Kobo Libra H20

Terrible experience. I click on the upper right corner to save the page, but the bookmark doesn't stay on, the book goes back to the very beginning every time and my bookmark disappears. Customer service giving conflicting advice, saying that I have to sync the device before and after reading and also perform "synchronisation repairs". A one month old device shouldn't need repairs. If I wanted a device that fails to sync itself to the marked page and needs repairs one month after purchase, I would have bought a used reading device.

A device specifically designed for reading shouldn't need synching before and after reading to save the page. All my phones, tablets and computer have always saved the page of a book automatically after I set the bookmark to a page.

Looking into how to return this useless device for a full refund, wish me luck. I can see I am going to have to get consumer rights authorities involved.

wasted money – wanted to use with my local library which is difficult to get to. kobo keeps defaulting to their store. A waste of money

You have to Sign in – Can we have a bloody E-reader that is just hardware? Why do i have to sign in or have an account to use this E-reader?. What a joke, I sick to death of having no privacy and have to have another account for something else. screw you Kobo do better.

I still love it but why couldn't they have released it with 32 GB to BEGIN WITH? Plus other probs – The fact is I do love this device. It changed my reading life - its lightness (under 200g) and perhaps size, as well as the fact it's e-ink (not a shiny lit-up tablet screen), made it more likely I'd just pick it up and start reading. But I am also quite unhappy with Kobo as a company for releasing a device with a quite-small 6.75 GB of useable storage in 2019 (when storage was already cheap worldwide) and then releasing a far more reasonable 32 GB device only months later. I don't feel this has integrity. It's clear they wanted customers to buy one and then upgrade. Kobo wanted to get two bites of the cherry. (Otherwise, why not produce a small number of 32 GB devices from the start? It's only (an internal) memory card.) The company also sends out quite a few individual dud units because clearly they don't check them. They let customers find them and have to go through the arduous return process. So that also says something about their integrity and care for their customers. They are certainly no love-brand, that's for sure.

So, to list the various problems:

1. The memory is pretty small if you have alot of books and/or read large (in storage space) PDFs.

2. You can't EASILY send or receive books wirelessly. I know this is possible because Boox does it pretty well (despite their other problems such as atrocious book-organising and categorising, which Kobo does exceptionally).

3. Their devices used to allow you to add extra memory cards - NOT ANY MORE including this one

4. DISASTER: If you sign out of your Kobo account (and back in), you LOSE all the organising you did: namely, all of the books you carefully put into various 'collections' will become UNATTACHED from them. All data lost! (Also all annotations). You will have to go through and recategorise them. I lost many hours of efforts because of this. Can they not at least WARN you?

5. When they update the firmware, you can no longer sign into Overdrive (which is a third party system that allows you to borrow ebooks from libraries). Then the only way to DO that is to sign out of your account - with the resulting disaster I just described

6. They have very poor customer service. They have NO email contact. Their online chat must be fake because they just ask you the same questions over and over and never actually direct you to a person. They direct people to TWITTER for customer service but are closed to any feedback.

7. It offers a module where you can read your articles on Pocket, but very often some articles just don't appear. For example: you save two pages in pocket. A minute later, one of them will be on the Kobo, the other won't**.

Overall, a device that COULD have been great - if a great company had produced it.

But all of the above and other problems (which I will add to this review as I remember or re-encounter them) make it BELOW average.

______________________________________________________________________ FOOTNOTES ** Nothing I tried would fix this Pocket interface problem: re-sync, refresh, re-add in Pocket, restart device. Even navigating to the problem webpage via a link in a successfully-saved Pocket page and 'saving-to-pocket' right within the Kobo didn't work. It saved in Pocket but did not appear on the Kobo Pocket interface. Clearly a major bug at someone's end. (If someone (including Kobo!) wants to test this, go to the Britannica entries for 'Sykes-Picot Agreement' and 'Hussein-McMahon correspondence' and try to save both. The first appeared in the Kobo Pocket interface, the second wouldn't no matter what I tried