Now that Kindle is supporting ePUB and no Calibre-tion is needed, I don't even see what the Kobo value prop is.
Like a screen big enough to comfortably read PDFs. 10.3" on Kobo Elipsa vs 7" on Kindle. IMHO that makes the Kindle only really useful for fiction.
There's also Pocket support for reading offline web articles.
Overdrive support so I can borrow books from my local library for free.
Free Dropbox syncing without having to email everything when I buy a book from someone that isn't Amazon e.g PragProg, Packt, etc. (Dropbox does support email though if you do want that).
In theory I could also use the pen and take written notes on my Elipsa too but it's not a feature I was looking for.
The other stuff you mentioned, like Kindle having a large purchasable library, is also true for Kobo right from the homescreen. They're also priced similarly if you match specs and available for same day delivery from Argos in the UK.
Finally, I know I could hack my last Kindle but Kobo make that really easy out of the box. Installing Koreader, Plato or anything else is simple even if it's not required for everyday use.
So for me it's the other way around. Amazon offers nothing I want that Kobo doesn't have.
Different people have different usecases but I don't think I'll go back to a Kindle now I've switched. Kobos are very easy to live with.
There is plenty of non-fiction that doesn't come in PDF form. It is quite readable on a Kindle.
Things like code or diagrams don't always reformat well and scrolling is a pain in the arse.
Life is just much easier with a bigger screen. Where I'd really come unstuck is when someone gives me a whitepaper or customer documentation that is only in PDF format. No reformating even if you want to.
Amazon used to sell the bigger Kindle DX but they stopped making it. So if you're buying a new device anyway there doesn't seem to be much downside to switching to Kobo, that I've found anyway.
Remarkable and some other companies have A5 or 10.3" screens but these are too small IMHO. You will still end up zooming and panning.
The Kobo Elipsa is the first ebook reader I've used where I can read PDFs without zooming, which is a game changer for me.
In general I think DX or Elipsa sized screens are more useful for text books even in epub format.
It's much faster than my old Kindle but I was never really that bother about the old Kindle's page turn speed. The Elipsa also has much crisper text but again I thought my anchient Kindle was mostly good enough.
The Kobo search features are much better. My old Kindle's search was too greedy which made it pretty much useless as I couldn't narrow results. e.g. I couldn't search for "act" without getting results for "actor" as well.
The only irk I've had with Kobo is that the default PDF reader doesn't let you set a zoom level to reduce margins as you read. You can zoom in but you need to zoom out again to turn the page.
That's only a very minor issues though, I can still read things fine with the default margins. Installing KOreader or Plato was as simple as dragging a file onto a USB drive and give you every ereader feature you could want including margin stripping PDFs.
I considered a Remarkable 2 but I'm not really one for hand written notes and I wanted a frontlight, which the Elipsa has but the RM2 doesn't.
I actually wish I could have bought the Elipsa without the bundled case or pen as I don't use either. The handwriting to text or drawing to flowchart conversion is fun to play with but it's not something I need, I'm strictly using it as a reading device.
I'd guess that the Elipsa would be a good replacement for a Kindle DX but that's caviated by how you personally want to use it. There's something very pleasing about keeping an old ebook reader going though so it might be fun just to keep using your DXs until they absolutely die and then see what's on the market at the time.
Hope that helps.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
That’s what lead me to switch to Kobo a few years ago, and it’s been great. Though some small press releases sometimes skip the kobo store still.
For PDFs and non-fiction manuals and guides I highly prefer a proper powerful tablet with a color screen. E-readers just don't have the power, refresh rate or UX to handle browsing around in 300 page books with pictures.
Funny enough, I found this holds true especially for things like programming books where I very frequently go back to see if I understood something correctly, and having a book separate from my computer in front of me is also useful.
I feel like a FreeBSD guru in the 90s, "YOU REBOOT???" but seriously, I don't recall ever having to reboot my Kindle except the time I tried to open a 500MB PDF and I should of known better.
