Reducing my dependency on Amazon was a big reason, obviously. I do still shop there sometimes but anything I could do to lessen my Amazon use seemed worth considering.
On a more practical note, I had recently become frustrated with the actual Kindle experience. It’s been unpleasant. Since I bought it new in 2021, my Kindle audibly whirred every time I turned a page, annoying if you’re a before bed reader who doesn’t sleep alone, and downloading books became virutally impossible. I’d see the cover appear on the device, tap to download, and it would show a progress wheel and then…nothing. I’d tap over and over. It could take 20 taps before the book successfully downloaded. I thought this was a me problem for a while, like maybe I had too many books and it was overwhelming the device, but last year found out a friend was experiencing the same thing.
I could also see the writing on the wall. I had chosen my Kindle model (the Oasis) over the cheaper/more popular Paperwhite because the Oasis had physical page turn buttons and the Paperwhite doesn’t. I absolutely require buttons on my ereader and as of this writing, Amazon no longer makes a single model that has them. Which is wild to me! I am so sick of tech companies deciding the best form factor for everything is a smooth rectangle. Bring back buttons and haptics! THE PHYSICAL REALM EXISTS.
I was also moved by a restrictive change Amazon implemented in February of this year, when they removed the Download & Transfer via USB button. Now the only way to get a ebook you purchased or borrowed was to download it wirelessly to your Kindle. If you used a third party ereader app or a third party program to organize your collection, well, now you don’t. I am very much against this kind of walled garden tech so it was another reason to want out.
All in all, I was sick of the Kindle’s shit so I decided to make the leap to Kobo.
My current ereader is the Kobo Libra Colour. The color is fine; I have no use for it and I would have chosen a black and white model if it had been available (it wasn’t) but it hasn’t affected my read, and I guess it’s kind of nice to see the cover of the book in color.
I like that the Kobo’s default sleep screen is the cover of whatever book I’m reading. I had the ads version of Kindle so the sleep screen was often advertising some completely bonkers book I had no interest in, which was fine but I do prefer seeing what I’m actually reading. I know lots of people have the no-ads version of Kindle but I don’t know what the screensaver is on that one.The Kobo does everything I want an ereader to do. The form factor is nice, more of a square than a rectangle and with just enough heft that it feels neither flimsy nor annoyingly heavy. The books actually download with a single tap, which in itself has made the switch worth it. The buttons were a bit of an adjustment; the top half is extremely hard to press and the bottom a bit mushier, which is weird, but at least it has buttons. After a few weeks, I no longer noticed this. If you don’t use buttons or if you use one of those button presser remotes, this isn’t an issue at all.
I read so many posts online before I switched on which ereader has the sharper screen. Conclusion: I can’t tell the difference. It looks fine, no different than my Kindle. Ditto with lighting: so many debates on which is brighter but I don’t notice a difference. I have not had one moment of thinking either of these things was better on my Kindle.
If you just want to open your ereader to read your latest book, the Kobo works perfectly. If you are slightly more of a power user, the Kobo wins by basically every metric.
One annoyance with the Kindle for me as a person with over a thousand ebooks (yikes) was organization. It was painful to the point of impossible to try to sort and organize books on the Kindle device. I’ve heard it’s slightly easier on the Amazon website but some of my books weren’t from Amazon like my pre-existing Nook and Sony epubs or books bought in Humble Bundles or from the publisher.
The Kobo integrates flawlessly with Calibre, the best ebook organization app and one I’ve used for years. If I tagged a book in Calibre and transferred it to my Kobo, Kobo would read the tag and put it in the proper collection. This lets me easily sort books! Because they’re tagged, a book can be in more than one collection; I have some that are organized by genre but also by whether I’ve read them and whether they’re a book I might want to reread.
It’s just more open of an ecosystem in general. If you ever decide to switch from Kobo to a different ereader, you can download your books in epub format, which will be read by pretty much every ereader on the market. That is not the case with the Kindle, which won’t let you download them at all now (see: that February change) but historically only let you download in a weirdo proprietary format not natively read on other ereaders.
