand why a computer program doesn't grok that Charlie Stross and Stross, Charles are the same person.

[glaurung]

I have yet to buy a batch of a dozen ebooks without finding at least one that has incorrect metadata. These are purchased ebooks, not dodgy pirated crap.

I have seen author names written with the surname first (that's what the author sort field is for), Books actually lacking an author name altogether, anthologies with the names of every author in the TOC listed under author name, but not the editor's name, books with the author name in the title field, and so on and so on. Not to mention misspellings of titles, authors, you name it. If an authors name was wrong on the spine of a physical book, someone loses their job, but It's like they don't care and cannot be bothered to check the equivalent basic things on their ebooks.

Never mind the comlete mess in the tags, which are so bad and so inconsistent that I often start by just clearing the field entirely.

[elf]

I currently have an Inkbook; I had a Kobo Mini for several years but misplaced it, and they don't make them anymore. I strongly prefer 5" e-ink readers but I don't believe they're currently being sold by anyone.

Absolutely no ereaders, any hardware, any software, have actually been good at library organization. They range from tolerable to mediocre to absysmal. (Inkbook skews heavily toward abysmal. My Kobo Mini was mediocre; I'm told there may have been an upgrade that improved that, but I never used the wifi for anything so never got the notification about that.)

I have ranted about this before. Some of the details have changed; for example, many ereaders now have a "favorites" shelf, but operation is often limited or clunky or both. But mostly - ereader navigation software is designed as if for a bedside shelf of books, not for a library.

FWIW, Calibre has plugins available that will neatly strip out the DRM so you don't have to worry about another 1984 incident.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a Kobo Touch. I've found the best way to organize books on it is to make liberal use of the "Collections" feature.

[alexxkay]

Regarding the sudden battery drain in Hawaii: that sounds a lot like a device trying to connect to a wifi (or other) signal and repeatedly failing, which drains battery *fast*. (I gather this has been weaponized. The protesters at Standing Rock reported sudden catastrophic battery drain just as a drone was flying overhead.)

[james_davis_nicoll]

I keep the WiFi off.

[viktor_haag]

You think you keep the wifi off because the device's UI tells you that the wifi is off. That may not be the same thing.

[julesjones]

I have a Kobo Touch, but in general I agree with James. Nice hardware, software is another matter. I am currently particularly annoyed about the bad search engine on Kobo, because I was trying to find buy links for the Hugo nominees, and then buy links for my own book. I have a new book out. I know exactly what its bibliographic details are. I had to resort to looking for it via Google to find it on the Kobo site. In fact, that's how I often look for books on the Kobo site. I try to buy there rather than Amazon when I can, but they make it difficult...

[armiphlage]

The search feature on the Kobo store is so sadistic it has to be intentional.

When I wanted to buy an Ian Macdonald book, and typed "Ian Macdonald Luna New Moon", it didn't display the book I wanted until the THIRD PAGE of results. It's better now, but is still bad.

[(Anonymous)]

"Which took almost exactly one million clicks to break."
The combination of size and precision of that number is impressive, though not particularly surprising.

Riderius

[baggyeyes]

Not all of the books sold by Kobo are DRMed. If the publisher does not allow DRM, then it will be free of that pesky feature in the Kobo version of the book.

Also, there's a spot in the Kobo site, library maybe? where you can download your purchases.

My major quibble with that was I bought issues of magazines and couldn't download them. That's hardly a Kobo-only thing.

I don't work there, I just have a Kobo that I use a lot.

[beamjockey]

I'm not a Kobo guy but a friend passed along this link. Perhaps it is relevant to Kobo users here.

Bought a PDF From Kobo? It’s Going Away After 1 November

Sounds grim.