For the past 10 years I’ve read books exclusively as e-books from Amazon. In December 2014 as I was reading the paperback Bonk by Mary Roach I found myself huddled in the corner of my chair near the light and holding the book to get the most light I could on it. That was ridiculous, so I put the book down and ordered the e-Book edition for my – at that time – little used Kindle Touch. I haven’t looked back. Over the past year I’ve tried to cut back on my dependence on Amazon; as part of that I decided to buy a Kobo Libra 2 from Rakuten.
The last five books I’ve read have been on the Kobo and I enjoyed the reading experience and the feel of the Kobo Libra. I’m a fan of physical page turn buttons and Kobo implements them quite well. My old Kindle Oasis has page turn buttons but it is showing its age. It was an honest trial but I think I’ll be going back to the Kindle for two reasons.
I make a lot of highlights and notes while I’m reading so when I go back to write about it I can easily remember details and my take on them. Both of my problems are related to that highlighting. First: highlighting sections that span virtual pages end up highlighting the whole second virtual page. Once I’ve adjusted the highlighting there is a terrible ghosting on the page. I’ve worked around that problem by going into settings and forcing a page refresh on every new page. Then when I encounter the ghosting I page backward and forward to get a clean page. It is an annoyance but works well enough if it wasn’t for my second problem. Frustratingly, I’ve found that when I review my annotations on the device, or using the iPad app, or even the web site the chapters are reordered in some random fashion. It makes it very difficult to review the book in the order it was written. I’ve tried to figure out how to overcome that problem, but have found on Reddit that others have the same frustration. If I can find a solution to that problem I might continue with the Kobo, otherwise, it’s a problem I just don’t want to deal with.
Amazon e-books have their own problem, most notably the fact that I don’t own the books I pay for; I merely have a license to read them. I think it was in 2009, the early days of Amazon e-books, there was a legal dispute over the novels Animal Farm, and 1984. Amazon simply removed the book from everyone’s Kindles without notice. While I appreciate the irony, it sticks in my memory.
On the off chance you know the solution to my problem with Kobo annotations let me know and I’ll happily continue with my Libra 2.