If you are the type of person who likes to mess around with their device and customize everything, Kobo also has the Koreader application. https://koreader.rocks/user_guide/ I have personally not dipped a single toe into this but I understand it’s a steep learning curve with great benefits once you get it properly set up, especially for PDFs, which are usually very annoying to read on an ereader, and manga. You can get the Koreader software on a Kindle but you have to jailbreak it. That’s not the case with Kobo.
I mean - no.
My main concern when switching was making sure that whatever ereader I chose would work seamlessly with the library. It’s why I passed over other ereader options based on Android, which require you to log in to your library site on the reader’s internal browser. I never want to see my ereader’s web browser; whenever I have, I have regretted it for the seven hours it takes for a site to load before I can get back to my book.
Kobo actually owns overdrive, so it lets me download wirelessly from Overdrive/Libby with no problems. I can also download books I’ve purchased from the Kobo site to sideload or organize in Calibre without any issues.
Another big worry for me when I switched was whether I would miss Amazon’s many ebook sales. Maybe 1% of the ebooks I own were purchased at full price. My usual method is to read any book I’m interested in at the library and then if I like it, I wait for it to go on sale before buying it. I still spend ungodly amounts of money, but the bright side is I have an ungodly number of books and they’re ones I know I love. If I no longer had access to sales, that might have been a dealbreaker.
Luckily, that hasn’t been an issue at all. What I’ve learned is Kobo and Amazon have the same sales! Amazon’s daily deals are also Kobo’s daily deals. Same with weekly, same with monthly. A few times I have come across a book on sale t Amazon that was full price at Kobo but I can count the number of times it’s happened on one hand, and I switched to Kobo nine months ago. Kobo also has a price-matching policy, which will refund you the difference in the form of a credit but I haven’t tried it out yet.
I have not regretted switching to Kobo at all but I do have some caveats that you should consider before buying.
1. If you have a single library card, the Kobo works flawlessly. IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE LIBRARY CARD: it’s going to be annoying. My home library has reciprocity with other libraries so I have a bunch of library cards. These are all cards I have legitimate access to, no address fraud or anything, and my understanding is that Kobo used to let you add them all onto the device so you could download from multiple libraries.
For some reason, that’s no longer the case. I can only be logged into one library at a time on my Kobo. If I’m logged in with my home library and check out a book at a different library, I either have to go into settings of the device and switch my library card or I have to download the new book to my computer and sideload it. The books you download from one library remain on your device even if you switch to a different library so it’s not like you can only ACCESS one library’s books at a time but still, this is wildly annoying! I don’t have my library cards memorized so I have to look it up and go through a bunch of screens. It’s a fairly quick process but not so quick that I don’t resent it.
I am both the sort of person who’s always at my computer for something and the sort of person who enjoys methodically going through books, so it hasn’t been a dealbreaker, but I would definitely prefer if it weren’t the case. I’m hopeful at some point Kobo will see the light and allow multiple cards again.
2. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, stick with Kindle. Not only can you not read many of Kindle Unlimited books free at Kobo, you often can’t buy them at all because of contract exclusivity. It should be very obvious if this applies to you but I’ll say if you’re a romantasy reader, double and triple check availability of your favorites before you consider the switch. Kobo does have its own KU analog, Kobo Plus, but I know nothing about it besides that it doesn’t have the same library as Kindle Unlimited.
3. Similarly, f you are a goodreaders user who likes to sync highlights or reading progress on (Amazon-owned) Goodreads, that’s not available to you on Kobo. My gut feeling is that this is a very, very small subset of readers and also one with a large KU overlap but it’s worth saying. You CAN highlight on Kobo (in multiple colors if you have a color one, which is kind of cool) and it’s easy to view highlights from a single book, but there is not a native way to view highlights across ALL books. I do miss the Notes and Highlights page on Amazon that let me see my universal highlights. I have heard there are some third party ways of doing this that I haven’t explored yet; past reads and readwise are on my list to investigate because I do miss this feature.
4. If you want all your books on one device and you own a lot of Amazon books, it is almost impossible at this point to download them to put on your Kobo without resorting to piracy. I am not advocating piracy, but you should be aware. That is entirely Amazon’s fault so the rage over it may be enough to drive you to Kobo anyway.
Thus concludes my guide to switching to Kobo. I waffled on leaving Amazon for over a year before I finally but the bullet but in the end it was a pretty seamless transition.