Cheap Kobos at WH Smith

[julesjones]

Much as I love my Cybook Gen3, it's elderly. So I had it in mind to get one of the Nooks that were being flogged off at £30, should I be able to find one. Of course, there were none to be had, but in my wanderings around the Arndale Centre on Friday night just to be certain, I noticed that WH Smith were having a one day only special on Kobos - £20 off all models. Which made the Kobo Mini £30...

So I now have a Kobo Mini, which I have not actually plugged in and set up yet and thus cannot report on. However, if any other UK resident is interested in getting a cheap Kobo, keep an eye on your local Smith's, since they seem to be running this as an occasional promotion. The purchase included a multi-use discount voucher for 20% off any accessories I buy between now and August.

Comments

Glo owner here

[vatine]

I have a Kobo Glo (to replace my Kobo (no model name, but the larger-storage model of the two original Kobos) that had a screen breakage after an unfortunate backpack incident), chosen because I like the display size, it's about the same size as a paperback page.

On the whole, I am quite pleased with both Kobos I have owned, the first one I had for a bit over a year, until it finally ended up in a full-enough backpack that it bent too much for the screen, somehow, and ended up displaying things only on the top 3rd of the display. I purchased a stiff-ish case for the Glo, so it should hopefully not suffer the same fate.

As a general recommendation, I find Calibre to be a fairly good way of managing the library on my reader, it makes it easy to shove things not bought from Kobo onto the device (that's close to every ebook I have bought, the only one I can think oif that's through the Kobo store is a Scalzi collection).

Re: Glo owner here

[julesjones]

Thanks, that's useful to know about Calibre. At the moment I'm organising my ebooks manually, because the Cybook starts from an assumption that you will be buying books from elsewhere and is set up for it. But I want to start replacing some of the treeware with electronic editions, so I could end up with enough that I do need to start organising them more systematically.

I thought about the Glo, but in some ways the Mini makes more sense as a handbag sized device, given that I've reached the age where I need to use reading glasses even for large print. I'll probably keep using both devices, but the Cybook (and the Glo) are really more backpack-sized than handbag-sized.

And snap on the Scalzi collection -- that's why I set up an account on the Kobo website. :-)

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

I bought a Kobo touch in april and like it a lot. I really have only one complaint: the touch screen also responds to cat tails sweeping over it :-D.

[julesjones]

Oh dear. And as is well known, cats like to read with their bums...

[neyronrose.livejournal.com]

I hope you like the Kobo Mini. I liked the Kobo Touch I had. I gave it to Dad, and he enjoys it. There were a number of options for font size on the Kobo Touch. I think it was eight or so. I really liked that feature. I sideloaded quite a number of e-pub e-books that didn't have DRM on them onto the Kobo, and that worked just fine. Kobo adds its own DRM if you get books from there. I'm curious to know what you think of your Kobo.

[julesjones]

The Cybook has a large range of font sizes available, so that was one thing I checked when I had a look at the Mini in the shop. A couple of years ago I'd have probably decided that the Mini's screen was too small, but since I now have to use reading glasses anyway with the Cybook unless I take the font size all the way up, it's not really an issue to have to use reading glasses to get a sensible number of words per screen.

I know Kobo sell a lot of books that have DRM because the publishers are being silly, but I was hoping that if it comes DRM-free from the publisher it would stay that way. I did buy the Subterranean Scalzi Bundle from Kobo, and that was DR<-free, but I was also buying a standalone epub to load onto the CyBook, rather than through Kobo's own hardware. I'll have to try downloading it to the Kobo directly rather than sideloading it.