Introducing the Kobo

I was recently gifted a Kobo Clara 2E electronic book reader - a Kindle clone, if you like. As my Kindle has battery problems (it doesn't keep its charge long and sometimes doesn't charge at all), I was quite pleased with this gift, but I haven't had the need to do anything with it yet. I woke up early this morning (having gone to bed early the night before) and was considering what to do with my problematic computer, My first decision was to copy all the books that I have stored on it to the Kobo whose memory capacity is a generous 16 GB, far outweighing the Kindle's paltry 1 GB - and even that's plenty for books that rarely exceed 1 MB in size. The second decision was to back up music, photos and videos to an external drive, but that's another story. 

So: I now supposedly have 2200 books on this device, although I think that this number is somewhat inflated; I copied various ancillary files to the Kobo and I think that these files have been included in the count. All the books are in mobi format, the default format of the Kindle, but the Kobo can handle epub files as well, so it looks like I won't have to convert books anymore, should I settle on the Kobo. On the other hand, I read many books on the computer via a program called Mobipocket Reader, so I'll still need mobi files for this.

I decided that the first book that I would read on the Kobo would be 'Troubled blood' by Robert Galbraith (a Cormoran Strike novel), primarily because I had started reading this on the problematic computer yesterday. This book also has graphics within, so it will be interesting to see how the Kobo handles them. Operating the Kobo is a bit troublesome for the long-time Kindle user: there are no buttons! Everything is operated by touching, swiping and pinching, as with a smartphone. I figured out how to build a collection (aka directory) and how to add books to the collection - this requires touching three dots ... next to the book's name; this process wasn't always successful and sometimes resulted in opening the book. Eventually I succeeded in adding all seven Strike novels to the collection.

The Kobo does not seem to recognise chapters in the mobi format. There seems to be no way to jump to a specific chapter, and navigation within the book isn't easy. At one stage I decided to upload a book in epub format solely to see whether these are handled better; the font was far too small so I had to learn how to change the font size. When I went back to the mobi book, the font was too big so I had to change it again. Apparently one can change the font size simply by pinching, instead of having to go to the settings page. I have been careful with my language here, using 'seem' and 'apparently' - maybe there are ways of achieving what I want and I simply haven't learned them yet.

I read in a review somewhere that the Kobo is slow. I didn't notice any problems when actually reading and 'turning' pages (achieved by touching the screen about half way down on the right hand side to get to the next page), but bringing up the settings page and the book catalogue was a bit slow. This isn't much of a problem; indeed, when adding books to a collection on the Kindle, the operation is a bit slow, but this is a rarely used option and so isn't important. Every now and then, the top right hand corner of the page is shown folded - like one used to do with a real paper book when wanting to save a reminder or to bookmark the page. I am not aware of doing anything to cause this graphic to appear and I don't know what it means (RTFM).

At the moment I'm reading black text on a white background; I've already discovered how to invert this and have white text on a black background, but that looks strange (white on blue would be good). There's also some function to change the background colour according to the hour of the day: reducing one's exposure to blue light at night is a good way to help fall asleep, whereas exposure to blue light at night can prevent falling asleep, or at least, making it difficult.

Obviously there's a lot to learn and get used to; one hour of reading is not sufficient to form a learned opinion.

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This day in history:

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