Kobo Touch, Sony Reader or iPad?
In which I contrast the Kobo Touch, Sony Reader and iPad 2 in terms of reading books.
Let me cut to the chase: If I was forced to choose only one of these devices, it would be the iPad. But for the purposes of exclusively reading books I would choose the black Kobo Touch.
First, let me point out some obvious issues, then I'll get to the technical and human aspects of these devices that lead me to make that recommendation. Before you proceed, get yourself comfortable: this soliloquy is going to be a little long.
My priorities for an e-book reader are simple: I must be able to read it comfortably, I must be able to load the books I'm interested in reading, and I shouldn't be locked in to one book seller's store. The Kindle doesn't support ePub, so I didn't review it. The Kobo Touch and Sony Reader support non-DRM "mobi" files (Kindle books), so apart from books that are only available on Amazon, there's no handicap to using either the Kobo or the Sony. When it comes to technical books that I want to read, the 6" eInk display let both devices down.
The Kobo Touch is cheaper, thicker and heavier than the Sony Reader. The iPad is far heavier than both, and far more expensive. It also does more, but not in sunlight. For the purposes of this quick review, I'll only consider utility as a book reader.
While the Kobo is heavier than the Sony Reader, the Kobo Touch has a matte bezel (the bezel is the surround to the screen, the area of the slab by which you hold it). The iPad has a flat but reflective sheet of glass as its entire front surface. The Sony Reader has a bezel that is not just shiny and reflective, but slightly curved on the front, and it has a bevel (the portion of the plastic shell that slopes down from the 1.5mm deep bezel to the screen surface). As a result, the Sony Reader will reflect any available light source into your eyes. The iPad can be angled away from the light source, since it only reflects light coming from one direction. The iPad's reflectivity can be addressed by applying a matte screen protector (at which point your problem becomes incident light making the matte screen visible and reducing contrast of the text you're reading). There is no such option for the Sony Reader.
Of the three devices, the iPad is the fastest: it loads books faster, turns pages faster, turns to bookmarks faster, allows annotating faster, everything is faster. The Sony Reader is second (by a long way), and the Kobo is a close third. The big difference between the iPad and the eInk readers is that the eInk readers will "refresh" the screen to remove ghosts of previous pages. This is a limitation of the eInk technology. The Sony Reader "refreshes" every page turn, the Kobo "refreshes" every 6 by default (you can change this to somewhere from 1 to 6). After using these devices for a while, the refresh issue becomes irrelevant in the same way that you don't really notice page turning when using a paper book. Your brain pauses for a while while "real world stuff" happens, then you get back to the words of your novel and your brain starts processing the drama from where the last page left off. So the refresh isn't really much of an issue: I raise it only to inform you, dear reader, so you are not caught by surprise when you see the screen blinking black before drawing the next page.
The Kobo Touch is available in two bezel colours: black and white (white also comes with choice of different coloured padding on the back). The Sony Reader is available in three colours: black, white and red. The choice of colour is important with the Kobo, since the white bezel is painfully bright in sunlight, and I almost feel I have to wear sunglasses while reading it at my office desk. Choice of colour for the Sony Reader is not really important, since the bezel is reflective and regardless of which colour you choose it's going to be a painful reading experience in anything except subdued ambient lighting.
Both the Kobo and the Sony have soft backs on them, making them easier to hold for long periods. Of the two, the Sony has the nicer padding. But it has that shiny bezel. The Kobo isn't so shiny, so every surface is equally "grippy" and the padding on the back is comfortable. The iPad has a textured aluminium back, which I find comfortable to hold for short periods. The weight of the iPad makes it more convenient to sit it on a table or bookstand while reading, leaving both hands free. I find the eInk readers (Kobo and Sony) easy to hold in one hand, usually by gripping with a "pistol-grip" on a corner. People with smaller hands should be able to do the same: there's no need to try gripping the entire reader: they're light enough to hold with thumb and two fingers.
Once you have the comfortable position, what about actually reading?
The Kobo and the iPad both support swiping and tapping as gestures to turn pages. That is, you swipe from right to left to turn to the next page, left to right to turn to the previous page, or you can tap the left side of the screen to turn to the next page, or tap the right side of the screen to turn to the previous page. The Sony Reader only seems to reliably support swiping. The Sony also has two hardware buttons for turning pages, but they are at the left side of a row of silver (shiny, reflective) buttons on the front of the device: the buttons are not easily accessible if you are holding the reader with one hand and cuppa with the other.
