Another Disappointment From Kobo

I try so hard not to be negative, yet it seems inevitable that every post I make these days is critical.  Perhaps that is why I have not been posting much lately.

Moving along now, it's been a little over a year since I bought my Kobo Touch.  Coincidentally, Firmware 2.0.0 has, at long last, appeared.  Is this a good thing?  You decide.

New Features:
- Custom Shelves (finally)
- The Home screen now has a single carousel (although they kept the wrong one and hid the wishlist again)
- Adjustable font weights (Currently works for most of Kobo's font's but does not work for sideloaded fonts and, in fact, breaks them (see below under Newly Broken Features))
- French Dictionary
- Switch between accounts on your Kobo

New 'Features':
- Improved custom recommendations (i.e. Better Spying)
- Pin books to your Wishlist so you can buy them later (With an obtrusive link on the Home page)
- Find books similar to the ones in your library (Also with an obtrusive link on the Home page)

Newly Broken Features:
- Sideloaded fonts are set to the lowest possible weight with no way to adjust them
- The clock is now buried within a menu, even when reading
- The wishlist hearts no longer work
- Page turns in sideloaded books are now much slower

Still Missing:
- Proper Library sorting options (genre, length, etc.)
- Support for book series
- User adjustable first line indent options
- A Bug free experience

Please Note: This upgrade is known to brick some Kobos.  In fact, the firmware is no longer being pushed to devices until they get it working.

Personally, I'm quite glad that I didn't download this 'upgrade'.

Six Months With the Kobo Touch

According to the receipt that I found yesterday, I have now (as of today) owned my Kobo Touch for six months. Coincidentally, a new firmware version has also been released today.

At the time, the Kobo Touch seemed like the right choice. I had considered buying the first Kobo eReader since it was cheaper than a Sony and it didn't lock you in like Kindle, but several things held me back. The biggest thing was that change was promised to be on the horizon. "Price drops by Christmas," they said, "colour e-ink next year. . ."

Of course, those promises were broken. So by the time the Kobo released a new touchscreen I was tired of waiting and ready to buy a device just to 'get me by' until the good stuff came out.

By and large, the Kobo has worked. Most of the time. Right off the bat the reading experience wasn't great. There was little support for sideloaded content (the main reason I bought the thing) but you could read with it. It just wasn't very easy. There wasn't much control over how the text was displayed and the 'page' number would often overlap the text. Through quite a few firmware updates all this has changed, of course.

But the story doesn't end there. It hasn't always been an uphill experience. With each firmware 'update' it seems that new bugs are introduced. Sometimes old bugs come back. There was one bug that cut off the last line of text on every page. There was one bug that broke the functionality of SDHC memory cards for some users. There was even a bug that caused some Kobo databases to become corrupt forcing constant 'factory resets'.

Currently, the only bug that really bothers me is that it will sometimes not turn the page when I tap the screen, a second tap will then turn two pages. This bug has been around for a long time. . .

I hope that the new firmware I just installed will fix this, but I doubt it. It isn't listed as one of the fixes. Also, there is still no way to organize the library into collections or shelves.

Conclusion: while buggy and often frustrating, it works. Still, I can really only recommend the Kobo Touch to users who won't mind mucking through CSS and XHTML to make their books work, or who can hack the Linux based firmware. Furthermore, within the last six months, new ereaders have come on the market that are priced competitively with the Kobo. Sony and Kindle (Amazon) both offer much better customer support and can pump far more resources into their software updates.

Kobo Touch 1.9.14

For those of you considering buying a Kobo Touch for Christmas (and as penance for yesterday's post), here are some of the features that Kobo has added to the Touch since it's initial release (my notes in italics):

• Choice of five new pre-loaded fonts (seven in total)
• Add your own fonts!
• Adjustable margins, line spacing, justification and more
• Search within a book
• Enter text for dictionary search in all supported book formats
• Select words within ePubs for dictionary search
• Set your preferred language
• Translate words in a book into other languages
• Full German dictionary now included
• Sleep and power off screens now show full screen book covers!
• Support for free ebooks from Internet Archives
• Book progress available in Library
• Customize how you tap on the screen to turn pages (including left-handed)
• Check the time while you are reading
• Revised EXTRAS page under Settings (extras include Sudoku, Sketchbook, and the internet browser)
• Make notes within a book while you read
• Browse and edit your notes with the Annotations List
• Tap the upper right-hand corner of your page to bookmark it
• Add notes to your bookmarks from the Annotations List
• Sync your notes and bookmarks to the Kobo Cloud (Proprietary ePubs only)
• Share passages and awards with your friends through Facebook
• Recieve awards for sharing your reading life
• Share book on Facebook
• Quickly preview Footnotes and Endnotes from linked text in a book (not working properly yet)

