Booksellers club calls in Kobo to aid indies
Britain's Booksellers Association (BA) has hopped into bed with Japanese-owned Canadian e-book company Kobo in a bid to help the UK's independent bookshops fight back against Amazon. Kobo already operates in the UK through a partnership with newsagent WH Smith. The deal with the BA will allow the trade organisation's 3000-odd …
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If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash
I bought one of the basic ones... 3 seconds to load a page? That just makes in instantly unusable for any moderately paced reader, you can't stop for that long between pages! If you plan on saving the independent sector from third rate products and disappointing a lot of users who trust those indies to sell them good stuff, go nuts.
Re: If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash
The new ones very recently announced have apparently addressed this issue. Tempted by them but would like to have a hands on test to verify.
Re: If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash
Sorry, can't agree with that. Bought a Kobo Touch in March, after trying all three models on display in WH Smith.
Very pleased with the battery life, which does appear to be a week between charges, and page turns seem to take 0.5s.
Think I've spotted live ones in Currys as well. A small point, Kobo have promised, in writing, that they will NOT do an Amazon, once you've bought something, it stays bought, even if they have screwed up.
The Mrs bought a Kobo Vox from WHSmiths. It was utterly crap.
£150 for 3 year old tablet technology: 800Mhz single-core processor, dodgy WiFi connectivity and 1 hour battery life. Selling something like that at that price borders on exploitative. Average punter hasn't learned to be sceptical of anything sold in a bricks and mortar shop like us techies.
Thankfully they accepted the damn thing back, so I could get a Nexus 7 instead.
Tax
It doesn't help that the poor old independent book seller has to pay a decent rate of tax either.
Kobo Wireless Ereadr
Being a Skinflint I bought a basic Kobo wireless ereader off ebay £20!
Page turns~ 1- 1.5 seconds
Reads off SD card
Battery lasts all week [and I read a lot.]
Does what i need it to do, epubs and PDF
Hidden casino game [menu>settings>advanced>menu
It runs on linux and you can boot from an external SD if you want
My only gripes are:
Can only sync kobo books across devices not my existing epubs
No newpapers or rss feeds available in the UK kobo store
can't change the web settings. or view email.
Whilst it does appear everything is going digital you would have thought there could still be a way for physical booksellers to remain relevant.
For one thing you can't wrap up an e-book and leave it under a Christmas tree.
Physical bookstores could just have a bunch of e-book readers about the store that people could preview books on. - put a couple of ebook readers at the end of each row with ebooks of all the physical books in that row preloaded. (chained to the shelf to stop people walking off with it of course!)
If you want to buy an e-book they just sell you a scratchcard with the book cover picture & a code to download the e-book.
Easy!
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