Every now and then I found that the Kobo took just a little too long to turn a page, and I tapped again, only to find the Kobo would then turn two pages because it was trying hard to catch up with me. The Sony Reader didn't have lag problems like this, because it is a faster device to start with (and 50% more expensive, but you get what you pay for). For some people that lag in page turning might be unforgivable: especially if it happens at a climactic moment in the story (one moment you're reading about how the hero is plucking up the courage to talk to the fine gentleman she just saw, then you skip two pages and the potential romantic interest is being carried away in an ambulance … way to ruin a story, Kobo).
Another issue I found with the eInk readers is that the touch screen is overly sensitive. On the iPad, the touch screen can tell the difference between fingers tapping or swiping, versus a palm accidentally resting on the screen. The eInk readers are easily confused by any object that touches the screen, which includes pyjama cuffs and stray bedsheets. So if you're reading in bed on a cold night, you might face some frustration due to bedsheets turning pages for you. Overall, I didn't have much of an issue with this while my partner has been plagued by cuffs and bedsheets turning pages without her permission!
All navigation on the Kobo Touch is done by touching the screen. There are two buttons on the device: the big silver "home" button on the front which always takes you to the "Home" screen, and the sleep/wake slider switch at the top of the bezel which you use to (predictably enough) put the device to sleep or wake it up for reading. Navigation on the Sony Reader is done through a combination of button-presses (a dedicated button on the right of the row of five shiny reflective silver buttons) to bring up the menus and screen-taps to select options and navigate menus. There is also a dedicated button to go back one level through the menus.
I found navigation on the Kobo Touch much easier than on the Sony Reader since everything works through taps. The constant back-and-forth between pressing buttons and tapping the screen made the Sony Reader a disappointing "user experience" in my view. Navigation on the iPad is the easiest of all, with the Kobo Touch a very close second.
When it came to reading the books I want to read, neither of the eInk devices was in the game: the books I read tend to have tables, figures, pictures, and complex formatting. Complex formatting in my case involves such things as poetry books where whitespace is part of the poem, or technical books where source code is presented in a monospace font with different colours for words that form different parts of the programming grammar. The Kobo crashed when trying to load O'Reilly books, the Sony Reader managed to load them, but produced something that was only barely useful. Processing these books through Calibre resulted in books that loaded on the Kobo, though they were still barely useful.
For my particular requirement of being able to read technical books, none of the eInk devices are up to scratch: the screen is too small to see a sufficient quantity of the text, or to see pictures and charts in sufficient size and resolution to make sense of them. Dropping that requirement, the "types of books I want to read" becomes my collection of ePubs that I have from Project Gutenberg, various customer-friendly publishers, and books that I have written myself. Both eInk devices handle this collection with aplomb.
Now one final word about these devices: the iPad is able to take books from the Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other book stores. You'll be using a mix of applications: iBooks, Kindle, Nook and Kobo all have their own specific applications on the iPad. The Kobo is tied to the Kobo bookstore, though you can load books onto it that use Adobe DRM. The Sony Reader is tied to the Sony bookstore, though you can load Adobe DRM books. Most of your books will be locked to your device, and you load them on using Adobe Digital Editions. This works by the "bookstore" delivering to you a token which you then open using Adobe Digital Editions, which then orders a copy of the book that you bought, encrypted using the DRM system such that only the chosen device can read it. Thus if you have a Kobo and an iPad, you will only be able to read the book on the device that you bought the book for.
If you lose your device, you have to authenticate your new device before you can get back to reading your books. You can only reauthenticate 5 times. So if you upgrade six times, you have to buy your books over again. If the bookseller goes out of business, you can no longer read your books. If the bookseller decides you're not supposed to have that book, they can remotely disable that book (e.g. Amazon recalled many sold copies of George Orwell's “1984”)
Some booksellers provide unencumbered books: technical shops such as O'Reilly, Apress and Pragmatic Programmers are amongst those. You can read these books on any device, as many times as you wish.
As for borrowing books from the public libraries: the Kobo works well with Adobe Digital Editions. The Sony Reader only worked with the Sony Reader desktop software.
So summing up: the Kobo is cheaper and has a matte border around the screen (making reading easier), but is heavier than the Sony Reader. The Sony is faster, lighter, but is ever so distractingly reflective. The iPad is faster, heavier, more expensive by far, and not suitable for reading where you have to hold the iPad in one hand for extended periods.
The white Kobo is distractingly white. I would prefer something that was more in keeping with the shade of the screen, which is somewhere in the order of a 15% grey.
If you are only reading novels, I would take the black Kobo Touch. For technical books which are more complex in layout, take the iPad. Reading technical books on the Kobo may require massaging.
