Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double
publishersweekly.com
publishersweekly.com
The store seems to work well and the prices are pretty cheap, but you can also load them manually through something like Calibre if you already have a collection of ebooks.
I love how thin and light it is. I originally thought the small size would be a downside, but being able to fit it almost anywhere has made it great for plane/train rides or any kind of trip.
The battery lasts quite a long time, though it seems to discharge quickly if you don't use it for a while.
I think my favorite part is that it's just super intuitive. It feels purpose-built and does everything in the way I expect it to.
Overall, highly recommend. Very good product.
I think those are CBZ/CBR archives, which should hold ordinary image files (JPEG/PNG) within. I'm not sure on the details though.
Honestly, seeing your fixes and his, makes me more excited about potentially getting one with all the tuning possible.
Time to wait and see if anything new gets announced at IFA.
Kobo also has a "sideload mode" that (despite the slightly confusing name) just remove all online features all together.
I own two kobos, a libra for fiction and an ellipsa for tech books and textbooks. Both have koreader on.
No, you do not. Kindle has never and, as far as I am aware, to this day, does not support epubs. The only way to read epubs on your Kindle is to convert them either by Amazon's Send to Kindle service or through software like Calibre.
1. Epub of a book exists on a computer
2. User takes simple action to read that book on a Kindle device
3. ???
4. User succeeds at reading that same book
Like when Github invisibly renders Markdown into HTML for display in my browser: It seems rational to say that I'm reading a Markdown document.
Or when I print that same HTML onto paper and read it. I'm not reading the HTML nor the Postscript intermediates: I'm still reading a Markdown document.
I don't hate Amazon, but I was not willing any longer to give them knowledge and control over my reading.
Curious about what has changed? I've only ever used the email method and that continues to work.
> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.
Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
And I agree with you I don't like the lock in factor, but I felt more locked on a Kobo than on a Kindle
My Clara BW is my daily driver. As much as I'd like to use an open reader, their rendering and screen quality are still not quite as polished as the corpo options.
It requires an online setup (account).
A quick search did not find what your saying. Can you please post a how-to or link one (that I couldn't find)?
This guide is for a kobo that is already set up, but the procedure is mostly the same from step 5 onwards for a new device.
The only step that I think is missing from this guide is that you have to select a language before connecting the Kobo via USB, in my experience. Mass storage mode should work once you have picked a language.
I also did the same on a factory reset, used Libra Color, and that worked well. On that device I had to do some trickery to get the notes feature to work, which I think involved loading up some dictionary files. I can't readily find the guide I followed for that.
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Edit: I'll also note here that this setup works flawlessly with Calibre! It is detected and syncs easily!
It would be better if it was an option on the setup screen, and even better if it was the default option and if the login screen was in the parameters.
Because as an hidden option I always fear that they remove it and that we have to find an alternative. And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
The way they implemented this means that these Kobos can always avoid being e-waste even if Kobo disappears. Assuming they don't maliciously remove it, that is, but seeing as it was added fairly recently and is fairly obscure, I doubt they would bother doing so for current and past devices.
> And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
Being generous and expanding DIY to mean any "open" or "modifiable" reader, this ecosystem has actually be rapidly improving in quality and selection recently. A few new devices were announced recently, and I'm particularly interested in the new M5Stack offering since it has a frontlight and LoRA.
https://liliputing.com/lilbits-more-phone-sized-e-ink-gadget...
I wish I could recommend any Android-based readers, but the software ecosystem for them is quite poor. I would immediately purchase one if they offered a verifiably-clean AOSP or LineageOS option.
> "We're losing the person who reads one book a year," he says. "And that was the person who bought their one Tom Clancy novel when they went on vacation, because you needed something to read on the plane because there was nothing else to do on the plane. Now that the plane has Wi-Fi, and so does that beach, that person is scrolling, not reading."
I don't want fantasy with "the most unique magic system ever created" or "the most complex society" I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
I get it, I'm boring but I guarantee the whole "men don't read anymore" would be less true if publishers still put out books like I'm describing
Instead when I go into a bookstore for the one time a year I shop for my wife for Christmas, I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
If you're okay with these characters and kingdoms existing in vaguely-medieval China (with magically-empowered monks and Taoist-Buddhist symbolism) rather than vaguely-medieval Europe (with magically-empowered knights and Christian symbolism), then I think you'd be very happy to learn about the genre of xianxia (lit. "immortal heroes"). Unlike the Western high fantasy, xianxia fiction is at a peak of popularity right now, with tons of new stories getting published each month.
As you might guess by the name, at first this was only a literary movement in China; but these days there are tons of English-language xianxia stories as well. And they're not necessarily being written in Chinese and then translated, as you might guess; there are some Western authors writing in this genre too.
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That being said: while you can find some xianxia stories in published physical form in stores, as a "new media" genre being written mostly by younger digital-native people, most xianxia stories are first being published digitally online as serial fiction.
Among websites where these serials are published, https://wuxiaworld.com is popular for authors writing in Chinese (I believe the site offers professional translation services to authors), while https://royalroad.com is popular for authors writing in English.
