![]() ![]() There are few other e-readers currently on the Canadian market, including the little-known Aluratek Libre eBook Reader Pro for about $170 and the Astak Digital eBook Reader for $290. "We don't believe that segment of the market is going to pay $500 for that device, so coming out at $149 we thought was an ideal price point for a consumer who wants to try e-reading out." "We wanted (an e-reader) that was affordable, easy to use and stylized so the average book buyer who buys a book a month, that's not willing to put out $400 or $500 for an all-singing, all-dancing e-reader, could have something great," he said. Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis said the company set out to make a budget-minded, no frills e-reader that would appeal to the large market of consumers who aren't willing to spends hundreds of dollars to read ebooks. (TSX:IDG) for $149.įeature-wise it's nothing like the iPad and more closely resembles the Kindle and Sony's line of Reader devices, with a few less features. On the other end of the price spectrum is the Kobo eReader, which will be sold in Canada in May through Indigo Books & Music Inc. No Canadian release date has been set but Apple's website says it's coming in "late April." The most basic version starts at US$499 for a WiFi 16-gigabyte model while the most pricey model is $899. The iPad does a lot more than just read ebooks - it browses the web, plays music and video, and games and apps, to name just a few features - but it comes with a price tag to match. on Saturday and is expected to challenge Amazon's Kindle as the dominant e-reader on the market. Drop an unencrypted PDF or ePub document into one of those cloud-storage services, and you can access it directly within the Kobo app to start reading.TORONTO - The market for ebook readers is about to get a little more crowded and readers will likely be able to choose from a full range of options in the months ahead.Īpple's iPad is officially being released to stores in the U.S. Kobo hardware device, which is available for pre-order at Borders stores in the United States.Īs an added bonus, Kobo offers impressive integration withĭropbox (which I tested) and iDisk via Mobile Me (which I didn’t). ![]() Navigating the bookstore is easy enough, but caveat emptor: I learned the hard way that, at least at this writing, Kobo is considered an international retailer: The $9 book I bought had a $2.60 fee added onto it by my credit card company.Īs you’d expect, Kobo can sync your current page between the iPhone and iPad versions of the app, along with versions of the software for Macs and PCs, other smartphones, and the very Kindle-esque ![]() Like Nook and Kindle, to purchase books with Kobo, the app exits and launches Safari. In the iPad version of the app, you can select a theme for Kobo’s virtual bookcase, and even the in-app bookmarks you use, with options like a tassel, a leather strip, or even a wiener dog. I never experience such loading screens in Kindle or iBooks on the iPad. The process rarely takes more than a second or two, but it’s always noticeable. Unfortunately, in Kobo, the pages-remaining feature comes at a price: Whenever you reach a new chapter, the app locks for a moment as it calculates that chapter’s length with your current font settings. I appreciate that feature in iBooks and here in Kobo too, since it’s far more annoying to flip ahead a few pages to see where the chapter ends when you’re reading an e-book. Instead, the app shows you the number of pages remaining in your current chapter. I prefer sepia to a bright white page background, because I find it’s far less abrasive on my eyes.Īlso unlike most of its competitors, Kobo doesn’t offer virtual page numbers. Oddly, unlike almost all of its competitors, Kobo doesn’t offer a sepia-tinged reading mode. I found that using the nighttime mode with the brightness slider at its dimmest setting suited me just fine. While the app doesn’t offer Nook’s myriad options for tweaking the background and text colors, it does hew pretty closely to the Kindle app’s fine offering: You can adjust a brightness slider, and you can enable a “nighttime reading mode” which swaps the background and foreground colors, so that you’re reading white text on a black background. Similarly well-implemented are Kobo’s brightness controls.
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