Hacker News Reader

Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really get the Kindle hype. Kobo is a vastly better experience and the unlimited plans are more affordable. Kobo is $8 a month, $10 for books and audiobooks. Kindle is $12 flat. Kobo has g drive and Dropbox integration. Also the e-readers use the same screens (minus the “colorsoft” which is still a e-ink product).

View on HN

Marketing, first mover advantage, brand recognition, entrenched userbase, ubiquitous company name.

People use Kindles because they’re the easiest to find, most well known, integrated with one of the most popular online shps on the planet that also encourages easy publishing, were one of the first, used to “just work”, don’t need to be changed, already have their books on there, and so on.

Idk about Kobo plus, the content available on it all seems to basically be the written equivalent of shovelware (unknown authors, questionable quality). I've almost never searched for a modern book I want to read and found it available on the subscription service.

Agree everything else is better though, and Amazon's equivalent subscription library could be just as bad for all I know.

I suppose it depends on what you're into but kindle unlimited is the reason I prefer the kindle to kobo. Kobo seems to just be garbage but around 1 of every 3-4 books on my TBR written at least 6 months ago is on unlimited. Almost everything else I can find at the library. The few remaining outliers I wait until a sale (physical or digital).

Uh. My Kindle cost me $100 like 8-10 years ago and has literally zero running costs.

What are these figures you are mentioning?

If a Kobo means a monthly fee, I swear I’ll never even consider getting one.

They're referring to the subscription plans that give you unlimited access to their catalogue (or at least most of it), like Spotify versus buying an album. Both Kobo and Kindle offer individual purchases as well.

Kobos doesn't require a subscription. I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo Clara Colour recently and it's honestly one of the best tech choices I've ever made. Kobos are hackable by default, so you can literally plug them into Chrome and flash new software onto them via WebUSB (or just via the file system). The real kicker for me though is the support with Calibre, I have a massive collection of maybe 2000 books, and this perfectly syncs with my Kobo supporting filtering, collections, etc. attempting this with even 10 books with my Kindle would routinely break down, books not appearing even after waiting hours for it to index, corrupt file systems, etc, the entire device is designed to push you towards Amazon store, including the scammy "pay £20 more to remove adverts" and them disguising the actual price as "reduced".

The fee GP pointed to is a monthly subscription similar to Amazon's Kindle book club offering.

I meant the book and audiobook subscription. It’s equivalent to Kindle Unlimited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com