Jules Jones

I lost my Kobo Touch last month, probably by leaving it on a bus. Granted it was 7 years old, but it was still working perfectly well even if complaining about the number of books I'd stuffed into it. Getting a new one would involve a) money, b) actual thinking about what I wanted as a replacement. I took to eBay to see if I could find a cheap old one, and found WH Smith's outlet shop with a pile of refurbished Kobos they'd obviously found down the back of the sofa. So I bought a Touch *and* a Mini for £20 each, plus a couple of silicon sleeves for the Touch, because of course my original fancy leather book-style cover had gone along with the actual device.

The Touch is a bit temperamental but functioning well enough that I wasn't going to send it back. The Mini... was not. It couldn't connect to the Kobo servers, and it has to do this at least once to complete setup, even if you never connect it to Kobo again.

There was a Thing in 2019, with a new software update for most models but only as one last update push to the Mini, and after that if you hadn't already synched a Mini to get the update you would have to go to the website and install it manually before being able to synch with the servers again. Fair enough. I went to the website, and the Mini just sat looking pitifully at the server saying that it couldn't download, please synch again. I went and pulled out my previous Mini, which I hadn't used for some years other than to do the synch to get the update, and it was perfectly happy chatting to the servers. So the shiny new refurbished one has gone back to Smith's. :-( I'm not sure it was even a refurbished one, as it was in a sealed original box, and may have just been surplus stock left over when they stopped selling them, so presumably it never got the update.

As for the Touch, I prefer having ereaders in a rigid cover to protect the screen when tossed in a backpack. Back to eBay - and there was someone flogging a batch of the original branded covers! Brand new, and in original packaging. One arrived this morning, and it really is either the real thing or a good enough counterfeit that I'm happy to have it. The only thing not working is the sleep function when I close the cover.

I'll have to buy a new one sooner or later, but if this one manages to keep me going for another year I'll be very happy.

Haven't posted one of these in a while, because I haven't posted much at all. But the latest Amazon UK "buy our ebooks" is a "start a series from 99p" promotion, and I spotted a couple of books that might be of interest. Some are also price-matched on Kobo UK, and possibly other online retailers. Do check the price before you click the buy button, because it can change.

The full promo page is at http://amzn.to/2rCe3xN. Items particularly likely to be of  interest to you lot:

"The Silver Pigs", the first in the Falco series from Lindsey Davis about a private eye in Imperial Rome. I tried this on the recommendation of other sf fans and loved it - it's a good chance to try the series to see if you like it. £1.99 at Kobo and Amazon

"The Ides of April", first book in the Falco: The New Generation series. Just added that one to my own collection. :-) 99p at Kobo and Amazon

Agatha Christie's "The Murder at the Vicarage", the first of the Miss Marple novels. £1.49 at Kobo and Amazon. I'm in the middle of re-reading this right now, because it was there on my Kobo when I wanted some cheerful murder.

"The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter - £1.99 at Kobo and Amazon.

"The Atrocity Archives: Book 1 in The Laundry Files" by Charles Stross. If you're an sf&f fan and haven't read this - buy this book. And not just because Charlie's a mate of mine from sf writing circles. It's the start of a series in which the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft are all too real, and one of the UK three letter agencies is devoted to putting off the forthcoming invasion for as long as possible. Charlie lovingly pastiches various spy, mystery and thriller series along the way. (There was much squeeing amongst the crit group for a later novel when we realised that we were reading a chapter starring avatars of Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin.) £1.49 at Kobo and Amazon.

"The Vesuvius Club" by Mark Gatiss. Yes, *that* Mark Gatiss, written before he became much more famous for his scripts than his novels. Edwardian derring-do, with more than a little tongue in cheek, in multiple senses. 99p at Amazon only.

That's just a sampling - I could quite easily buy another dozen interesting-looking books off that list were I not horribly aware that there are four dozen still queued up on my Kobo...

You will remember the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth just shy of two weeks ago, when I discovered that my second Kobo Mini, delight of my heart, had had a meeting with a gentleman who speaks in SMALL CAPITALS. I hauled it into Smith's the next time I was in town, and was informed that as it was over a month old I would have to return it to customer services by post for evaluation, and moreover, they did not have any in stock in the store and were not entirely convinced that they ever would again. This prospect did not seem to delight them, and they'd been running low on stock even when I acquired Mark 2, so I think it was not a mere excuse. My own view is that the Sale of Goods Act does not really give them the option of "post it to Customer Services" were I to make an issue of it, but given that I wanted a replacement rather than my money back and they in all honesty had no replacement to give me then and there, I took the proferred freepost envelope and a returns form.