Also, as a "new media" genre, these stories are "not well understood" by traditional publishers (i.e. they don't know how to market them), so these stories tend to need to achieve a very high level of popularity before the traditional publishers are willing to engage with them. So even when these authors do produce novelizations of their originally-serial stories, they often end up finding no physical publisher willing to pick them up, and instead end up self-publishing only for digital distribution through Kindle/iBooks/etc.
There are plenty of old books in the genres you like waiting to be read. Some of them will be in digital format. None of them will be AI dreck.
> I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
The genre survived John Norman and Jack Chalker, it can handle a little sex stuff aimed at women. I haven't read that book, but I have read "In the Barn", from famous award-winning anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions" and as such one really has to lean into the dairy-themed smut for me to raise an eyebrow.
I grew up on Redwall, Riftwar, Dragonlance, Mercedes Lackey and Troy Gibson and probably a few others that I'm forgetting now.
Nowadays they would probably be criticized as being too generic or too slow or not engaging enough or whatever but I loved them
Actually, thinking about it. All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.
Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it. Salvatore cured me of that.
But this Blackgate looks interesting. I'll take a closer look when I'm home. Thank you for the recommendation. Love your username too, gave me a good laugh when I saw it.
I too am a middle aged dude who grew up reading and I think there's a simple explanation for that feeling: we got old. The market has moved on and left us behind. It happened to the ancients, and it will happen to the young.
> Nowadays they would probably be criticized
I don't know who Troy Gibson is, and Redwall generally got a pass because of the target audience, but all the rest certainly got tons of criticism from readers at the time. Riftwar was too generic and RPG-like. Dragonlance was also generic and the RPG elements were only barely pasted over. Mercedes Lackey was repetitive, you read one you've read them all. (Did I read all three of those in my teens and enjoy them a bunch? I certainly did).
> Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it.
We had those back in our youth as well, most notably the now-almost-forgotten Thomas Covenant books.
> All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.
Glancing over at my bookshelf, you might like the trilogy starting with "Range of Ghosts" by Elizabeth Bear (the 2nd trilogy is fine, the third book kind of fizzles out, and its biggest sin is establishing a character who's basically "Miles Vorkosigan, except a villain" and then not leaning hard into that).
Ultimately tho this plus "dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms" means you really should start reading Malazan. It's not perfect (parts of it are rapey, and the later books, especially Toll the Hounds, can be really pretentious) but it is the sprawling epic fantasy with a cast of thousands.
Dudes and ladies with huge swords? Check. And magic? Check. Killing dragons? Check. Conquering kingdoms? Well, there's a lot of attempts to reverse previous conquests and stop ongoing conquests, so I'll give that a chek.
And I somehow warped "Larry Dixon" into "Troy Gibson" in my brain
Absolutely embarrassing. I dislike getting old :)
I asked my wife to put some of those books on hold at the library for me though. I'll check them out. :)
You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.
The Kobo does have good Overdrive integration and that's a huge plus.
I thought that was obvious but here you are, since you need that spelled out. Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Overdrive is for public libraries everywhere, so the choice of which is better should be pretty clear as well
I've been steering clear from Kindle even though their devices are an attractive buy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Amazon left the e-reader market in a few years since their Kindles are tainted.
And Kindle's market share is probably dropping like a brick. I mean, if Kobo's sales are surging then Kindle sales are probably lagging.
In the end, it probably doesn't really matter. All the profits are in the books themselves and there are reports that Amazon is doing alright there as well. That said, global ebook sales are still down from their 2013 peak.
https://www.ereadersforum.com/threads/amazons-global-dominan...
As a side effect of its openness I’ve bought more books through the Kobo store than I would have otherwise. A perfect counter example is my Oculus Quest 2 which I go out of my way to not buy games from its associated marketplace on; as long as that device is hard-tethered to Facebook and its software, I’m better off as using it as a “dumb” headset with VR purchases going to PC marketplaces like Steam.
Kobo devices ship two different rendering engines: the obsolete, appallingly bad Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK), and their own, bespoke, WebKit-based renderer. By default, files with an .epub extension are rendered with RMSDK. Consequently, you'll get all sorts of weird issues. Some of the ones I've encountered: I've had cover images not displaying in the library, misbehaving internal links (footnotes), inability to override typefaces/text size.
Easy fix: rename the file to .kepub.epub[0].
Slightly more involved fix: run the file through Kepubify[1] first. This tool makes further tweaks to the books to enable a few other features, like remaining read time estimation.
[0]: https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec#sideloading-for-testin...
If you really want to support quality literary production, pirate the ebooks but support political parties that advocate for UBI.
(Both my previous generation Kindle Paperwhite that I switched from and the Kobo Clara Colour that I switched to, do this.)
Then if they could make the glass screen flush with the front like the Paperwhite, that would be awesome too.
I know it's such a small issue that no politician will ever take it on, but I really wish there would be some legislation around forcing interoperability and ebook transfer rights.
You can buy a Blu Ray disk and it's going to work in your player. Ebooks should be like that too. And I should be able to give away my ebook collection the same way I can my BR collection.
Kobo has the Sage which seems similar at first glance, but unfortunately it also has a stylus. It's closer to a Kindle Scribe or a Remarkable device.
Considering how many second-hand computers, tablets, and cell phones are there, I find this surprising.