Saturday, August 28, 2010

Kobo - e-book reader - a review


I have a Kobo e-reader, I have had it for a couple of weeks.
It came from New Zealand via Borders Bookshop. (there were none in Aus.)
I was sure it was the one for me when I picked it up a the Bookshop and
it was so light and the screen was easy to read and it had been recommeded
by @flexnib.

The first adventure was to learn how to use it - relatively simple to
turn on and begin to set up for reading the 100 novels that come with.

Charging was easy and working through the download of software was fine.
Moving around the books and selecting was easy, the reader bookmarks for you
and remembers where you are. The screen is not back lit and I like that,
it is about the size of a small paperback. You have a couple of choices with the
font and size. Books can be in alphabetical of title or author and you can put
PDF documents on the reader. (not tried that yet.)

I read a couple of the books included, Dracula and Alice's adventures and
then decided to buy an ebook from Borders.

The first thing I had to do was to download the upgrade of software. that
took a while and a bit of 'round the houses' guessing.

The I went to the book store and chose an e-book from a favourite author,
cheap as it had been out a few years and a good one for the first experiment.

Thats when everything went haywire - I clicked the boxes handed over the
money and nothing happened. The book was supposed to transfer to my account from there I could sync to the e-reader.

From there I followed a trail to find some help, as I assumed an incorrect
step on my part was the problem. the Homepage of the bookshop did not have
a visible contact for help, and I went down a wrong alley seeking information.
Honestly the Kobo people are very helpful, it just wasn't their problem.
Finally tracked down a 'help desk' for the bookshop, put in a query and
tah dah, they answered - generic email - which stated one problem they were
having was with downloading e-books and it should be fixed soon!

Four days later the book was ready to be sync'ed. Just my luck that they have
problems when I am downloading the first book - leads to insecurity of the
biggest with new tech.

I then decided to leave the purchasing of books for a while and read the 100
and try to down load some old Sci Fi from online sources.

At this point I have downloaded e-pubs, but I have yet to work out how to move
the files to the e-reader. When I have more time to figure it out I will.

Today I successfully downloaded three books from Borders and it all went very
fast and easy. the problems they had are now fixed. I need the books for
#ALIAAccess - airport waiting etc. (Yay!)

@kalgrl

3 comments:

flexnib said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
flexnib said...

When you connect your Kobo to your computer it appears as another drive - you can just drag any epub files to it and they should appear on the device after you disconnect it.

If you want a more elegant way of managing your epub files than that I recomment using the freeware ebook manager Calibre :)

Rosanne Dingli said...

You seem so happy with your reader you might like to experiment by downloading one of my eBooks. (Yes, this is a real author - in Perth - commenting on your blog.)
Please follow the clicks to my email address, and ask me for a code, which will get you a free eBook called Vision or Delusion from SmashWords - they have formats for all platforms.
Rosanne Dingli
http://www.rosannedingli.com

There is an email link on my guestbook page.