Back in July I thought I would spend a little money on a treat for myself. I didn’t need an new ereader (my old Aura was still working ok, albeit was a bit battered) but I wanted to check out the side handle on the Libra to see if it was more comfortable when reading at night.

A recap

I started back in 2009 with a Sony PRS-650. I used that until its battery died. Then I switched to a  Sony PRS T1  in 2013.

In 2014 I got a new Aura HD because I wanted a backlight (and was immediately a bit annoyed when I realized you needed to have a Kobo account just to use it to read books). I worked around that by having an account for the ereader that I never used and a separate account for any purchases I made and side loaded all my books through Calibre. This got replaced in 2017 with a new generation Aura after an unfortunate accident involving a suitcase and hard airport floor.

New reader

Which brings me to this year and my new Kobo Libra 2 with a colour screen. It’s not bad. I don’t much have use for the colour screen and the variable colour backlight is a bit annoying (more on that later). But over all I like the way it feels in the hand, like the fact the page turn buttons are back (haven’t seen them since the Sony) and am appreciative of the move to usb C.

Account registration

One of the bonuses was I looked into the whole “must have an account to use” idiocy again and found a hack:

1. Connect Libra Colour to PC.
2. Go to \.kobo\Kobo and find the Kobo eReader.conf file.
3. Open the file and add the line SideloadedMode=true under the [ApplicationPreferences] section.
4. Done! The device will now display the “My Books” tab straight away, and the online store will be disabled. You can re-enable everything by doing the same thing and adding SideloadedMode=false instead of true.

You lose the  main screen that shows the Books Reading etc but since I rarely used that its no great loss.

The downside is there are a number of “ghost” titles in the lists showing up under Author view that must have been something to do with promotions and I assume they would have been deleted int eh intial setup but annoyingly show up when I am browsing books on the ereader itself.

I have screwed around with editing the hidden KoboReader.sqlite file on the eredaer and while I can find the books in some tables, deleting them doesn’t seem to get rid of them. I imagine there are associated tables I need to clean as well but so far no joy unless I want to delete everything and start over. Still a possibility…

Battery life

I had/have a beef with the battery though. The Libra has a fancy dimming functionality. If you set bed time for, let’s say 11:00 pm, it will start slowly changing the colour of the backlight from cool (blue) to warm (orange) and dimming the screen for reading in the dark. I thought this was the cat’s meow.

But.

The battery life sucked. I mean I was recharging every 4 days! One night I hit the 10% battery life warning which used to mean I had several hours of charge left and it went out on me in less than 15 minutes. This was beyond unacceptable. I didn’t want colour at all, let alone if it was going to be such a huge battery suck. But googling yielded no solutions or even anyone else’s notice of the problem — I was starting to think maybe I got a dud ereader.

Then I started fiddling with settings and one night turned off the automatic dimmer and dialed the backlight down to 30% — which is a bit below my preferred level but workable. The next morning the battery indicator showed it was still full. Aaargh. I have left it that way and played with the colour and level and so far so good. It has only been a couple of days but the improvement is significant. I will keep on playing and see if I can nail down the exact battery-draining culprit, but so far it seems its just the timing function. Why Kobo would have such a ridiculous battery suck as a bart of the software is beyond me.

Happy?

I think so. I like the handle and page turn buttons. Now that the battery is better I have more faith in it (although I now keep my old Aura up to date and charged in case). It is a bit more bulk and doesn’t fit in a pocket anymore but that’s not an issue I care too much about except when my hands are full. And it is zippy! Interface things the Aura used to do badly like scrolling actually make sense now that the response is immediate instead of having to pause between touches.

But if I am feeling rich again I might finally break down and try a Boox or a Pocketbook. Still annoyed at Kobo? Why yes, how could you tell…? 🙂