I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that only shows 50 words means that your reading will be slowed down to a crawl as you flip the page every 6 seconds. Now I have been accused of being rigid in my thinking so reminding myself of that, I vowed to give it a further try.

Once I found it  was possible to change fonts and layout, things began to improve and once I had finished my first book I was hooked. Not so much on the layout, form factor, techno mumble jumble or anything else but by the ease of getting the next book. Finishing a normal book means that you likely won’t start another for a while until you replenish your stock at a store some time later. The great thing about Kobo is that it takes only a couple of minutes to get another book. At 11 at night when you are looking for something to read, you can easily download something and be reading within 5 minutes. Not so of regular book shopping. In fact I hazard to guess that I’ll read more with a Kobo than I did with real books and if many of us do so, this will be a boon for the publishing industry but alas, not so much of one for the retail bookstore.