48 hours. That is the total time my latest geek purchase has been in my possession. Barely did the Kobo Elipsa come from the package, or the return-to-sender slip was rolling out of the printer. TLDR? : Wonderful hardware, terrible software. The years between my last Kobo (somewhere in 2012) and the purchase of my latest, have proven that Kobo still has a way to go when it comes to writing good and simple software for their devices. After being frustrated with the Elipsa’s glitchy behaviour in annotating, notetaking and plain READING of documents I decided NOT to go the “I’ll just early-adopter my way through this” and go : Screw this, I just wanna read.
So now what ?
Having spent too many hours on Youtube researching this little project I knew I still had 3 options left. An Onyx Book Tab (expensive and with a sub-par epaper display), A Remarkable (That comes without a backlight and has a frigging subscription model to be able to read your own damn notes) OR a Kindle Scribe.
Uncle Jef’s bookstore.
Over the years I have owned several Amazon E-readers. From a regular Kindle, to a Kindle Voyage and a Kindle Oasis. The build quality and the quality of the display is top notch, but when it came to sideloading books it was always a little bit of a hassle. You could “mail books” to your device but those needed to be in PDF or .mobi format. Calibre took care of that but setting it up was a little cumbersome.
On that part I preferred the way of working of the Kobo (Picks files straight from Google Drive or Dropbox) or the Onyx Boox which sucks up to any Android cloud sync app you want. And the actual management of your sideloaded books in your Amazon library becomes problematic if you have a larger collection. But I get it : The whole point of buying a Kindle is to buy books in the Amazon bookstore.
Amazon has come quite a way.
BUT, Amazon has come a long way. I can use the “Send to Kindle” webpage to upload any epub, pdf or what have you to my Kindle Library and boom .. its there. I can download an epub file on my phone, share it to my Amazon Kindle app on my phone and boom… it’s in my library.
The upside of using THIS system is that I am restoring “continuity” across my devices. I can read my sideloaded books on my iPad, Phone, Android device (Onyx Boox reader) and pretty soon on soon to arrive Kindle Scribe. If the image quality of the Oasis and Voyage have been anything to go by, I may be looking forward to a well built device with a crisp screen and simple but solid software.
And with my lovely wife finally making the switch to digital reading, being able to manage our E-book collection and keep tracks of what we are reading (across different devices) is becoming more and more important. So I’m looking forward to a simple but effective digital reading solution that just works so I can stop fretting with ‘stuff’ and get back to my book.