What we can compare is the quality of the general purchasing experience, and here again Amazon comes out ahead for me. Their recommendation engine, while sometimes overzealous, is extremely valuable.
It has gifted me with some of my favourite literary discoveries, including the immensely talented Ted Chiang, whose book of short stories was among my favourite reads of last year. I would never have discovered his work if not for Amazon. The search results can also be somewhat puzzling, with multiple copies of what seems to be the same book appearing as different entries. One aspect that Kobo will probably never bring to parity is the review ecosystem.
For any given product, there will often be a host of user and professional reviews, easily accessible even on the Kindle, to help you decide whether or not you want to read the book in question. And not by a small margin. When I went to purchase it, I opted to look on both devices to see which had the more favourable deal. One extremely important advantage that Kobo e-readers have is compatibility with open book formats. Calibre is a hideous but extremely powerful piece of software that facilitates the management of ebooks.
It includes powerful tools for converting between ebook formats, and it handles it all invisibly. You can simply connect your Kindle to your computer and send a bunch of EPUB books to it—Calibre will automatically convert them into a compatible format for you before transferring. Essentially, Calibre obviates the need to worry about what formats your e-reader of choice is natively compatible with, so you can focus your attention on other criteria when making your choice.
That being said, I found that sending Amazon books to the Kobo via Calibre required some extra work, with a separate plugin required to enable chapter reading times and other standard functionality. Despite the promise of being focused, e-readers are not truly as uni-functional as I made them seem. The difference is that their additional features are almost always enhancements designed to augment the reading experience, not distract from it.
This is an obvious feature that both devices share, but if we dig deeper we see more evidence of differing design philosophies. On both devices, tapping and holding a word pops up the dictionary definition. This is the bare minimum, and I consider it a missed opportunity. The number of hints is also adjustable, so you can tailor it to your reading level. Kids earn badges too, which is a clever bit of gamification.
Also worth mentioning, something of particular interest to readers in different languages, is that Kindles have a robust translation engine built in that can quickly display large passages of text in your native language. This capability, powered by Bing Translator, can even automatically detect languages so you can quickly look up a short French passage in your English book, for example.
What Kobo e-readers do have is something called Beyond the Book, which provides extended info for highlighted text in supported books, including related web articles, related books, and related authors.
Effectively, any passage becomes the centre in a spiderweb of information for you to explore. This might be an appreciated feature for some, but it feels out of place to me on an e-reader. I mentioned X-Ray earlier as an additional tab that appears when you highlight a word to get its definition. For supported books, X-Ray is like a built-in Spark Notes. Highlighting a character name will surface a bio and all appearances of that character in the book. When you look at these competing features, Beyond the Book and X-Ray, it seems clear that the latter was designed to improve the reading experience explicitly, whereas the former serves as a distraction from it, sending you away to other articles, other books, other places than the current read.
You can expect to find X-Ray enabled in many modern books you buy for your Kindle, but Beyond the Book is relatively uncommon, even for current bestsellers. This difference in philosophy applies to other enhancements as well. Kobo has a built-in achievement system, a Reading Stats area, and games sudoku, chess, solitaire, etc. The former are very neat, especially the reading stats, but the latter is another example of something I just find strange to include on an e-reader.
And now I can do so seamlessly. Re-downloading, even re-booting are ineffective. Unfortunately, I use Safari as my main browser, so my process for getting articles onto my Kindle is as follows:. For someone like me who reads a lot of articles, this is a transformative improvement and the single most tempting aspect of the Kobo. For every feature like Pocket integration that has me lusting after a Kobo, I remember something like highlights and annotations, and suddenly my loyalty to Amazon is reinvigorated.
Not only that, but it can be interesting to see what others have highlighted via the Popular Highlights option. This is precisely the sort of limitation that I was glad to be rid of with ebooks, so to have to contend with it again is terrible. In fact, the only legitimate way to get a highlight off the Kobo is to share it to Facebook. The only social network I want to interact with while reading is the one designed for it: GoodReads.
Speaking of sharing, Amazon is keen to provide multiple ways of sharing your books legitimately. For one thing, they have the Kindle Lending Library, which is a perk of your Amazon Prime membership that allows you to freely borrow more than , books. This is exciting for friends, but it gets even more fun with the power of the internet: a popular subreddit exists where people can request books they want to read and have kind citizens loan it to them.
Furthermore, Kindles recently gained the ability to link Amazon accounts, allowing family members to share purchases.
This might change soon though, as the parent company, Ratuken, recently announced its acquisition of OverDrive, the established firm that powers book lending in the United States.
As I was working on this comparison, I found myself surprised at how much my opinion fluctuated. I expected the conclusion to be fairly self-evident, easy to pin down. The truth is that which one you choose will come down to how you prioritize your criteria for e-reading. Neither is perfect. But one may be more suitable for your needs. On the other hand, I adore the highlighting functionality of the Kindle, as well as its various subtle enhancements to the reading experience, which I feel are more in line with my desire to stay focused.
Lastly, double click the acsm file to download this Kobo book as epub or pdf book via ADE to your computer. When you launch Epubor Ultimate, you will find that your Kobo books downloaded through Kobo Desktop are displayed under Kobo tab on the left sidebar.
Being able to decrypt Kobo books is a prerequisite for converting Kobo books to other formats. After the decryption, choose the format supported by your devices or reading apps and click Convert button to start the conversion. Tips: you can find the decrypted or the converted books by clicking the book folder icon in the lower right corner of the software. You just have the right to access to your Kobo books whenever you want. Only when you remove DRM from Kobo books and back them up to your computer, they are totally yours.
Hillary Lopez works for Epubor and writes articles about eBooks and eReaders. She explores the best method to help you read eBooks more freely and wants to share all she has got with you. You want to transfer your digital library from your old Kobo e-reader to your new e-reader. That seems complicated. Below, we explain how to do in an easy way, so you can also put books on your e-reader if you don't have a degree in IT. Reread your favorite e-book or start that one e-book that's been on the digital your to-be-read pile of your old e-reader for the longest time.
Transfer books to your Kobo e-reader What do you need? Transfer books to your Kobo e-reader. View all Kobo e-readers. What do you need? A fully charged e-reader charge for 4 hours before use Included micro USB cable. The username and password of your current Kobo account. When you login with this account, you can transfer previously purchased books from the Kobo Shop.
A laptop or PC, when you want to transfer your library of e-books that you purchased somewhere else. The username and password of your current Adobe Digital Editions account.
Also read: "Where do I download e-books? Transferring books from the Kobo Shop to your e-reader. Transferring other books to your e-reader. Transfer books directly. Connect your old e-reader to your computer and click Connect.
Create a new folder on your computer. Copy all books to the map that you just created. Disconnect your old e-reader. Connect your new e-reader to your computer. Use Windows Explorer or Finder to drag the books from the newly created folder to your e-reader.
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