Kobo arigato

Speaking of The Dead (previous post) my Kobo is kaput.  I ordered it mid-April, it arrived April 30 and as of Sunday, June 6  it was done.  I was championing it wholeheartedly when I first got it. I wasn’t loving the ragged right layout of the text or the massive amounts of spacing, which necessitates a ton of page turns and therefore  depressions on the right side of  the blue “directional pad.”  But I loved the gadget. Strangers would ask me about it in the park and I would sing its praises: so affordable! Thin and easy to carry! Yes, I can read it in the sun, no, there’s no eye strain — it’s not backlit, see?

But then the battery died on me mid-chapter a couple of times, and I couldn’t figure out how to sync the Kobo without needlessly reloading books I’d already read from my library onto my device. And then the final straw: the screen of death.

My call to Kobo was answered quickly by a friendly CSR who walked me through re-charging it and asked whether I’d been  “safely removing the hardware” after charging (I hadn’t),  but another long charge didn’t improve the situation, nor did the inevitable poke-with-a-pin to reset the device.  Now all I have is a white screen with a band of black at the top and a box that arrived from Kobo today to ship the device back.

A search online revealed a few similar tales, but not many — I’m hoping mine is an anomaly.

Funny thing is my mom gave me a Sony eReader a few days after my Kobo arrived and I returned it, wanting to stick with the “Canadian” reader.

Advertisements