Parent vs. Reader, Round 3: Mom vs. ‘Thingie’

I got my mother the Kobo Reader as a combined Mother’s Day/retirement present. She had been lukewarm on the idea of ebook readers (she could not imagine a situation where there wouldn’t be a paper book around) but I just knew that once she got the hang of it, an ebook reader would be something she’d enjoy.

I’ve been talking it up and she’s sort of been listening, but I knew I had her when I told her the case (an M-Edge Kindle sleeve that is a bit over-long for the smaller Kobo) was pink, and she grimaced and said she would have to look for something more suitable. And I knew I really had her when we learned that one of her peers (my sister-in-law’s mother) has a Sony Reader and loves it!

First Impressions

Mom was impressed by the appearance of the Kobo. She found it light and comfortable to hold. I think that for a newbie like her, it was really important that there weren’t too many buttons. She is more capable with computers and technology than she thinks she is, but she doesn’t love techie stuff and gets easily overwhelmed—in fact, her response to the issue of where to get content was ‘I don’t need to worry about getting books because I can just have you get them for me and then come over and put them on it.’

I was able to get her comfortable going back to the home screen, selecting a book and turning the pages. I did not get into advanced options like how to change the bookshelf view or how to change access the help screens. Mothers have no need for help screens because if they need help with such things, they simply phone the child who gave it to them. It is a well-known law of the universe that buying a gizmo for a parent indentures the child to unlimited tech support for the life of the gizmo, isn’t it?

Installing the Software

The Kobo software is in my opinion not ready for prime time. I had successfully removed books from my ‘I’m Reading’ list to avoid having to sync 50 books at once, but could not figure out how to add them back in again to show Mom. And the whole conceit of the ‘I’m Reading/My Library’ set up in the first place is inefficient and unnecessary. Why not just have the books all in one pool and let the user drag and drop them like they can with iTunes?

To that end, I decided to give Mom the Adobe Digital Editions software. I also thought she might want to read library books, so the ADE software would give her the most options and only make her learn one program.

We had a few glitches installing both the Kobo and Adobe software. I had left a few of my own books on there just so she’d have something contemporary to try (she told me she didn’t want classics) and I figured that once we had the software up and running, she would replace them with her own books. But both the Kobo software and Adobe software didn’t like that I had books on there from another account not authorized to the computer, and kept throwing out error messages.

I did find that ADE set up much easier than my old Sony software had been—it detected the reader right away and asked if I wanted to authorize it, rather than making me go into the preferences and do this manually as I had in days gone by with my old Sony.

Mom ignored the whole software set-up process (it was around this point that she started talking about how she didn’t need any software because I would just get her the books) and although I explained that transferring books via ADE really was not that hard, she didn’t listen.

Bonding with the Kobo

We have to get Mom a cool nickname for the reader. She kept calling it the ‘thingie’ (and continues to do so; she called me the next day and referred to it by this name when she told me she had already been using it) and although she was somewhat delighted when she learned that ‘Kobo’ was an anagram of ‘book’ I don’t think she’ll call it that.

There are some encouraging signs that Mom is adapting to ebookhood, though. Among her other Mother’s Day gifts was an Indigo gift card (Indigo is our version of Borders or Barnes & Noble, and the retail partner of Kobo) and she asked me if she could use the gift card to buy ebooks too. And she asked me if I could please bring over some Nora Roberts and Jodi Picoult next time I come and put them on the thingie for her.

Success! I have another convert to the cause, and a very happy newly retired mom with a fledgling ebook hobby. Happy Mother’s Day indeed.