The Kindle Basic came out at the tail end of , whereas the new Kobo model was issued a few week ago. What device is better? Today, we evaluate the overall hardware and e-book experience.
The Kobo Touch 2. They say content is king, and for every ereader this is no different. While we know that the Kindle has Amazon , one of the biggers book-tailer in the world and no doubt ebook-tailer but what about Kobo. The Kobo store carries over 2.
One of the criterias for choosing an eReaders is the availability of cheap and competitively priced ebooks on the bookstore. In the past, critics have lamented that offerings from the Kobo stores were more expansive than compare to rivals but it seems that they have been working hard to bring more offers and titles at 99p each.
Apart from this, the Kobo ereader also works with other ebook bookstores that support the ePub format giving you access to even more titles. Kobo has adopted an open approach where once readers have purchased their books, they have the freedom to choose and load it on any devices they own, removing any proprietary limitations.
The ability to borrow ebooks from your local library is a definite plus and will appeal to a lot of readers. Please check with your library as not all libraries offer ebook loans.
Performance wise, we found that while sweeping across the screen to flip a page is pretty nifty, there is noticable delay on the Kobo.
However we soon got use to this and found that you can in fact tap on the left or right corner to achieve the same result and it seems to response quicker. Tapping the middle of the screen brings up the options. This allows reader to bookmark, annotate, seach the dictionary, change the font type 7 types and its size 17 sizes and more.
I think this will be one of the biggest frustration for people reading on the Kobo. This is also one aspect of reading where the physical buttons of the non-touch device are preferable to the tap and swipe actions of the touch screen. Both the Kobo and the Kindle offer more storage than you are likely to need.
The Kobo has a slot for a memory card, which allows you extend the storage and any books you buy from Kobo are available to download via wi-fi. The Kindle stores a back-up of all your content on-line, whether you buy the books on Amazon or elsewhere, which means you can archive your books to save space on the device if your collection is massive and then download whichever books you want using the built-in wi-fi. So despite the Kobo being expandable by quite a few extra gigabytes, both devices come with plenty of storage in the first place and offer a way to store your books somewhere other than your device in a location that makes them easy to download on demand although with the Kobo this only applies to the books you purchased via the Kobo store — any other books will need to be added via the USB cable.
Amazon has one mighty book store and the chances are you already have an account on Amazon too. With the Kindle, almost all the searches resulted in finding the book at a competitive price. All books were selected by browsing the paperbacks on my shelf. At first, both the Kobo and Kindle look quite similar when it comes to buying books from other stores.
This is important to me because I buy specialist books, such as titles from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Another very strong feature on the Kindle is that any books you email to your device get stored in a personal documents folder on Amazon, which means they are safely backed up and available to re-download to your Kindle later on and to read on other devices like your mobile phone using the Kindle app. From the marketing gumph, you might be led to believe that the Kindle locks you into Amazon and that the Kobo is far more open, but in reality the Kindle behaves identically no matter where you buy your books, whereas the Kobo experience is very clunky for books bought outside of the eco-system.
As an aside, one of the externally purchased books I loaded onto the Kobo had terrible problems, causing a long freeze followed by a crash and re-start, but the same book worked perfectly on the Kindle. The chances are that I will buy many books through the native book store, but for specialist books I want confidence that I can buy books elsewhere and still read them on my e-book reader and the Kindle is the hands-down winner in this category.
Where these two e-book readers are similar, they are very similar — but in all respects where there is a significant difference the Kindle comes out on top.
If you want to have the most seamless reading experience there is no question that you should buy the Kindle. If you are buying an e-book reader in order to read books, the features that matter are the ones listed below and nothing else should really affect your buying decision.
I have written a handy guide to choosing which Kindle to buy. Here is some of the feedback I received on this article — I responded personally to these messages where possible. I am unable to publish all of the messages I receive as some are very specific.
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