eReaders

They are great. Except the Kobo eReader. Which, of course, is what I bought. First, they had ads all over borders.com and in store about how if you buy it you get a $20 Borders gift card. Well, that only applies if you buy it online - which I found out as I was checking out, 2 days before leaving for France. That obviously didn't give me enough time to order it online. Why advertise that special in-store if you don't offer it in-store? Nowhere does it specify that in the text of the flyers or online ads. That did not make me happy and I let the clerk at the store know and I sent feedback to Borders through their website (and I have yet to get any kind of response).

Next, they won't let you actually try the thing in-store (not sure why they don't have a floor model - maybe it's too new) but all of the employees raved about it. It's light, it's compact yet the screen is still big enough to be useful, the technology that they have for the screen is great, you can read it in full sunlight (and here, that is an issue ;-)) Unfortunately it is a little slow to respond and refresh so the pages take a little while to turn. I have gotten to the point where I can hit the button just enough ahead of time that the next page comes up as I finish the current page but it can be a bit tedious waiting for it to do it's thing.

Finally, I ordered a book from Borders.com, it downloaded to my computer but when I tried to sync the eReader to the computer, something went wrong. The download didn't complete, I got all of these error messages and the book was not on the eReader. Another annoyance is the fact that there are 2 different computer applications for downloading and transferring books. One comes with the reader and automatically installs when you plug it in, the other is required when you purchase books online. They don't play nice with each other so if I download a book into one, I can't just transfer it over to the other. The Kobobooks.com website downloads to the Adobe Digital Editions app and Borders.com downloads to their app and it's kind of a headache. I think they rushed to get this reader out and hadn't ironed out all of the software kinks just yet. The help that is available is not that helpful - again, I think because it is so new.

After all that, somehow, today when I tried one more time to transfer the book to the eReading using the Borders app, it worked!! Yay, now I can read the most recent book from Dean Koontz's Frankenstein saga...