Kobo Unboxing

It's a few days late, but here are some pictures from the Kobo unboxing. It is a great little machine, and it's a great entry to the eReader world. It's a fine eReader, and works as advertised, and I hope that it will become more of a mainstream device. I've read about a book and a half on it, and I'm very satisfied in how it works. The selection of the Kobo book store is at least as good as the Amazon Kindle store, and often times better, so there will be no shortage of reading content. In addition, it also will handle ePub and Adobe Digital Editions, which will allow it to take ebooks out from the library (something that the Kindle likely won't do). I wholehearted give my recommendation for it.

Straight from Chapters: It arrived the day before they were sold in stores.

I thought that it came in very classy packaging.


The package came apart like a book in a dust cover


And then opened like a book


The Kobo in all its glory


It does have a nice, slim formfactor

And this brings us to the conclusion of the Kobo unboxing. Definitely a worthy gadget to add to my collection!

Koboriffic

I’m not sure why I’m as excited for my Kobo ereader as I am. I mean, I have many other electronic devices, and yet the Kobo is rivalling the excitement level that I had when I got the PS3, and while the Kobo will be a fantastic device, it hardly, “Does Everything”. I suppose it could be that the Kobo represents a new territory for electronic devices. I feel that electronic readers will be very important to the future. I’ve heard the argument many times of people saying, “Why not just use a paper book?” or, “I would prefer books.” I can honestly understand those arguments, have even said them myself, but to those people, I want to say, “Have you ever seen eINK?” It’s a technology that needs to be seen to believed. It’s like Morpheus in the Matrix, “No one can be told how good eINK is, you have to see it for themselves.” That being said, I have no illusions: the Kobo eReader is a first generation device, similar to the Diamond Rio MP3 player of old or maybe even a first-generation iPod (if it’s lucky). eReaders of the future will do away with some of the annoyances of this generation (screen flicker in page turns, etc) and will likely be cheaper and better. The Kobo platform will allow me to carry my eBook library into the future onto those devices, as it uses the widely agreed upon standard of ePub.


The other gigantic advantage of ereaders over traditional paper books is weight and portability savings. As someone who just moved boxes and boxes of books, being able to simply carry a single CD or DVD that contains my entire library will be sweet. This extends to bringing books on trips. 1 GB of internal memory is more than enough to care hundreds of books, so next time I go on a trip I’ll be able to bring a few series of books with no additional weight cost.


I suppose the final reason why I am excited for the Kobo is I hope that it will reignite my love of reading. It’s not that I don’t love reading – I just don’t do it much any more. Historically, I have always been a voracious reader. As recently as the years from 2001-2003 I read several books per month and even up to 1 per week. That being said, I don’t think that I will ever reach those levels again as my life has changed too much. I have much less free time, but I do hope that I will at least get back into reading to some degree. I guess that is where most of my excitement lies.