Which, it transpired when I got it home and looked at it, should have been in part filled in by the shop staff before it was handed to me. Which meant another delay before the next time I could get into the shop, and wait while it was filled out correctly.

After all that, O Best Beloved, the paperwork was scanned in case of accidents, and then placed in the envelope together with the late lamented, which went to the front desk at work to be handed to a passing postie on Wednesday evening. And tonight I got home to an email telling me that it is officially an ex-Kobo, and a new one has been ordered for me.

If perchance I do see any more in Smith's at thirty quid, I shall grab another as a spare. I like my Touch, and have been using it this past fortnight, but the Mini really is much more convenient for the daily commute.

That thing in the Kobo manual about always eject the Kobo in software before disconnecting it from the computer?

Nine times out of ten you'll get away with it. The tenth, you'll curse, because you've bricked the Kobo. Sometimes it will need a few presses on the hard reset button. Occasionally it will do a Lazarus impersonation if you let the battery run flat, and then plug in and restart with the hard reset button, and cycle the hard reset a couple of dozen times.

And when all else fails, you can, if you're of a geekish turn of mind, Google for hacker forums and find out how to download an image of the system drive, and install it on the internal memory card.

But I don't do Linux at all, and I don't really feel like downloading and installing the necessary tools on my elderly and increasingly unreliable XP box, and then spending a stressful few hours wrestling stuff into submission before I can use my tiny e-ink reader again. Not when my data on this device is toast anyway, and a new one is only thirty quid. The time I'd probably need to spend is worth more than that. So I'm putting a few links here for later, when I feel like conducting surgery, and called into Smiths on my way home last night. The shiny new one is indeed shiny, because they only had the white/silver version in stock.

The Mini snapbacks (and a lot of other Kobo accessories) have been drastically reduced, so I've also bought a nice purple snapback. This is because at some point I will probably fix the old one, and then it's going to be used for the books I don't want on the device that gets handed to the Aged Parents when they want to borrow a book. Purple seems a nice discreet colour-coded reminder for "this is the one with the porn on it." :-)

Some useful links for cloning a working card for backup or to to put into the old device:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=193321&page=3
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=212243
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2462847&postcount=1

I now have a Kobo Touch to go with the Mini. I also have a fitted rigid cover for the Touch, so the Cybook can snooze undisturbed in the new cover I bought it last year, instead of being unceremoniously tipped out and back to its old ugly transport box.

I'm not being entirely silly here. The Mini is the size I need for comfortable reading on the bus, and you will have to prise it from my cold dead hand. Hand singular, because it's tiny enough that I really can hold it in one hand. But the extra inch of screen on the Touch means being able to bump the font size up to large print equivalent and still get a sensible number of words on the page, which will be useful in some reading situations. And for the price of two hardbacks, to get something to hold a load of ebooks I've just bought really cheap in the sales -- that's still less than the equivalent in treeware would have cost me to buy new.

Pity the synchronisation across readers only works on books bought through the Kobo store and not on sideloaded stuff, but given some of my books, that may be a good thing. :->

This latest "won't someone think of the children!" hoopla in the UK media about the torrent of abuse porn supposedly to be found next to the kids' books in Smith's ebook catalogue?

Apparently that would include my fantasy-as-in-speculative-fiction short story published by Musa. That does have adult content, but there are plenty of books from Musa that don't. But all of Musa's books have been yanked by Kobo. *All* of them. Not just the erotic romance lines. We are, amongst other things, talking here about the publisher of the sequel to the novel that was made into "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

Also my self-published erotica short, surprise, surprise. That one's erotica, but it's consenting adult humans who aren't related to one another.

Discussion elsenet suggests that this is because Kobo has decided that the easiest way to placate the Daily Heil is to simply block everything from Smashwords, and everything from self-publishers. Since Smashwords is used as a distributor by a number of small presses, including Musa, books from those small presses are now banned regardless of content. Kobo is supposedly going to start letting stuff back on once they've checked it, but I wonder how long that's going to take and what criteria are they going to use?