Score: 6.1 (UPDATED July 20, 2011 - See Below)
First, I have to say to the person who bought me this: it is still the single greatest gift I have ever received. No low score can take away from the heartfelt nature of this gift, or the countless hours I have already spent using its delightfully delightful services.
Yes, it was my wife who bought me this.
In all fairness, I did ask for it for basically six months before this most recent Christmas, when I, like a child, savagely ripping off layers of wrapping paper, feasted my eyes upon the one gift I'd wanted above everything else, and was at one with the world, the universe, and the little poverty stricken orphan Timothy Cratchit. It was the tickle-me-elmo beanie baby wrapped in some other slightly more obscure holiday madness gift with a quaint electric sheen. And it was mine. My heart did flips. I took all my Chapters gift cards I received that same day, and splurged on beginning my electronic book collection. Now, I kind of wish I'd waited.
Which is not to say that the Kobo e-reader is in any way bad. It's not, really. I mean, a little bit. Ok, it's kind of bad. When asked to do nothing but let you read and slowly turn from one page to the next, it performs fine. That was the original reason I asked for it: to read. I didn't want an iPad or any other tablet, I wanted an e-reader, with e-ink. This is because my eyes, which are already seared consistently enough by working at a desk all day, simply could not handle arriving home and having to deal with another glaring LCD screen when all they wanted was some simple, passive, black on white text. Is that too much to ask?
Prior to this Christmas season, the answer had always been "yes". Amazon's Kindle, which has revolutionized ebooks, was still at a price point that was simply too high to justify. Sure, ebooks are a bit cheaper, but I'd have to amass an entire library to make up the price difference (actually it was only about 50-75 books, but still), and the technology still had to prove itself. But along came Kobo, and just in time for Christmas, along came it's $139 price point. Just dear enough to justify a great Christmas present, or so I told my wife. Truth be told, Amazon had come very near to matching that price with their cheaper WiFi only Kindle, but two things directed me to direct my wife to getting the Kobo over the Kindle. #1: Amazon's proprietary DRM ebook format annoyed the hell out of both the library user and open-source geek in me (user only, don't worry), and #2: As weird as it sounds, I wanted to support Kobo, a Canadian company, because I just couldn't bear the sight of my big box book retailer getting shut down by, you know, that other big box American retailer. A flurry of ill-dispensed patriotism sold me on the Kobo.
Selling my wife was a bit harder. Let's just say she's a book purist. It's paper or nothing for her. She rejects ebooks with the veracity of a dog lover thrust into a nest of adorable, cheezeburger has'ing kittens. It's for this reason that I never expected she would actually get it for me, and the same reason I was so child-like upon opening said gift.
My first week of ownership was (to begin a metaphor whose final path I'm not sure I want to know) the honeymoon period. I downloaded and started reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and was loving every bit of it. The readability is excellent, the weight and ergonomics of the device itself are great, the buttons respond well and are laid out nicely, the page-turning speed (the one spec I'd actually cared about deeply) was more than adequate, and not having to earmark my current page (the e-reader does bookmark whatever page you're currently on when you switch it off) was the best thing since sliced bread toasted with sliced cheese. I read that first novel in about a week and a half, and it was then that I noticed my e-readers fatal flaw.
That flaw is battery life. Now, my understanding of e-ink, and one of the great advantages it possesses over LCD screened devices, is that the display itself only uses power when the page is being turned, ie. when the pixels are actually doing some changing around. E-readers, then, are supposedly amazingly power efficient. So efficient, in fact, that they never have to turn off. One of the weirdest things I experienced when I first opened it was that it simply doesn't turn off. You hit the power button and the only change noticeable is that the cover of whatever book you're currently reading replaces whatever else was on the screen. And it stays there. Forever. Or, and this is much more likely, until the battery runs out.
UPDATE (July 20, 2011): I am stupid. This section is not entirely accurate. There are two modes for turning off the Kobo. The first is what I've described above, and is referred to as Sleep mode. The "Powered Off" mode is achieved by holding down the power button longer, and actually stops all power drain. The only difference in view is the wording itself at the top though. It is likely I was sometimes setting it to sleep mode, and sometimes powering it off, and was just too dumb to notice the difference. Because of this inconsistency, I am scoring the Kobo a full point higher. Not so much because I'm sure it will perform better, but because when you're this dumb, you've got to give out freebies as recompense.
See, the device evidently does continue to use power at all times. The engineers who designed the thing obviously figured that the extra power required to boot the OS up and down would be far more damaging to battery life than the steady draw it currently employees. That may be true in situations when people are turning it on and off every hour. But for anyone like me who reads in long intervals and then takes a week off, it's incredibly annoying, because every time I went to go read, the battery was dead.
