Kobo Touch eReader

Best buy of 2013 (for now)! You cannot imagine how happy this purchase has made me. It just arrived at my house a few days ago, and I was so excited getting all my new ebooks into it.

You can say I'm rather crazy about reading. If I get started on my reading phase, I really go all out. Unless when I need to study, then I can't read. But generally, I buy physical copies of books whenever I'm bored, which means that I have plenty of fresh-clean books (read through once) that are taking up space on my shelves. They get dusty, and that annoys me... but that's the price I pay for being such a book-buyer. -_-

After much research, and consistent disappointment that Amazon's Kindle does not support non-US countries, loosely speaking... I was left to decide between Barnes and Noble's 'Nook' and Kobo's Kobo Touch, Kobo Glo, Kobo Mini or Kobo Arc. Honestly I don't care one bit about colour-screens since I'm really into classic cream paperback books, so it was between the standard black and white Nook or the Kobo Touch.

I am shallow with regard to the appearance of my possessions... so I didn't pick the Nook simply because it is... so stubby and ugly. Haha. The Nook below.

I settled for the Kobo Touch then. The pictures shall speak for me.

Here's the cute little smiley that greets me when I open my Kobo folio cover.

One thing that's sad about the Kobo is that there is such a limited choice of covers, compared to the various Kindle versions. I picked a simply black Speck fitfolio, that cost a bomb relative to the reader (a third of the ereader price, sheesh). Fortunately for me, I love black accessories because they're practical and I wouldn't have to worry about getting stains on it. Boy, I hate seeing stains/discolouration on white gadgets!

So much sleeker than a Nook, I KNOW RIGHT.

My buddy who owns a Nook didn't pick a Kobo because she didn't like the "quilted back design". This design basically serves the function of preventing the ereader from easily slipping out of your hands when you're reading. It works (it'd better...) and is really nice to grip!

One hilarious thing is that this quilted material smells... so my fingers did smell funny after I held out to it for too long. But the initial quilt smell has since worn off.

Here's a little snippet of how the read-page looks like. This is an excerpt from New York Times' Bestselling author John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines".

As you can see, I've finished John Green's "The Fault In Our Stars". I loved the book immensely, and its 198 pages, I devoured in a few hours. It is really a heartwarming and sad story about teenagers struck with cancer and how they fought it. It's not an emo and distasteful ill-person story (as some people I know are generally turned off about unhappy stories), but rather it really said alot about living with the disease and of having hope and of giving in, giving up.

It's also realistic - people actually die in the story.

Another look at the quilted back.

My glorious, pretty Kobo.

I love it too much already.

P.S. The Kindle doesn't support .epub format, and by the way, if you're interested, the Kobo is the only e-reader which supports international use, and recognises international credit cards, so no trouble with buying books. Plus, you can add any kind of e-books into the Kobo via Calibre freeware.