Let me cut to the chase: If I was forced to choose only one of these devices, it would be the iPad. But for the purposes of exclusively reading books I would choose the black Kobo Touch.
First, let me point out some obvious issues, then I'll get to the technical and human aspects of these devices that lead me to make that recommendation. Before you proceed, get yourself comfortable: this soliloquy is going to be a little long.
My priorities for an e-book reader are simple: I must be able to read it comfortably, I must be able to load the books I'm interested in reading, and I shouldn't be locked in to one book seller's store. The Kindle doesn't support ePub, so I didn't review it. The Kobo Touch and Sony Reader support non-DRM "mobi" files (Kindle books), so apart from books that are only available on Amazon, there's no handicap to using either the Kobo or the Sony. When it comes to technical books that I want to read, the 6" eInk display let both devices down.
The Kobo Touch is cheaper, thicker and heavier than the Sony Reader. The iPad is far heavier than both, and far more expensive. It also does more, but not in sunlight. For the purposes of this quick review, I'll only consider utility as a book reader.
While the Kobo is heavier than the Sony Reader, the Kobo Touch has a matte bezel (the bezel is the surround to the screen, the area of the slab by which you hold it). The iPad has a flat but reflective sheet of glass as its entire front surface. The Sony Reader has a bezel that is not just shiny and reflective, but slightly curved on the front, and it has a bevel (the portion of the plastic shell that slopes down from the 1.5mm deep bezel to the screen surface). As a result, the Sony Reader will reflect any available light source into your eyes. The iPad can be angled away from the light source, since it only reflects light coming from one direction. The iPad's reflectivity can be addressed by applying a matte screen protector (at which point your problem becomes incident light making the matte screen visible and reducing contrast of the text you're reading). There is no such option for the Sony Reader.
Of the three devices, the iPad is the fastest: it loads books faster, turns pages faster, turns to bookmarks faster, allows annotating faster, everything is faster. The Sony Reader is second (by a long way), and the Kobo is a close third. The big difference between the iPad and the eInk readers is that the eInk readers will "refresh" the screen to remove ghosts of previous pages. This is a limitation of the eInk technology. The Sony Reader "refreshes" every page turn, the Kobo "refreshes" every 6 by default (you can change this to somewhere from 1 to 6). After using these devices for a while, the refresh issue becomes irrelevant in the same way that you don't really notice page turning when using a paper book. Your brain pauses for a while while "real world stuff" happens, then you get back to the words of your novel and your brain starts processing the drama from where the last page left off. So the refresh isn't really much of an issue: I raise it only to inform you, dear reader, so you are not caught by surprise when you see the screen blinking black before drawing the next page.
The Kobo Touch is available in two bezel colours: black and white (white also comes with choice of different coloured padding on the back). The Sony Reader is available in three colours: black, white and red. The choice of colour is important with the Kobo, since the white bezel is painfully bright in sunlight, and I almost feel I have to wear sunglasses while reading it at my office desk. Choice of colour for the Sony Reader is not really important, since the bezel is reflective and regardless of which colour you choose it's going to be a painful reading experience in anything except subdued ambient lighting.
Both the Kobo and the Sony have soft backs on them, making them easier to hold for long periods. Of the two, the Sony has the nicer padding. But it has that shiny bezel. The Kobo isn't so shiny, so every surface is equally "grippy" and the padding on the back is comfortable. The iPad has a textured aluminium back, which I find comfortable to hold for short periods. The weight of the iPad makes it more convenient to sit it on a table or bookstand while reading, leaving both hands free. I find the eInk readers (Kobo and Sony) easy to hold in one hand, usually by gripping with a "pistol-grip" on a corner. People with smaller hands should be able to do the same: there's no need to try gripping the entire reader: they're light enough to hold with thumb and two fingers.
Once you have the comfortable position, what about actually reading?
The Kobo and the iPad both support swiping and tapping as gestures to turn pages. That is, you swipe from right to left to turn to the next page, left to right to turn to the previous page, or you can tap the left side of the screen to turn to the next page, or tap the right side of the screen to turn to the previous page. The Sony Reader only seems to reliably support swiping. The Sony also has two hardware buttons for turning pages, but they are at the left side of a row of silver (shiny, reflective) buttons on the front of the device: the buttons are not easily accessible if you are holding the reader with one hand and cuppa with the other.
