My new Kobo reader!

Tada!!! I have a new Kobo Reader!!!

It's pretty!! It came in a lovely white box. You slide the *book* from the case, and open it up and there is your beautiful new reader!














The books are so easy to put on the reader! Plug the reader into your computer. Then you can either buy from Kobo, using a program you install on your computer, or load previously purchased books onto it by dragging (or copying) and dropping (or pasting) into the Kobo drive.
Voila! The Kobo takes epub, pdf, AND Adobe Digital Editions. Although I will get into that a bit more later.








This is the Kobo off! Isn't that awesome! It shows the cover of the last book that you were reading, just as though you had closed a print book!










After you have turned on your reader (by holding down the button at the top for about 3 seconds), this is the screen that appears as it is loading.








It takes a few seconds (feels like minutes!) and then......







You get this. This is a current list of the books that you are reading.

If you look at the top it says I'm Reading, and then under that, there is Books and Documents. All of the epub books you load go into Books and pdf goes under Documents.


The button is very easy to use. On the I'm Reading page *center* is enter, left pages back, and right pages forward. AND you guessed it, up is up and down is down.

I like how it shows you what chapter you are on for each book that you are currently reading.





K, I am having issues formating now, and I hate bloggers some days. So I am just going to insert the pics, and then do some descriptions underneath!

Ok, so from top left, clockwise:

1. This menu shows the different ways to organize and sort the books. It is the menu found on the I'm Reading page
   
2. This menu shows what you can do while reading a book - jump chapters, see the table of contents, go back to the I'm Reading/Books/Documents pages, and display.
3. This is what the table of contents looks like. I can jump by parts of the book, or by chapters.
4. This is the different fonts. You can have 5 different sizes and either serif or sans serif

Now, I have has this reader since the day it came out, May 1st. I am loving having a dedicated reader. I love how long the battery lasts. I haven't purposefully charged it, other than when I have been loading books.

Some issues I am having with the reader:

• You can't use the reader while you have it plugged into the computer (I would like to be able to read while it was charging, or to see what books I need to remove as I am done reading)
• I can't delete the books from the reader, I have to remove them when the device is plugged into the computer (going back to the not being able to use while plugged in, it's hard to me to sometimes figure out what books I have read and need to be removed).
• I have converted previously purchased books into epub. The reader didn't totally enjoy that. It wouldn't change the font size. I did a quick Google search and found this. It is a bunch of tips for the Kobo. It gives instructions on how to tweek your epub file so that you are able to change the font sizes.
• I do NOT enjoy the way it reads pdf files. At. All. Basically, think of it this way. The pdf is a bunch of pictures. You can either zoom in or zoom out of the picture. If you zoom in, then you have to scroll through the image to read the whole page. Then you can flip the page. I will be sticking to epub.
• The reader came with 100 free books, but..... you can't remove them. I am not entirely sure what they were thinking with this one, but, I know for a fact that enough people have complained and they are working on a fix. They will be making it (from my understanding) so that you can either remove all of them, or just the ones you want to.
  

Now, so that I don't end with all negative, things that I love:

• It is so bloody light.
• I love how when the reader is powered off, and you have the cover of your book there? It's just like a book!
• I love how easy it is to use. I plugged it in, charged it, and I was good to go. So easy to put my books on.
• I love that it is Canadian! Woot!
• I love that there are no gadgets. It's basically just a book. It doesn't play music. It doesn't surf the net. I also read on my iPhone and I found myself distracted every time I was reading because I would keep getting emails.
• I can buy epub almost anywhere, and almost every book comes in it (or the Adobe Digital Editions!).
• I can read Adobe Digital Editions! How cool is that??? The only problem being that the font can't change :(
  

Looking at this, it appears that there are more negative than positive. I guess there are, but quality over quantity! The pluses outweigh the minuses!

For $150 this reader can't be beat!
You can buy right now at Chapters! - Canadians
Preorder at Borders! - Americans
I'm not sure when it will become International!

You can also follow @Kobo on Twitter for more updates!

Please, if you have any questions about anything I didn't talk about, please please please ask in the comments and I will put together another post answering them.


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Edited to add - I will take some pictures of how pdf and adobe digital look on the reader. I didn't have either on the device at the time I wrote this.