Review: Kobo Libra Colour - reading experience (part 2)
Continuing from part one, where I unboxed and introduced the Kobo Libra Colour, I'm going to discuss the reading experience in this post.
Kobo's interface & operating system
While the operating system itself is somewhat of a secondary concern, it's key to how you access books in order to read them so I've included it here. From the time of my first Kobo, the interface has only improved with new features being added (collections for example) to help with the reading experience. Kobo has got their interface right in my opinion. I've pretty much never had to read the manual, so the interface is intuitive, and it "just works". Obviously there are features that you don't know about short of reading the manual, or exploring, but the good news is that if you go exploring you don't seem to be able to break anything (the worst you could do seems to be a factory reset / erase).
Reading experience
I showed before that it was nice to have colour book covers available when choosing a book - that was, in fact, the first thing that drew me to the Libra Colour in the first place. Colour doesn't get used so much when reading a book, unless you've added a highlight or the book itself includes a picture of colour text. Unlike the Kobo Aura, where all highlights are a mid-grey, the Libra Colour gives you options of yellow, pink, blue, and green.
Leaving the screen aside, the buttons make such a difference to turning pages. While I got used to the tap or swipe page turns on my Aura, clicking a button to change page feels more natural. It's also always going to work - I find that when my hands get too dry I can't use a touch screen so well (which has led to me choosing books with my nose...).
Like the Aura, the Libra allows you to change the font the book is displayed in. I set my font to OpenDyslexic and adjust the line spacing and font size to my needs. Having that flexibility is the main reason that I switched to using an eInk reader in the first place.
Page turns are nice and quick, even when there are many annotations or drawings on a page. I have noticed that the drawing or annotation "ghosts" (appears faintly) more than standard text does, but that's not usually a problem. If it's really bothering me I just change pages a few times or go back to the home screen to trigger a full screen refresh. Alternatively you can change the full screen refresh rate to fewer pages in the settings.
You can access the table of contents, and move around the book, quickly from the menu. It's also possible to add a bookmark by "folding the top left corner" the same as some people do in paper books. Personally I feel they should be told off for criminal damage, but hey ho! [1]
Dark mode (black background)
When I'm developing code, and writing blog posts, I have the background for my work area in a dark colour (an example below) - we'd call this dark mode.
The Kobo Libra Colour supports dark mode for reading books and articles but I don't get on with it too well. My eyes struggle to track text in this colour combination, which is odd because I don't have a problem tracking my blog editor. As a result, I read my books on a pale background which then benefits from the natural light red-shift setting.
Returning to the home screen, or bringing up a menu item, drops you back into a brighter background. If your eyes have adjusted to the darker light you will get a shock, especially if you have the screen brightness set high. This seems an odd oversight, and one I've seen others mention online, so perhaps Kobo will fix it in an update. In the photograph below you can see the book I'm reading in dark mode with the menus still white. This book also used images for its chapter numbers, which haven't been inverted.
Pocket setup
I've used Pocket, now owned by Mozilla, for years as a way to save articles for later and remove the clutter / distractions from pages. Sadly, "later" could be a long while, as I'm less good these days at actually going back to read the article! What that does mean, though, is that I've got over 100 articles saved "for later". A really nice feature of Kobo's readers is that you can read your Pocket articles on them, which is great because not only are you then looking at a clutter free version, but you're reading on eInk which is better for your eyes.
Initially, only 19 or so articles were pulled down by the Libra - those I'd saved most recently. This isn't a huge issue, as I can still read the articles on my phone or Kobo Aura, but is confusing given my earlier Kobo had every article visible and downloaded. I even checked that I was in the right account - definitely was - so this appears to be a decision on Kobo's part. Subsequently added articles have added themselves correctly.
Reading pocket articles
This seems to work well, with pictures rendering in colour when they're present. I have noticed that sometimes pictures don't appear, yet I can see them on my phone in the Pocket app, so there must be something that the Kobo's Pocket integration doesn't support (perhaps the image is pulled from the Internet at the point of need).
Once you've finished the article you can either archive it, add it to favourites, or delete it. Choosing to delete the article will ask if you want to delete it only from the Kobo or from Pocket overall - I wish there was a default for this so I didn't have to choose each time. I pretty much always want to delete the article from my Pocket account.
It's worth noting that page numbers aren't always accurate - I was just reading an article and got to page "10 of 5". This happens with books too sometimes, depending on the conversion. Not a huge issue, but a bit odd nonetheless.
On to part three
In part three I cover the writing features of the Kobo Libra Colour. These are the reason I picked the Kobo Libra Colour, rather than the Kobo Clara Colour, so I hope you'll find that post useful.
Banner image: Photograph of the Kobo Libra Colour showing some book covers in colour.
[1] Which is odd, given I'll happily highlight and annotate in a paper book - I'd just never fold the corner over...