Every now and then I found that the Kobo took just a little too long to turn a page, and I tapped again, only to find the Kobo would then turn two pages because it was trying hard to catch up with me. The Sony Reader didn't have lag problems like this, because it is a faster device to start with (and 50% more expensive, but you get what you pay for). For some people that lag in page turning might be unforgivable: especially if it happens at a climactic moment in the story (one moment you're reading about how the hero is plucking up the courage to talk to the fine gentleman she just saw, then you skip two pages and the potential romantic interest is being carried away in an ambulance … way to ruin a story, Kobo).
Another issue I found with the eInk readers is that the touch screen is overly sensitive. On the iPad, the touch screen can tell the difference between fingers tapping or swiping, versus a palm accidentally resting on the screen. The eInk readers are easily confused by any object that touches the screen, which includes pyjama cuffs and stray bedsheets. So if you're reading in bed on a cold night, you might face some frustration due to bedsheets turning pages for you. Overall, I didn't have much of an issue with this while my partner has been plagued by cuffs and bedsheets turning pages without her permission!
All navigation on the Kobo Touch is done by touching the screen. There are two buttons on the device: the big silver "home" button on the front which always takes you to the "Home" screen, and the sleep/wake slider switch at the top of the bezel which you use to (predictably enough) put the device to sleep or wake it up for reading. Navigation on the Sony Reader is done through a combination of button-presses (a dedicated button on the right of the row of five shiny reflective silver buttons) to bring up the menus and screen-taps to select options and navigate menus. There is also a dedicated button to go back one level through the menus.
I found navigation on the Kobo Touch much easier than on the Sony Reader since everything works through taps. The constant back-and-forth between pressing buttons and tapping the screen made the Sony Reader a disappointing "user experience" in my view. Navigation on the iPad is the easiest of all, with the Kobo Touch a very close second.
When it came to reading the books I want to read, neither of the eInk devices was in the game: the books I read tend to have tables, figures, pictures, and complex formatting. Complex formatting in my case involves such things as poetry books where whitespace is part of the poem, or technical books where source code is presented in a monospace font with different colours for words that form different parts of the programming grammar. The Kobo crashed when trying to load O'Reilly books, the Sony Reader managed to load them, but produced something that was only barely useful. Processing these books through Calibre resulted in books that loaded on the Kobo, though they were still barely useful.
For my particular requirement of being able to read technical books, none of the eInk devices are up to scratch: the screen is too small to see a sufficient quantity of the text, or to see pictures and charts in sufficient size and resolution to make sense of them. Dropping that requirement, the "types of books I want to read" becomes my collection of ePubs that I have from Project Gutenberg, various customer-friendly publishers, and books that I have written myself. Both eInk devices handle this collection with aplomb.
Now one final word about these devices: the iPad is able to take books from the Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other book stores. You'll be using a mix of applications: iBooks, Kindle, Nook and Kobo all have their own specific applications on the iPad. The Kobo is tied to the Kobo bookstore, though you can load books onto it that use Adobe DRM. The Sony Reader is tied to the Sony bookstore, though you can load Adobe DRM books. Most of your books will be locked to your device, and you load them on using Adobe Digital Editions. This works by the "bookstore" delivering to you a token which you then open using Adobe Digital Editions, which then orders a copy of the book that you bought, encrypted using the DRM system such that only the chosen device can read it. Thus if you have a Kobo and an iPad, you will only be able to read the book on the device that you bought the book for.
If you lose your device, you have to authenticate your new device before you can get back to reading your books. You can only reauthenticate 5 times. So if you upgrade six times, you have to buy your books over again. If the bookseller goes out of business, you can no longer read your books. If the bookseller decides you're not supposed to have that book, they can remotely disable that book (e.g. Amazon recalled many sold copies of George Orwell's “1984”)
Some booksellers provide unencumbered books: technical shops such as O'Reilly, Apress and Pragmatic Programmers are amongst those. You can read these books on any device, as many times as you wish.
As for borrowing books from the public libraries: the Kobo works well with Adobe Digital Editions. The Sony Reader only worked with the Sony Reader desktop software.
So summing up: the Kobo is cheaper and has a matte border around the screen (making reading easier), but is heavier than the Sony Reader. The Sony is faster, lighter, but is ever so distractingly reflective. The iPad is faster, heavier, more expensive by far, and not suitable for reading where you have to hold the iPad in one hand for extended periods.
The white Kobo is distractingly white. I would prefer something that was more in keeping with the shade of the screen, which is somewhere in the order of a 15% grey.
If you are only reading novels, I would take the black Kobo Touch. For technical books which are more complex in layout, take the iPad. Reading technical books on the Kobo may require massaging.