I was recently at my local JB Hi-Fi browsing around (as most gadget geeks do) and noticed that the Kobo Mini had reached the impulse-buy price of $50. As part of her due diligence on a similar purchase, P had asked me to look at a bunch of e-readers and tablets and I had confirmed her conclusion that the Glo model was good. For my needs, though, I had stuck with the tablets I already owned (an iPad and a Nexus 7). Still, I figured that $50 would be worth experimenting with e-ink myself.

I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now, and here are my thoughts.

The screen is cool but irritating

I love the fact that this thing goes for weeks without recharging, and it definitely is easy to read. In fact, the resolution and contrast are much better than I might have expected. You can see in the picture above that the screen can render thumbnails of book covers with some fidelity.

However, the e-ink flicker is still present and as irritating as I thought it would be. People complain about the wasteful page-turn animations on tablet reading applications, but they have nothing on a whole page going black before it shows you the next one.

It’s probably a little small

The Kobo Mini is sold on the idea that you really do want a “pocket” book. This probably works for some people, but my pockets already contain a metric crapload of stuff (including two devices which could be used for reading in a pinch), so I don’t think it’s really for me. It doesn’t quite fit in the palm of my hand, the bezel is a little small to comfortably hold it by the edge or corner, and the balance between text size and number of words on the screen (I read fast enough to need probably another 50% more words at the default resolution) is a little off.

This is all subjective, of course, and other readers may find many of my complaints trivial, or even positives. So let’s get a little more technical.

The Kobo store

The best devices these days are gateways into ecosystems. The Kobo store has a reputation of decent range and good prices. Comparing the prices, I found it to be comparable with Kindle and Play, but what really stands out is that they are quite open about which books come locked in with DRM, and which are free and open. I won’t go into my opinions on DRM, but neither Google nor Amazon will tell you which of their books are restricted. They do sell unencumbered books – the choice is made by the publisher, not the retailer. The fact that Kobo is open about it is a huge tick in their favour.

Unfortunately, that’s about the end of the positives about the store. Navigating the Kobo webstore is like walking the labrynth without a ball of twine. “You might like” is really “related to this title”, “Science fiction & Fantasy” is hidden under the “More” link.

Also, there isn’t a wishlist system… unless you’re using the Kobo desktop software, but only if you’re on the front page. The wishlist is a core function: people generally don’t buy every book they can all at once (especially at today’s prices). It’s a great source of data you can use in personalisation: recommendation, special offer emails are all so much better when your customers can tell you what they’re interested in. And if you’re going to include a feature like that, make sure it’s available everywhere. Kobo are doing themselves a disservice with their treatment of the store.

Interoperability

One of the most infuriating things about DRM is the attempt to lock you in to one ecosystem or another. The Kobo supports third-party books (mainly with the ePub format) but getting them onto the device is a bit of a trial. The Kobo software offers no way to directly manage content on the device, and it’s not clear if the volume that mounts on a Mac is actually a portal into the Kobo’s media storage. I get not wanting to allow people to extract files you sold from the device, but making it difficult to get other services’ files onto your device seems a bit self-defeating.

With this in mind, I was forced to install Calibre. The program attempts a little to be all things to everyone, but I was able to puzzle it out sufficiently to get some unlocked files on. If you want a simpler solution, you can use Adobe Digital Editions to get most DRMed files (except for Kindle) Getting some DRMed files sorted was a little more involved; it’s not difficult to figure out, just requires more than just Calibre.

In the end

Well, it’s not a bad little device and $50 is an attractive price for a respectable brand in the e-book market. The form factor is not quite right for me (if I were serious, I would probably end up getting the slightly larger Touch or Glo models), but the battery life is certainly superior to the all-purpose tablets most people have.

Although calling out which books have DRM is a good move, it’s drowned out by a substandard shopping experience. If you’re happy to muck about with an extra piece of software (or two) then you can have a quality reader as well as books from almost any other store.