I have found the Kobo Touch to be very buggy. Each firmware release fixes some problems but invariably introduces more or resurrects old bugs. Strangely, these bugs do not affect everyone, but everyone will get a bug at some time or another.

One persistent bug which has affected my Kobo is that it will randomly not turn the page when I tap the screen. I could then wait forever staring at the same screen, the interval is not a factor, but the next time I tap the screen the page will process two taps. This means that if I tap forward a second time the reader will quickly turn two pages. If I tap in the center it will turn the page once and then bring up the menu. This problem presents more frequently under certain firmware versions than others but it has not gone away.

I still cannot recommend this device to the average user. There are plenty of alternatives on the market now such as the Sony PRS-T1. If you can find the discontinued Sony PRS-650 I'd recommend that over the new Sony. Personally, I would avoid Kindle at all costs, but they reportedly do have great customer service.

And just recently colour eInk eReaders have started to show up. . .

Kobo Touch Malfunction

What is this? Some sort of cosmological retribution for finally getting a functional Bluray palyer?

Last night my ereader started acting up. Basically, my SD card no longer functions with my Kobo Touch.

This is a known problem, has been for a couple of months now, it just never bit me before. Kobo keeps telling us that they've fixed the problem, but that doesn't seem to be true now does it. In fact, the Kobo Touch has many problems and lacks in some industry standard features (like the ability to organize your library), although firmware updates may address these issues in the future. For instance, they have added many features since the original launch such as search within the text of a book, highlighting, and notes. Yes, those are standard features on other ereaders, and yes Kobo Touch owners had to wait until quite recently for those last two (note that they list the SD card problem as 'fixed'). Mostly they've given us clutter like reading awards, post to facebook, and other crap like that.

And how do they reward us loyal early adopters? By giving away free ebooks to new adopters. . .

I was going to post about all the nice features that Kobo has added to the touch, but I'm too pissed off at the moment. As it stands now, I cannot recommend this product to anyone.

Edit (12/09/2011): Oops, my bad. The problem was caused by a poorly formated epub. . .

Kobo Touch 1.9.5

Update!

The 1.9.5 firmware update (full details here) for the Kobo Touch adds a fully featured text adjustment menu. There is now a slider to adjust margins, a slider to adjust line spacing, and a slider to adjust font size. You can also select left aligned or justified text.

Most importantly, there are new Fonts! The Kobo Touch came pre-packaged with Avenir and Georgia. Now it also has Amasis, Delima, Felbridge, Gill Sans, and Rockwell.

You can even add your own fonts! There is room on the font menu for five more fonts that you can load yourself. Just make a folder called fonts (not Fonts) and put the OpenType or TrueType font files in there. Right now I have Bookman Old Style, Calibri, Charis SIL, Segoe UI, and a modified version of Nimbus (not fully functional on the Kobo) made by the mobileread forum user delphin.

I've also tried Book Antiqua, Cambria, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Sans Mono, DejaVu Serif, Droid Serif, Garamond, Garamond Premier Pro, Liberation Serif, and Minion Pro.

Note: Italic and bold text in side-loaded books seems to have been broken by this update.

My wish list for future updates: Dictionary and highlighting for side-loaded books, library sorting options (Author, Genre, length, etc.), a notepad, first line indent.

Kobo Touch

So, I took the plunge today and bought my first e-book reader. You may have noticed the title of this post. . . yes that's what I got.

The software has already become corrupt once.

Not an auspicious beginning. I'm not sure how that happened. Perhaps there is some trick to ejecting the device that they didn't mention in the pamphlet type 'manual' that it came with.

Other than that it works well. Reading on the e-ink is much nicer than the LCD on the iPod I borrowed from my sister.

I'm busy loading it up with public domain books.