I don't know if this is still the case, but the Kindle used to be a loss leader. So in theory, by purchasing one, using Calibre only and never purchasing ebooks from Amazon, you are causing Amazon to bleed revenue.
And Kindle STILL does not support ePub. All Amazon has done is started letting people email epubs to their Kindle and their backend will convert it to an Amazon format. This has conversion warts, means you lose cover support too. You still can't copy an ePub over USB.
It's not like $45 is the regular price of the Kindle either. Camelcamelcamel has the new base model having it's lowest at $70 and I've seen the Nia for $80 and they are pretty comparable.
Not having to hack the device you supposedly own to avoid having ads as your screensaver? My Kindle is at the bottom of my closet for that reason. I haven't bought another physical e-reader, but if I do, it won't be a Kindle. I didn't want to go through the process of finding up-to-date instructions, waiting for a hack that would install on my hardware and software version, crossing my fingers to do the install, at the end of which I wouldn't even know if it was a victory for me or a victory for them that I was still using their product. So I stopped using it and won't buy another one.
Ad-supported or not has always been a choice for as long as Amazon has offered ad-supported kindles. I remember making this choice about 10 years ago, and I made this choice about a month ago when I bought my most recent Kindle.
If you bought it used or from a reseller, I don't know what to tell you, but Amazon gave you a choice if you bought it from them.
As a source, here is an Engadget article from the time when this option was introduced: https://www.engadget.com/2011-04-11-amazon-releases-ad-suppo...
You can clearly see that Amazon offered the "with Special Offers" version alongside the versions without "Special Offers". The ad-supported version was discounted by $25 back then. Nowadays, it appears to be a $20 difference on the Paperwhite.
It is not amazon encumbered. That is a huge value to many
As most of the books I read are out of copyright anyway, I'm not "encumbering" myself with Amazon in any way, except for buying hardware they made.
Did they exit the business? It looks like the Nook Glowlight 4 was released less than a year ago.
I don't know a single person in real life with an e-reader other than a Kindle, including myself, so I had to google to see how B&N Nook was doing when you said that, but it still seems to be a thing.
There is still a need to deal with conversion, but it happens on Amazon servers. Which is convenient, but gives no control over the results (and someone mentioned in another comment that it doesn't even preserve the cover image).
The Kindle itself does not natively support ePub. MOBI is being retired to favour AZW3, and Microsoft is moving to ePub.
Further the conversion that they do is notoriously bad and often results in unreadable books. So you often have to tweak the ePub files before sending them to get a decent result. Calibre is essential to that process.
The AZW3 proprietary format is not something I want to struggle with in my day-to-day -- if anything goes wrong, it's a rabbit hole of reverse engineering. I like copying media to my ereader using cables, because sometimes I don't have a solid internet connection or it just feels wasteful to send a bunch of big files over email (if I'm on a tethered or metered internet connection, just sending a couple dozen books is easily in the hundreds of megabytes up and down).
Kobos are a much friendlier ecosystem, and are what I recommend to all family members who don't want their device shackled by Amazon. Easy to hook up to local libraries to borrow books on the fly, easy to copy DRM-free ebooks from online stores.
I have a Boox tablet myself because I love notetaking in nonfiction books and hand writing my notes in work meetings and journals.
Kindles do not support ePUB. But you can send ePUBs through the Amazon online conversion service now, which wasn't possible in the past.
About week ago I wanted to test it, I tried it with bunch of epubs from various sources and only about half converted successfully.
With Calibre it works but it's an annoying extra step. I hope Amazon fix this issue before they officially start supporting ePub.
There are a lot of really crap "epubs" out there.
Yes, you can use Amazon's weird conversion service to convert them, but you could do that with Calibre (or just pandoc) anyways, and probably with less friction too.
Chrome extension here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/push-to-kindle/pna...
Just email to Dropbox and it'll sync onto the device.
https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117217/amazon-kindle-tr...
Never seen an advert on my Kindle.
And the deletion from your library happened...once? Over millions of titles available?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...
