Kobo Vox

Gord bought me the original Kobo ereader last fall. Once I got used to it, I loved it! He bought himself one a couple months later and loved his too.

His started acting funky on yesterday. He could still use it but it wouldn't be the same experience.

Today I surprised him by getting him the latest Kobo, which is the Vox. And though mine is still fine, I couldn't get him one without getting me one too! His is jet black and mine is hot pink.

Some of the pluses for me on the new Vox are that books are in colour and, if I am near WIFI, I can surf the web (plus there are apps already installed like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and tons of free ones I can download if I want). You can also watch videos and listen to music, which are nice to have but not a selling feature on an ereader for me.

It's heavier than the previous Kobos and the casing is harder. And it seems like the battery doesn't stay charged as long ... not a surprise given what it can now do. If you turn the WIFI off, the battery will last longer.

When I turned it on, it walked me through the set-up process. As a head's up, you must be near WIFI because it looks for the latest software update right away. And the instruction manual gets downloaded automatically. The manual is good but I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own ... not a big surprise with most electronic devices. I played around it and it's not hard once you get the hang of it.

If you buy ebooks from Kobo, it's extremely easy. There is a Kobo app that allows you to access and buy their ebooks.

One of the attractions to Kobos for Gord and I was that we can "borrow" ebooks from the Toronto library system (for periods of one week to three weeks). The library uses Overdrive as their engine and ebooks are downloaded into Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). With our old Kobos, as soon as we connected them to our laptops (using a USB cord), we could see it appear in ADE and just drag ebooks across to it. The Kobo would sync and that was that. This wasn't happening with the Vox ... it wasn't appearing.

Also, I have non-Kobo ebooks (epubs) that I manage in a program called Calibre. Like in ADE, the Vox wasn't appearing as the device so I couldn't drag ebooks onto it.

I was extremely frustrated and considered taking my Vox back since I wasn't able to use it as I wanted. But I went to Google and found eventually this great video at Good EReader that helped so much.



Solutions

Library books
To be able to borrow ebooks from the library, I had to download an Overdrive app onto the Vox using WIFI. Then all I had to do was click on the app, search Overdrive for the Toronto library system, input my library card number and PIN and I could see my account, search for and download ebooks. You have to know your Adobe (ADE) log in info then for it to happen. A cool thing is that instead of having to download the ebook into ADE on my laptop and then drag into the Kobo, it goes right to the Vox. Sweet!

Epubs
To get the epubs from my laptop onto my Vox was very very frustrating. I was doing everything according to the video. I had to "Turn on USB Storage". Then I copied one ebook using the "Connect/Share" function to make Calibre recognize it as a "device". Then I could just right-clicked on the ebooks I wanted to copy to the Vox and click on "Send to device" --> "Send to Main Memory". I could see in Calibre that they were on the Vox and I could see the Vox as a "drive" when I went to Windows Explorer and the epubs (they even automatically grouped themselves in a folder by author) but they weren't appearing in my library. Then I came across the "Import Content" function on the bottom of my Vox. In desperation, I pressed it, agreed to import and then the ebooks appeared onto my Vox. What seems to happen is that when you copy epubs onto the Vox, they go into its memory but you can't access them ... you have to "import" them first.

So after all this setting up and frustration, I think I'm going to love the Vox!