In an extremely upbeat press release, Kobo have just announced that we can now buy all the Harry Potter ebooks from their online store to read on our various Kobo ereading devices.

So, all great news?

Not really, since what actually happens is that if you go to the part of their online store that deals with the Harry Potter ebooks, you are actually redirected to the Pottermore site and you buy them there.

In fact, as with the Kindle versions of these ebooks, you actually deal with J.K.Rowling’s own ebook website (Pottermore) and not with Kobo or Amazon.

Thus you might as well go direct to Pottermore, buy your ebooks there and then load them into whichever ereader you happen to have, as they sell the ebooks in all the various formats that are currently out there, and as they are not DRM protected, you can happily bung them onto whichever ereader you want.

The press release is a wonderful document however, worth quoting from, as it is so breathless and worked up about this non-event… here are some extracts:-

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Kobo have sent out a Press Release announcing this fact, and extolling the features and ease of use of this new App, which will have the following features we are told:-

• Revamped Look and Feel
• A new and improved interface immerses you in your books
• A gorgeous library view that let’s you search and find your books easily
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud storage lets you access your entire library from wherever you are
• Never lose your books — they’re safe and secure in the Cloud
• Freedom to Read Anywhere
• Read on your desktop PC or even from your Windows 8 tablet

Got to love that verbiage… “Gorgeous” eh?

You will be able to download this App from both Kobo’s site and the Windows 8 App store quite soon.

After a lot of noise, shouting and general tam tam, the Kobo Vox has arrived in Oz for all you lucky guys to enjoy in all it’s glory.

Collins Australia now carry the kobo Vox ereader in their online store – they also carry all the other Kobo ereaders (the Kobo Touch and the Kobo Wireless) as well, so if you are feeling silly, you could of course buy the complete set.

As you may know, the Kobo Vox (which I have reviewed in another post – link below) is a colour Android based ereader, more a small tablet really, as it can play music, show videos, deal with email and so on.   I am not sure I really like this move to make all ereaders into small computers really, sort of the model that fits between the Smart Phone and the full sized tablets, such as the iPad.   But for those who want to be able to do everything on one device, I can see the attraction of such ereaders.  A bigger screen than the mobile phone, yet small enough to carry around more easily than a full sized tablets does sort of seem sensible to me.

Anyhow, this baby is – they claim – an ereader that can perform other tricks, not a tablet on which it happens you can read ebooks.  And as such it is primarily configured as an ereader, and as such is of interest to this blog.

In general people feel that this tablet/ereader is not in any real way better than the Amazon Fire, so before buying look carefully at the Fire as well.

Anyhow, the main specs are below for your interest, as is the link to Collins Australia, so you can nip along there and buy one if you wish.

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And fails lamentably in my view.

Starting in January, if you have bought a new Kobo Touch between now and the end of March next year, you will be able to download one free ebook a month for a year from Kobo’s ebook store, which sounds at first glance to be an interesting and possibly pleasant idea.

Not as good as it sounds:

However, as is so often the case in this life, it is not quite as wonderful as it sounds.  First off, it is only available to people who live in Canada or the USA (why on earth should this be the case?  Have these people not understood that the internet is world wide…  WWW means World Wide Web after all), and secondly, the happy and proud owner of the Kobo Touch ereader can’t download any old ebook from the Kobo ebook store, nope, they will be offered a choice of one of three ebooks each month.

An extraordinary collection:

They have announced the amazing selection they have made for January 2012, and if it is indicative of the ebooks that will be offered for the remaining 11 months, things are pretty thin really.

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A splendid ereader for people who are only interested in reading ebooks and nothing else.

The Kobo Touch Edition ereader is a very straight forward and honest ereader, with only those functions that an ereader needs, no fancy colour, 3G, can’t play MP3 files, and logically enough it doesn’t support Text to Speech either. But it is very good to read ebooks with, and that is its great strength.  And as its name sort of gives away, it comes with a touch screen.

Currently Kobo ereaders hover just below the three market leaders in the world of ereaders, the Kindle series (the top sellers) the Nook from Barnes and Noble (but given the financial problems of Barnes and Noble, I don’t know how long the Nook will be with us) and the Sony ereaders.  This means it is still a very good device, as there are about 500 other ereader models way below the Kobo in quality out there.

As with its more successful relatives, the Kobo Touch Edition has WiFi connectivity, so you can very easily connect to Kobo’s online ebook store to buy your ebooks, and should you not be able to find the ebook you want there, it also has an, albeit primitive, web browser so you can go to other online ebook sellers and find ebooks to buy there.   So as is almost standard now for ereaders, you have no need for a computer to work with this ereader.

Further, not being from the Amazon private walled garden, it supports a whole range of ebook formats, thus enabling you to buy ebooks from an equally wide range of online shops and free ebook sites.

What more to be said?

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A little while ago I wrote a short piece (link to that post) in which I wondered what advantages the newer ereaders and tablets gave me over the older and simpler dedicated ereaders out there, such as the Sony and Kindle.

In that post I stated quite strongly that I had a personal preference for the old fashioned sort of ereader, such as the Sony 505, or the earlier Kindles, and that I saw no real added value for me in the more modern and multifunctional devices, such as the Nook Colour or iPad.

But, as always, there is more than one side to any discussion on such devices, and there are many folk out there who definitely prefer to have all their desired digital functions in one device, so they only have to cart one such gadget around with them wherever they go.

It is interesting to look at the genesis of these devices, as they have evolved from relatively simple and humble beginnings and are now amazingly complex and useful gadgets, capable of so many functions that it is a bit overwhelming at times.

Way back in the dark ages of computers around the 80’s and 90’s of the last century, if one wished to read a book on a digital device, it was simple enough, we only had two devices that could do this, our computers, huge, desk top monsters generally, or on our PDA’s, which in many ways can be seen as the precursors of the true ereader in the sense that they were small enough to fit in our pockets, were capable of displaying ebooks – yes, there really were ebooks back then.

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