A lot of recent Kindle defectors want to crown Kobo as the saviour of ebooks and ereaders, but I’m not sure if Kobo is truly up to the task of competing with Amazon, because, like usual, it doesn’t look like they’re putting any effort into it whatsoever. Eventually some of the deserters will be forced to head back to Amazon after they get tired of Kobo’s apathetic approach.
Kobo used to regularly release software updates for their ereaders to add new features, but over the past few years the frequency and quality of Kobo’s updates has seriously declined. Now they just release a couple of minor “bug fix” updates a year, and when they do add new features they’ve started leaving older models out.
The last major software update to get released happened back in June of 2023, and that was mostly just a notetaking update for older models to add features that were added to the Kobo Elipsa 2E when it was released.
Before that, you have to go all the way back to 2022 when they last improved PDF support by adding a zoom lock feature. That’s also when they finally added pinch-zooming to change the font size, which still doesn’t work right.
Over the weekend I decided to do some reading on the Kobo Libra 2, and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t turn on out of sleep mode when pressing the page buttons, and then I finally realized it doesn’t support that feature. Kobo added the option to wake the Kobo Libra Colour by pressing the page buttons nearly 6 months ago, but they still haven’t added that feature to their older models, and they haven’t released a single software updates since then.
I also think it’s odd how they officially added Dropbox and Google Drive support to the Kobo Libra Colour, but they never added that to older models like the Libra 2. Apparently new features are only for new customers.
My Kobo Libra 2 also has an annoying font bug that I’ve been waiting for Kobo to fix for the past year, but I guess that’s never going to happen. I finally decided to do a factory reset to see if that would fix it, but no, the font type still keeps reverting to a different type on its own for no apparent reason, but at least now it seems to be limited to the supplemental font type after deleting all custom fonts except one.
I wish Kobo would put more effort into taking Amazon down a few pegs, but Kobo seems to be content to be a background singer that few people have ever heard of outside of hardcore fans. With all the things that Amazon does to anger Kindle customers, you’d think Kobo would do more to capitalize on Amazon continually finding new ways to alienate customers, but instead Kobo keeps slacking off on software updates, while doing zero advertising and rarely doing sales or promotions, and refusing to release a new black and white Libra to compete with Kindles. It’s a puzzling strategy, to say the least. Being owned by Rakuten, you’d think Kobo would have enough resources to put more effort into taking a bigger slice out of Amazon’s pie, but they really don’t seem to care, especially when it comes to the US market.
While I agree that sometimes they seem to be asleep at the switch…never considering trade-ins, “real sales”, I find their basic software to be great. Love pocket integration as my preferred way to real online articles at my convenience. Generated page numbers instead of location I will take any day. Incremental font sizes and margin control are fantastic. So far, I have not any major glitches on my Forma or Sage. Not sure what new features are left…although a good AI text to speech would be fantastic.
I admit the issue you had would be highly annoying for me. Yep, they miss low hanging fruit. That said, they did catch media attention with the Libra Color. How many actual units they sold…who knows.
And how many Kindle’s updates say nothing about what’s change?
Kindle has room to grow more features. They are “user friendly”, not customizable.