I’ve already written about the Kobo Libra Colour e-reader — one could even say I’ve written too much about it1And just so there’s no confusion: I’m obviously kidding about getting ad revenue for these posts, since this blog doesn’t have ads. It’s just my latest hyper-fixation, and I think it’s neat. — but I keep falling back into the style of aping internet tech reviews. I haven’t called out what might be the best thing about it.
One of my key takeaways is that it just “gets out of the way,” which is underselling it. The entire UX — and the distinction between user interface and user experience is especially significant here — is designed around letting you read (and annotate, if that’s what you’re into) your stuff.
There’s absolutely still a Kobo store selling DRM-protected licenses for books, just like on Kindle devices, but the key difference is that it feels designed around convenience instead of consumerism. It’s never more than a couple of taps away, but the key difference is that it’s always at least a couple of taps away.
On the home screen, the Kobo brings your existing library to the forefront, along with multiple entry points to OverDrive (if you have it connected) to get books from your library. On the “My Books” tab, the search bar defaults to searching through your library, and you have to explicitly choose to look through the Kobo store instead. Even on the “Discover” tab, which is essentially the Kobo storefront, OverDrive is given a prominent position at the top. Half the screen is dedicated to a daily sale offer, to get a recommended book for one or two bucks. And there are algorithmically-generated lists of recommendations to buy higher-margin books, similar to the Kindle. But it also gives prominent placement to your own wishlist, the books you’ve explicitly said you’re interested in, as opposed to the books that are being shoved in front of your face.
That’s in addition to the more “open” feel of the Kobo in general. There are multiple routes to getting your own DRM-free books and documents onto the device, whether it’s Dropbox, Google Drive, or a USB cable. It’s directly integrated with Pocket, if you want to read articles you’ve saved from the web.2And you don’t mind using a product from Mozilla, since I guess everybody is a bad guy these days. Even the books sold through the store and containing DRM are typically in a variant of the standard EPUB format, instead of Amazon’s proprietary AZW variants.
It’s subtle enough that I didn’t think to call it out. And that’s a shame, because it’s a huge part of why I chose the Kobo in the first place.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve suddenly become one of the hard-line “no ethical consumption under capitalism!” types. Or for that matter, any of the people who’ve been running around the internet since the early 2000s like Charlton Heston at the end of Soylent Green, screaming “you’re the product! You’re the product!!!“
Partly because it seems false, but also because it’s infantilizing. We’re undeniably influenced to make decisions based on what profit-driven companies decide to present to us, but we’re still adults making decisions. I still would recommend a Kindle to anyone who’s still comfortable buying from Amazon, because they’re well-made devices being sold at a price that’s affordable due to Amazon’s margins. It’s all about each responsible adult choosing the point at which the concessions are more than they’re willing to put up with.
I think it requires consumers to be mindful-if-not-absolutist about the choices we make. And companies to keep the balance in mind, making sure that their responsibility to customers is the most important constraint. I feel like it’s easy for people like me looking at consumer technology, including something as innocuous as an e-reader, to pay too much attention to how sharp and high-contrast the monochrome Kindle renders its shopping cart on every page, instead of asking why there needs to be a shopping cart on every page.
