On a lark I designed my own skin for my kobo Clara HD. Nothing overly fancy just a little Star Trek PADD vibe.
I dig it, it’s fun and makes reading just a few percent more enjoyable than it already is.
Having Some Fun with my Ereader
Reading
A week with my kobo eReader
The first thing I thought upon picking up the Kobo Clara HD was, “Wow this is crazy lightweight.” Then I put it to sleep after loading the book I’m currently reading, and WTH??? The screen is the cover of the book I’m reading! What? No stupid typewriter keys? No old time-y pens arrayed to look like a cracked screen? I mean, what? Not only that, there’s a little info bar you can activate to show your progress on the book cover you’re seeing.
I know it’s a small thing, seeing the cover of the book you’re reading, but book covers are
1. often pretty nice, why not showcase them.
2. A great conversation starter. Your ereader is laying there, letting people know what you’re reading. As an author, I’ll take all the marketing I can get :)
3. if given the choice of book cover or weird fountain pen caps, I know what I’d choose, every time.
Silos
I mean it’s cool that Kindles are tied into Goodreads, but I think I’m happy to trade that for seeing what I’m reading. I’ve reinstalled the Goodreads app on my phone, so when I start something new I’ll have to at some point open the app and update my status. The ease of use the Kindle/Goodreads connection offers is also part of the problem. Goodreads was a place for readers to collect, and still is, but now it’s more a place for kindle readers to collect. It’d be nice if Kobo integrated (there is, surprisingly, an API) but I’m guessing there’s a reason they don’t.
Buying books is just as seamless as on amazon, and because Amazon is so aggressive with price matching, it’s unlikely you’ll find a book on Kobo that costs more than it’s counterpart on Amazon. A few minutes after purchase it’s on your device ready to be read.
Kobo, like Amazon, appears to let Publishers pick DRM or no. Kobo supports Adobe Digital Editions. Thankfully Calibre can strip that pointless crap with ease. It’s actually easier to strip than Amazon’s propriatary DRM schema. So that’s a bonus.
I don’t advocate pirating eBooks but advocate loudly that DRM is useless (See above) and harms the legitimate owner of content more than it even slightly inconveniences pirates. Thankfully it’s mostly the idiotic larger trad publishers that still think DRM makes sense, and I don’t buy much of their stuff.
User Experience
Enjoyable is an understatement. I mean there’s not a lot you can do on a small eInk screen. You can see it looks similar to what Kindles offer.
It changes as you read things, updating reco’s etc. You can sign into Pocket, which is nice since I tend to hoard things in Pocket, forgetting to open the desktop app, maybe I’ll read more of my articles now LOL.
The screen is responsive and bright. The intelligent back lighting is nice. I know more recent Kindles have this, my 2018 Paperwhite did not. Not only does it shift brightness but color temperature.
The other thing that’s kinda cool and I’m only just getting to dig into, is that you can see some neat graphs of your reading progress.
Library Management
I like that on Device, the Kobo automatically has a “series” view so I can view my books by series. The Author view isn’t just a list of all books, sorted by author name like the Kindle (Unless I just never did it right). It’s a view of author names with the number of books by that author. So I can quickly go to Terry Brooks, then his books, for example.
Of course, there are also collections; I have Scifi, Fantasy, Writing, Business and Unread, as I did before, but now I don’t need to have a Star Wars collection, because I have the series view, likewise Star Trek, or the Frontiers Saga or Omega Force (which is sadly in Kindle Unlimited, so I’m done with that until Joshua Dalzelle takes it wide. ).
I’ve mentioned Calibre in this and my last post, it’s a great desktop tool for managing your ebook files. What’s nice is it has drivers for Amazon and Kobo devices (it seems the Kobo stuff offers more/better integration than Amazon firmware) so you can manage and organize your library then upload to your device. Collections and series data upload as well so when you go to your device, everything is already sorted. With my Kindle it would all dump to the main screen then I’d have to sort into the proper collections. Add to that of course It’d yell at me that my side loaded books wouldn’t sync.
Uploading to the Kobo has proven quite easy, I’m very happy so far with the experience.
Online Library Management
The one place where Kobo falls down is their online library. So long as you’re buying books on Amazon, you can assign them to a collection right from your account pages. It’s not perfect and you can only do it once, but it’s a great way to do initial sorting triage.
On kobo you see all your books and can archive them, that’s it. No organization of any type. You can download your books from that screen, so that’s about its only real use.
In Conclusion
It’s been a week, I’m happy with my choice, I don’t miss the Kindle, and while I’m sure to miss out on stuff that is Kindle Unlimited only, that’s just how it has to be. Thankfully my ebook library is thousands of books, many I’ve not yet read, and as many I’d read again happily.
Clone Wars (The Star Wars I want)
From the start it’s hard to imagine that The Clone Wars is a children’s show. It’s a cartoon, sure, but for kids? I’d argue not really. But that’s not point here, I don’t care if your kids watch war cartoons or not.
I just wanted to share how much I’m loving this (second) final season.
As much as love Star Wars, I’m not that big a fan of most of what’s on offer right now (Book, show or movies). I loved much of the now non-canon legends stuff, and in re-watching Clone Wars I’m super stoked to read the High Republic stuff when it starts getting released.
One of the things I’ve long been irked by what feels like unimaginative story-telling. The prequels were ok (so long as you ignore Jar-Jar and the Ani/Padme marriage stuff). They told a new story. The final trilogy I didn’t really enjoy as it was beat for beat a re-hash. The books meant to tie in the movies weren’t very exciting, the characters largely flat in some, the action/tension mostly missing in others. The new cartoon was, well, cartoonish.
This is a fresh start. I hope Disney makes good on it. This season of Clone Wars has shown that they have it in themselves to kick ass where Star Wars is concerned.
What was your favorite Star Wars “legends” story?
Mine is the Thrawn Trilogy. I’ve read it at least 4 times and still love it.
I failed my 2019 reading challenge.
I’ve been doing the Goodreads reading challenge since, well I think since they started.
This is the first year I’ve failed.
It’s a bummer for sure, but (Without looking to confirm) this is the first year in a while where I read a fair bit of business books. I’ve spent nearly a decade kinda burnt out on them after reading nothing but business books for years.
As I’ve gotten more and more serious about becoming a full-time author though there’s a lot to learn about the business side (plus the craft side as well) and I realize that I read non-fiction much slower than I read fiction. Between re-reading bits, and taking time to digest things, it just slows down the consumption quite a bit. Which isn’t a bad thing.
A hedge
Not to be deterred I’ve signed up for the 2020 challenge and the hedge comes in by setting my goal back to 45. I last set 45 in 2016, but blew it away then and years post and previous. We’ll see.
I haven’t read these few books since 2013, which I suspect was low because I wasn’t great at tracking them in Goodreads yet.
So that begs the question to you. How did your reading go this year?