The Kobo Glo HD e-reader

Last year on 23 September I was given the Kobo Glo HD e-reader as a birthday gift by Stephanie. This e-reader was on my wish list because it features a high resolution for its 6 inch screen, 1,448×1,072 pixels (300 pixels per inch). Last year the were no e-readers, except those from Amazon, which had a comparable resolution.

The high resolution makes text look very sharp, almost as sharp as a real book. It’s sharp enough not to bother me; the lower resolutions of older e-readers did annoy me. The reading experience is good, pages turn reasonably fast. I did notice that in an EPUB file which features endnotes, the numbers for the endnotes affect the line distance. This is ugly; normal endnote numbers are just set in superscript and do not alter line distance. Clicking the endnote numbers for links which take you to the endnote section was also quite hard. I’m not sure if this was the fault of this particular EPUB file, or the software of the Glo HD. Another gripe I have is that it’s compulsury to set up the Kobo e-book store. It’s useless to me because I can’t (or want to) use it, for the reasons described below.

With regards to the EPUB market, I think the DRM is still deterring people from buying e-books. I’ve said it before: DRM can be okay if implemented in a way which doesn’t bother the customer. Such as the Steam service for buying video games. For e-books I need to Adobe Digital Editions to place DRM-protected EPUB files on my ereader. But… Digital Editions is not available for Linux. Since Linux is the only thing I use, I’m pretty much restricted to free titles from Project Gutenberg. Of course there are a lot of good classics to download there, but it’s very strange that e-book vendors make it impossible for me to buy their products. And no, I’m not going to use a Windows PC at work for this. Even if used Windows or Mac OS privately, I wouldn’t want to download extra software which makes the experience more inconvenient just for the DRM.

The publishers should think about using watermarks or some other kind of friendly DRM, or maybe no DRM at all. They are almost driving people to use illegal sources for acquiring e-books. Kill off Digital Editions, please.

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