Addendum, Oct 27, 2010 - see also A Month with My Kindle 3.
When I was shopping around for an e-reader, I ended up buying both the Kindle 3 and the Kobo. Reader's Digest version: I took the Kobo back and kept the Kindle. Here's why:
Kobo (The good:)
- The Kobo is elegant.
- Easy to handle. It is very light, and the shape is easy to hold in one hand over long periods of time. There's space around the screen to hold onto. The soft, quilted back is a great idea.
- It has a (way) better font than the Kindle 3.
- Nice touches, like automatically generated footers, which the Kindle doesn't have, make it a more book-like experience.
- From an aesthetic point of view, a winner. It doesn't look or feel like an over-sized Blackberry.
- It's compatible with the Library - which means you can take books out of the library website and read them on your device. It's very cool. Kindle can't do that. It has to do with DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Kobo (The bad:)
- The Kobo 'D-pad' which is the main navigation button is pretty loud and not very accurate. By loud, I mean, keep-your-girlfriend-up-at-night loud.
- The Kobo is slow. When you're in a book, it's OK. What I do is press the advance button on the second last sentence. However, it is when you have a large collection, and you want to navigate to other titles, it becomes painful. Also, within e-magazines, it is hard to flip through them, and skip the pieces you don't like, because there's this huge time lag between page views.
- Adobe Digital Editions. Right now, DRM is a fact of life for store-bought and library e-books (which kind of locks you into certain readers). Kobo uses a 3rd party DRM (Adobe Digital Editions), which, theoretically, seems better because it is possible to buy a Sony reader and use the same ebooks. However, in practice, Adobe DRM can be pretty frustrating. My story: I took some e-books out of the library and put them on my Kobo. Seemed to work. Then, all of a sudden, they were locked and I couldn't read them, and nothing I could do got it to work again. I still had weeks left on them, but *something* happened. I walked through Kobo phone support (not bad, actually), but their usual fixes didn't work. Adobe is impossible to get help from. Still can't access them on my Kobo. So, I thought to myself, what if I had a bunch of books that I BOUGHT and that happened? Doesn't make me want to go out and buy e-books. I've been reading the classics, which are free and don't have DRM.
- Limited Functionality. Lack of keyboard, search, and dictionary.
Kindle 3 - Wireless Edition (the good)
- Speed. The kindle operates at a speed that makes sense for navigating around your collections. Page turns are quick. It makes downloaded e-magazines much easier to browse.
- Navigation. There are more navigation options with more buttons. With the small keyboard, for example, you can do things, like, jump to your book titles that start with "K".
- Search: I use this way more than I thought I would. For example, a lot of free classic e-books that you might get from, say, Project Gutenberg, have non-functioning TOCs. With the search, it's easy to just find the section by typing it it into the search box.
- Dictionary: Just move the cursor to the word you don't know, and, presto: the definition pops up. Another feature that I didn't think I use, but use it all the time.
- Ugly Font. First thing I noticed when I turned it on. Yuck. I suppose it's a matter of taste.
- Slightly Harder to Handle. It's a bit too slim/small. They've tapered the edges making it harder to hold than a Kobo. Along with the proliferation of buttons everywhere, there's not much place for your hands to rest.
- Heavy-handed Amazon control.They actually lock-down certain functionality until you go online and register the unit. Kinda big-brother-ish.
- Browser is Useless. The browser is pretty much useless for going on the web, so don't let this feature sway your purchase in any way compared to other e-readers. You can go to Wikipedia with a click and search on something. Cool, except that the page takes forever to load, and when it does, it is so small you can hardly read it. They should stick with the reading experience and leave the internet to IPad.
Neither is perfect. It comes down to aesthetics vs. speed/functionality. The Kobo is well-designed but way too slow. Plus, Kobo's Nav-pad is loud and inaccurate. The Kindle isn't pretty, so the aesthetic experience is so-so. But, the Kindle is fast, has a nice screen, has lots of functionality, such as the dictionary, and excellent navigation. Kindle wins the smackdown.
A note for those concerned about formats and DRM
In general, e-ink is great and they are both good screens. With both, you you can access thousands of free books on the internet. Don't worry about formats on the free books - it's trivial to convert them back and forth with the Cailbre e-book application (free - basically ITunes for Books).
When it comes to buying books, however, it's a different story. DRM (Digital Rights Management), is what all book sellers use to prevent piracy. However, it's not standardized. Which means that you only sort-of own your purchased e-books. You can't read them on a competitor's device. Publishers have made it so that the only way to safely own an e-book that you've legally purchased, is to illegally crack the DRM (allowing you to read it on any device forever into the future). So, which crappy DRM system do you want to get stuck with for your purchased e-books? Hint: there's no good choice. Just read the classics until they get a better system :-)
Addendum, Oct 27, 2010 - see also A Month with My Kindle 3.
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