Kindle

Unfortunately, the only DiSer who might have been able to help on this, is not posting on here anymore for * reasons *.

#FUCK KOBO

I mean I did what @marckee said for those reasons. I can afford to pay more for my books.

But the actual reader only seemed to be available from Play247/Rakuten and took about 6 weeks to arrive from Canada.

That aside it was a nice and pleasant device to use but the software is not as good as Kindle. The syncing is really lame and frequently I would switch from reader to my phone or tablet and it would either not note the new position or it would update all my devices with the older position, losing my current place.

On top of that, you are given a precise value to show where you are in a Kindle book so that when syncing fucks up you can just put this into the other device to move to that location. Kobo just give you inaccurate relative page values (there is a master ‘page’ list but this kept crashing the device) so resolving bad syncing fucks things up.

The main reason I had to cancel, though, was there’s zero security: I lost my eReader but there’s no way remotely to shut the thing down, so whoever found it was able to access the books in my account and probably buy new ones. I was forced to open a new account while in a chat with Kobo support (who were really nice btw) and then they had to move my entire account to the new account, then shut down my old account.

Worth noting that wasn’t going to fuck up my Kobo reader for whoever got hold of it, they just wouldn’t be able to use my account but it seems to me they could still read every book on the device.

#In answer to your actual question:

I just didn’t bother buying one. That OnePlus 3 has a really good screen. I just read the books off that, white text on black, with the brightness low. Even if I bought a backlight one it would probably be brighter than that and not great for night reading.

I’ve got a nook that I got from Foyle’s years ago that’s still going. They/kobo use epub, whereas Amazon use mobi. You can easily download an app to convert between the two. If it’s locked from Amazon, there are ways to unlock it easily, but best to google those.

If you buy ebooks from other shops like Waterstones, Foyles etc, they tend to just give you both files to put on whatever you want.

Don’t think I want to read for extended periods on my phone, I look it enough as is really.

Decent Kindle is £120! But there will surely be some black Friday deals on.

Somebody find me a paperback for sub £4 on Amazon (sorry marckee) in the meantime.

Might get Purity

You can use Calibre for unlocking. I do.

It’s usually okay although sometimes if you haven’t updated the plugin you get really weird corruptions.

The reality of the switch over for me was that I had one book to finish on Kindle so I just used my tablet or phone to finish that and bought my next books on Kobo.

However, I did have issues putting books directly onto my Kobo reader. The Kindle always picked up books I dropped on there but I couldn’t ever get the Kobo to do that.

I’m not even on book.

1 Like

Oh, then I am definitely not getting a Kobo

I’ve got a Mac, and Calibre was crap for me, but I used some other similar thing. Never had any trouble with the nook and copying stuff over, but it’s got a memory card in, so the computer just picks that up and saves them on there.

Calibre is a holy fucking shit storm on Mac and PC I can assure you but it does do the job.

There’s a memory card slot in the Kobo reader but I just never had one to hand to mess with. I guess that’s how it works then.

I’ve probably cursed this five year old e-reader that’s been bumped round in luggage a lot now, by saying that it still works.

I always have loads of SD cards around because I’m into photography. I never really bothered with Calibre, because it’s a mess, and the mac has a built in app for cataloguing ebooks. It could be better, it’s really basic, but it shows the book covers clearly, and you can just drag the books from there to places to copy the files, which is very handy.

I only ever used it to strip the copy protection, basically.

I’ve had my Nook four years. No signs of it dying yet. Read so many books on it now it feels like a buddy. Will probably have to give it a funeral when it shuffles off this mortal coil.

WHOAH! I didn’t even have the website open then, and your reply popped up on a little box. I need to figure out how to turn that off.