When the honeymoon started to wrap up, I plugged it in for my first charge, figuring the battery would get better. It only got worse. A full charge lasts about four days of non-reading time. Not fourteen. Not even close. Mix in some reading, say an hour a day, and suddenly it's three days. My previous LG cell phone that I used and left on all day and night, lasted two weeks on a charge, and had an LCD screen. It probably even had the same wattage battery (this was a very slim LG phone). There is a possibility that the one I received was a lemon, and that most other Kobo owners don't have to deal with this problem. The simple reality is it doesn't matter - I'm not a professional reviewer who gets to run through samples until I find one that the company thinks is representative of its standard quality - I get what I get. And what I got is poor design at some stage, whether it's the actual electrical, the other hardware, the firmware, software, something, somewhere, is crap. There was no nice, slow descent into happy married life, it was instant fights about kids, money, and sex (the unholy triumvirate/trinity/triad of unhappy marriage) all at once.
Still, like a man desperate for kids, money, and sex, I stuck through it. I figured we could work it out. I reasoned with myself that yes, it wasn't perfect, but damnit, I was in this for the long haul. I bought more books. I dove into Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which is not a short book, and told myself that I would have had to charge the hard cover version just as frequently as I did the ebook. In short, I began to lie to myself.
After the death knell that was the faked battery life, all the other issues, all the little blemishes and behavioural quirks that, in a normal marriage, you can deal with, started to come out of the wood-work; in this one they were just extra nails in the coffin that our relationship was born into. The menus are overly simplistic and don't allow for ease of picking through pages or hunting for a specific quote. The absence of a keyboard makes even basic activities involving, you know, words, hard. The lack of real page numbers means I can never retain an exact spot. Even the fake page numbers that are provided for each chapter (see my review of Steinbeck for examples) change as soon as you shift the size of the font. On top of everything, my e-reader was inconstant. The Kobo application that's required to buy books and sync them with the reader crashes and hangs occasionally, even mid-purchase. The application's bookstore, while pretty, isn't easy to navigate. The bookstore on the e-reader itself? Fuggadowbdit. Until the most recent firmware update, it was impossible to read while the reader was plugged in to charge, which, as I've mentioned, was every time I was in the mood to read. The USB cord that came with it is too damn short. The list goes on. Again, these are small travesties that get in the way of truly enjoying the device. Under normal circumstances, I could look the other way, but by this time, I'm pissed. I don't want to look the other way. I want to revel in my righteous indignation, and let loose a torrent of hellfire upon the object of my affection/affectation.
These issues I've pointed out thus far are all the reader's problems. They're things that Kobo could control. I have other issues, but these are really just mine.
The biggest is the lack of ebook support from libraries. This, I have to admit, should have been expected. Ebooks just achieved popularity. There's almost no way an industry as big as the publishing one would have a good idea of how to lease out ebooks to libraries, and still make money. The technology is still too young, and the economics of it are still being sorted out. I don't know why, but I expected to be able to log in to my local library and take out a dozen new releases all at once, keep them on my ereader until I'm done, and then return them somehow. It's not there. The groundwork is being laid, but at least where I live, the selection of ebooks are so limited as to be a joke.
My second self-inflicted problem is that Kobo is, I've heard, rather poor for supporting independent publishers and self-publishers. Amazon, meanwhile, has opened up the Kindle, and now anyone can write a book, publish it on Amazon for 99 cents (or more likely 9.99, for reasons of incentivization), and get it out to millions who have bought a Kindle, without ever killing a tree. No such luck with Kobo. I'm not sure if this will change in the future, but right now, it's not the greatest for the small voices who are struggling to be heard. You know, like this guy.
So how does this rather technocentric love story end? Not sure yet. I still have my Kobo, and I still use it for what I wanted it for: reading. But that's it. I find it hard to use as a replacement for a book - the tactile sensation, the ease of use, all the small things that go to make a reading experience pleasant. My Kobo has put everything back in perspective. Whereas before I was so happy to save two dollars when buying an ebook version over a paperback, or ten to fifteen for a hardcover like Freedom, I've since begun moving back to buying physical copies if the price is within a decent range of the ebook (usually about five dollars more). Sure, I've lost the portability, convenience, and good green feelings of owning my entire collection in one little device. But I don't have to charge my paperbacks, and I don't mind bending over the top corners so much anymore. In the long run though, I'm sold. The technology works, it just needs a bit of kneading to make it work well. Whether that's a Kobo in the future, or a Kindle, I'm not sure. But it will be something. I'm in it for the long haul.
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