I have an older kobo device that is perfectly fine for reading epubs, but it does not perform that well anymore. I dislike some of the features of the kobo reader, their push for their cloud things, and that I cannot turn off the branding1.
But overall it is a nice piece of hardware, easy to put into a pocket2 or bag, I can send my books with an usb cable to the device. I don’t know if the software was always slow, or if updates have slowed it down, but kobo seems to struggle with larger files.
I recently bought a massive book (1329 pages). It does not open on the device.
But the open source community has created awesome alternative readers that run on existing devices. I have installed plato. Plato is a sort of app on top of kobo (I don’t really understand how it works). But it is really fast and it opens massive books easily. It is just a beautiful piece of work!
Fonts are very legible, it is fast, it just works3.
Upon review, it seems I can turn it off. edit the line affiliate into ‘affiliate=Kobo’ in .kobo/affiliate.conf. ↩︎
Male jeans pockets only of course, women are not allowed to have functional pockets in their trousers. ↩︎
Plato has many many (too many) swipe gestures, taps and thingies, I only ever tap the sides to move to the next page, not sure if I can turn everything else off? ↩︎