The Gremlins of Kobo

I bought a Kobo – an electronic book reading device. I justified the purchase this way:

1. My niece, Hannah, has a Kobo and she really likes it. She praised it up and down. I swore to myself that I am never going to be one of those old people afraid of new tech. So a child’s love for her Kobo seemed like a challenge to me. If she loves it, maybe I’d better look into it.

2. The iPod and iPhone have totally changed my relationship with music. I don’t want to own CDs. They just take up space. Could the Kobo change my relationship with books in the same way? I love physical books, but there are a lot of books out there I just want to read and then get rid of. Could the Kobo help me with that?

So I went to Chapters and bought one. It has been a love/hate relationship ever since.

When the Kobo works, it is fantastic. It makes reading fun and fast and portable. I have the entire Illuminatus trilogy, three Mickey Spillane novels, and Studies in the Psychology of Sex (a 6 volume set of books by Havelock Ellis) all in a single device, with plenty of room for more. The screen is very readable compared to a computer monitor, or even the screen on an iPad. I can adjust font size, justification, and many other funky options. The battery life is excellent.

When the Kobo doesn’t work, it is incredibly irritating. And there are some serious glitches.

In all the years I have owned iPods and iPhones, it’s a very rare thing when I need to do a “factory reset”. I’ve had to do it maybe twice, ever.

I’ve had my Kobo less than 2 weeks and I’ve had to do FOUR factory resets so far. And not by choice. The little Kobo tells me, “Holy crap, dude! Something is messed up! Do a factory reset!”

And so I do. It doesn’t take very long, mostly because I don’t have a lot of books. Still, it is irksome.

I can’t say for certain why my Kobo demands factory resets. My best guess, it’s because I am using two different pieces of software to track the books I have on the device. One is the Kobo store. The other is the Adobe Digital Editions tool used to track library books. When I synch the device using Adobe, my Kobo panics.

“Factory reset! Factory reset!”

It doesn’t do this every time -- just often enough to make me irritable and paranoid.

“Will it die this time?” I ask myself as I synch, holding my breath.

Why can’t the Kobo be like an iPod, using one piece of software to track everything on the device? Why use two programs? Is it because the corporate bastards don’t want us checking out library books and other free texts?

My Kobo has a touch screen and WI-FI. But the WI-FI is so painfully slow, it’s unusable. Even surfing the Kobo store is a chore. And sometimes the device becomes entirely unresponsive. I push the little arrow for it to show me the next page of search results. Nothing happens. I push it again. Nothing. I pound on it repeatedly.

“Oh,” says Kobo. “Did you want me to turn the page? I was thinking about something else.”

Kobo naps at other odd, random moments too. I’ll be reading a book, merrily skipping from page to page by tapping the screen. And then I tap the screen and nothing happens. I tap again – and sometimes it skips ahead two pages.

Other times, I tap, nothing happens. And I tap. And tap. And tap, tap, tap -- getting irritable, and then suddenly the Kobo works fine again, going to the next page, pretending nothing just happened.

This error pops up infrequently. But when it does happen, I grind my teeth in fury. Paperback books do not make these kind of stupid mistakes. I turn the page, and we’re done. Like magic.

One interesting feature of the Kobo is a built in dictionary. Press on a word, hold down, and it will highlight it. Press a button, and you’ll get a dictionary definition – assuming the word is in the dictionary.

This is a great feature. The text appears, neatly spaced and bolded. Only sometimes, for no reason, I get a dictionary definition written in raw text, mixed with a gibberish of HTML code. It’s as if the Kobo forgets the dictionary is in HTML and reads it to me in ASCII. I have no idea why this happens. The problem is persistent. After one of my factory resets, it disappeared. Then it came back again.

I guess you could say the Kobo is full of gremlins. These glitches create a superstitious paranoia in me. What if I swipe the screen instead of tapping -- will it turn the page then? What if I surf the Kobo store one way and not another? What if I hold the Kobo this way instead of that?

I demand perfection from my devices. Is that fair? Apple products have me spoiled. My iPhone is nearly flawless, by comparison. It never stutters, skips, or coughs the way my Kobo does. I press the button and the iPhone responds. I touch the screen and it knows where I’ve touched.

The Kobo? Well, it’s a little slow and stupid, the way a child might be. And I find myself rooting for it.

“Come on, Kobo! You can do it! Turn the page, Kobo! I know you want to! You did it 37 times before mysteriously deciding to forget how! Come on!”

And then it turns the page and we both let out a sigh of relief.

Even with these glitches, I love my Kobo. I keep using it. I’ve bought two books, snagged some free stuff, and downloaded more from the library. I’ve read one book and I’m half-way through two more.

Not that I’ve given up entirely on paper. If the Kobo ever gets its act together, and shakes off the few gremlins inside it, I might go that route. For now, it's just a useful, glitchy toy.