Kobo Wireless Reader review: Setting up my Dad

I’ve been using my Kobo reader for a while now, and will get into my own experiences with it soon. But for this review I’m going to concentrate on the experience of getting my Dad set up with his Kobo today. I went down to visit over the weekend, and took the opportunity to get it all set up for him.(He had already ordered a smart tough zipper case for it.)

Dad found the set-up instructions rather confusing—he said after reading them he didn’t know anything more than when he’d begun. But since he had me to help him, that didn’t become much of an issue. Most of it was just a simple matter of plugging the device in, anyway.

One nice point I found right away is that since it uses a standard micro-USB connection, he could use same cable he uses with his digital camera (the same way I do, in fact) and not use up another port. I showed him how to copy books onto it as a USB hard drive, and then played with the included Border Desktop software a little before determining it was totally useless.

How useless? The library display showed only five out of the 100+ public-domain books included with the device. (I’m still not even sure they were actually on the device itself; they might just have been included in the Borders Desktop software. But there wasn’t any way to tell!) Trying to “sync” the reader with it first required the creation of a Borders account…and then didn’t do anything. Bwah? It did download a software update for the device, which I suppose means it wasn’t completely useless, but it didn’t do anything else we wanted.

Given that my Dad wanted to get rid of some of the included titles, I didn’t really see much alternative but to install Calibre. I had wanted to avoid it, fearing that its complicated nature might be too much to handle, but I wanted something that I knew for a fact worked and didn’t feel like trying to play around with Adobe Digital Editions.

Fortunately, the process of installing and deleting books was simple enough that I could set up a library for him and show him how to get rid of the books he didn’t want and add new ones, and he was able to handle that much of the process. Since I associated Calibre with the EPUB file type, adding the files is just a matter of downloading them and then clicking on them in the download list to open them.

Dad eyed the pages of Project Gutenberg with all the avarice of a librarian/booklover who has just discovered he has an instant-delivery library card to one of the biggest public-domain libraries in the world. He browsed or searched on some of his favorite authors and reflected on how they’d written far more books than expected. He expressed interest in reading some of the titles that were bundled on the reader, too, but felt some of them were odd choices.

As for the Borders e-book store, he did set up an account, but I don’t expect him to make any purchases there. For my fairly frugal father, even $2.99 might be too high a price. He never buys even paperback books new—why should he when he can get most them used for 99 cents plus shipping from Amazon?

With that in mind, I find it unlikely he’s going to want to pay money for a new e-book he can’t then pass on to someone else. (Granted, he could also browse the selection of free books from Borders—but given that he probably won’t have the time to read all the free public-domain books he wants, it doesn’t seem likely he’d find much to interest him there.) Consequently, we didn’t bother to set up the wifi connection—it’s only useful for the Borders store, and he wouldn’t be buying anything there anyway.

One thing we noted was that this e-reader isn’t really going to be the most useful for Bible reading in church, however. In order to look up citations quickly, you have to be able to click on links within the text. You might go to “Matthew” from the table of contents, then click on “10” to get to Chapter 10. You can do that with the iPad, or iPod Touch. I imagine there are ways to do it with the Kindle, too. But you can’t (as far as I know) click on links with the Kobo. (If anyone knows of some way it’s possible, I’d like to hear about it.) This also means you can’t read footnotes with it, a slightly more serious problem when reading non-fiction works or the Discworld novels.

Still, for the novels that are 99% of the reading he’ll do with it, he expects it will work out fine. I hope I can get him to contribute a column with his thoughts after he’s read a few books on it.