Kobo
Why Kobo
I use a Kobo Aura One for reading. Previously I had a Kindle Paperwhite 2. The Paperwhite was fine, but after moving to my Kobo I can’t imagine going back to Kindles.
Here’s a quick list of reasons why I love my Kobo:
- It supports open formats like EPUB. With Kindles, you need to either buy ebooks from Amazon, or convert your ebooks to Amazon’s proprietary Kindle formats.
- It has a larger screen. The Aura One model I have is 7.8". I find it much more comfortable to read with larger fonts. At the time I got it, the Kindle Paperwhite had a 6" screen size. The Kindle Oasis had a 7" screen with a square aspect ratio.
- It has a warm-colored frontlight. Kindles didn’t have this back then, though I’ve noticed they’ve added this to their latest models.
- It’s hackable. I use a custom firmware called koreader.
The Kobo’s openness and hackability is its biggest strength to me. I’m sure the stock firmware is just fine – I have a friend who’s happy with a stock Kobo.
What I like most are the formatting options. I have my device set to ignore all publisher page margins and line heights. Without these settings, ebooks don’t tend to be consistently formatted. Most times the differences are subtle, but sometimes books just have awful defaults. There are also other tweaks I sometimes enable, like ignoring publisher font families/sizes and paragraph spacing/indentation. The level of customizability has spoiled me; Kindles just can’t compete.
The device can display the cover of the book you’re reading when the device is off. It’s such a basic feature, but Kindles didn’t support this. I’m unsure if they’ve added support since.
There are a bunch of other features, like integration with third-party services, support for RSS feeds, Calibre sync over wifi, and so on. I don’t really use any of these though.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend a Kobo to the average person. Kindles are more user-friendly. I’m not a fan of Amazon’s dominance of books and ebooks, but most people don’t care about that. I’m not a fan of the closed formats, but again, people don’t care about that.
Kindles make the happy path for the regular, non-technical user very convenient, and so is still my default recommendation. For people with strong opinions about how they want to read their books, I’d advise considering other brands before deciding.
Calibre “on device” column empty after restart
Unless you are allowing Nickel to run so the books gets imported after calibre has sent them, they will not be in the database and will not show on the next connect. […] For Kobo ereaders, the On Device comes from the database. The database records are created during the book import process after you safely disconnect.