My point is - OP said that "once is enough" - well by that metric, I'm asking if they also don't use steam, because Steam has done exactly this at least once in the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
The edition of 1984 in question was pirated. Amazon could either remove it, or face a massive fine for distributing pirated material.
The only slight thing I’ll say in their defense is that since the uploaded (it was through a self-service system) didn’t have the rights to upload those books (essentially, a third-party pirated the book, uploaded it to Amazon’s servers and then sold the book they didn’t have rights to), I understand the thought process that you’d delete and refund. It’s not like this was a legitimate book they removed. It was literally pirated. Removing books from purchaser’s devices was absolutely the wrong move and has created negative PR for Amazon for 13 years because of one bad decision. But Amazon has admitted it was the wrong move and to my knowledge hasn’t done it again.
In fact, there are a number of books I’ve bought from Amazon over the years that are no longer available on Kindle for a variety of reasons (sometimes publishers pull them, sometimes authors) that I can still download retroactively to any of my devices. So if I’m going to be locked into any ecosystem, and this is just me, I’d rather be locked into the ecosystem that has had its DRM cracked pretty succinctly (meaning I can use my purchases on non-Amazon devices or apps) and that has an insanely robust library of books. Oh, and that integrates with my Audible library.
Compare that to iBooks, where the DRM hasn’t been broken (at least, not the current scheme. Some people have had success using insanely old versions of iTunes and DRM rippers from more than a decade ago, but that’s not a reliable or approachable method) and I can’t read any of those books on my Eink devices, or Kobo, which doesn’t have as robust of a library and has always had that weird store-brand Frosted Flakes feeling, and I’m very happy to be inside the Kindle world.
Plus, my Kindle Oasis has truly been a treat. (I said I would never buy one and now have bought two, so jokes on me).
It's the same thing - you get a discount for signing up to their ads campaign.
>>why would they need to make a version where you got ads on top of that
Gee, to make a device cheaper for you.
>>I guess if we follow your logic they could build phones, consoles and TVs with ads too
I mean....yes. I'm just surprised this hasn't happened already.
The ads are the front cover of some other book on the lock screen instead of the one you're reading. I dislike a lot of Amazon's methods but this one scenario is honestly a contender for least invasive advert still in use 2022.
If you want something that is truly ad-free, try the KOReader software.
There was a single instance of a couple of George Orwell's books being removed from user devices in July 2009. Customers had the purchase price they paid refunded. It was done because the company selling those books didn't actually have the rights to sell them. Afterwards, Jeff Bezos apologised and described it as "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles". It is therefore unlikely to happen again.
Given the commercial structure of Amazon e-Books, does it make sense to buy something that gives you as a reader more rights (e.g. when you die)? Perhaps. But I know what I've got into, so has every other Kindle owner on Earth.
You do you, but your stated premise against Kindle is at best a little inaccurate and outdated, and at worst comes across perhaps a little hyperbolic.
If it's still technically possible (it is), it will happen again. It's implemented to be used, even if occasionally. And mere existence of this feature is a clear declaration, you don't own it, you rent it. Many people may find it acceptable, taking other circumstances, but it's a big bold minus.
Since then they've also added an annoying carousel of sponsored apps to the home screen.
I've never bought an ebook from Amazon so at least I can easily move to something else when the kindle finally packs in.
So far I find that for my purposes, the Kindle is way easier to get content onto, and there's quite a bit of content I want that I can just buy there, but couldn't buy for Kobo.
I hope to not get locked in to the Amazon ecosystem but as of right now, my cheapest-model Kindle is way more useful than my old top-of-the-line Kobo.
(A5 because it’s pretty close to the Kindle format and easy to find in the print dialog.)
1: The desktop applications don't auto-sync. (I really like reading books on my laptop because it holds the screen at a comfortable angle. This is especially the case when reading while eating or doing something else with my hands.)
2: Sometimes the Android app is buggy, requiring that I reinstall. When I reinstall, I have to re-enter all my preferences.
3: Some of the default settings in the Android app are dumb, like showing popular highlights. I always turn that off as quickly as possible.