Falling in love with Reading again…?

So a few months ago I decided to make the jump from the walled garden of the Amazon e-Reader ecosystem to something a bit less closed in.

The Amazon/Kindle ecosystem is terribly walled-in. Amazon can remove books from your device, lock your account to block you being able to read ANYTHING at all, even if you’ve purchased hundreds of books from them. That to me is a step too far. And as an example, it happened this month to hundreds of people, where their accounts were locked by mistake, and these customers lost access to their entire libraries for the several days it took to remedy the situation. Absolutely unforgivable.

So after looking at various devices to get away from using my Kindle, I decided that I’d like to go with a colour device. After quite a bit of research on the various available colour e-Ink devices, I ended up going with a Kobo device, the Libra Colour.

The Kobo Libra Colour (KLC)

The KLC is a Linux-based device, is open source and freely moddable. Kobo claim no ownership of your device, or your library, so once a book is on your device? It’s yours, no questions asked. Their CEO is active on social media, and is such a fanboy of the company, constantly cheerleading them and their customers, and thanking people for choosing to use Kobo, which is endearing.

It’s a lovely device, and has notebook capabilities as it has a Stylus available for note-taking, which of course I also purchased :)

You can use it to highlight passages (in colour!), or write all over the book should the fancy take you.

The KLC has physical page turning buttons, which is handy for 1-handed reading, if you’re lying in bed for example, on your side. So the actual experience of reading on it is really nice.

The colour on the device is as good as current e-Ink technology allows. That essentially means that the device isn’t as “white” as the Paperwhite that I have, as current colour e-Ink device tech has a default darker hue. However in practice you wouldn’t notice it unless you do a side-by-side comparison of the two devices.

The Kobo Store

Kobo also has a store, similar to the Kindle store, where you can purchase eBooks and audiobooks (which also play on the KLC!). They even have a price match promise on their website that if the same book becomes available elsewhere (IE Amazon), then they’ll credit your account with the difference plus 10% of the book’s cost on the competing store.

I’ve yet to come across a book that I wanted that I couldn’t find on the Kobo store that was available on the Amazon Kindle store, so availability is not an issue.

The Experience

Since getting the device, I’ve read a few books from start to finish. The KLC has reading stats built into the device, giving you information like pages per minute, minutes per session, total time to read your current book, total time spent reading on the device, number of books read etc etc.

I’d spent a fair bit of time downloading some of my hundreds of books from the Amazon website to my PC, then converting them over from Amazon’s proprietary encrypted format, to a more open ePub format using a piece of software named Calibre. I was then able to copy these over to the KLC and read them without issue on there.

Nowadays I tend to buy my books on the Kobo site, even if it’s slightly more expensive than Amazon at times, but the vast majority of the time that’s because Amazon have a deal or something similar on. Normally the prices are the same as Amazon’s, and of course there’s the price-match deal they have on that means the Kobo site is now my first port of call for new books.

Closing Thoughts

The overall experience with the Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo in general has brought me back round to the habit of reading again. It’s something, much like writing, that I’d fallen out of love with doing for years. But now I find myself grabbing the KLC if I’m sitting and don’t want to be on my phone, and fancy diving back into one of the several books I have on the go currently.

I’m flitting between several cozy fantasy novels (Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree was a great introduction to the genre it subsequently spawned), as well as starting in on the Brandon Sanderson library of Cosmere novels.

Overall I’m very happy that I made the decision to move to the Kobo device and ecosystem. A far more open, freeing, and comfortable experience, and one which I won’t be leaving any time soon!