Welcome to another Good e-Reader Comparison Video! Today we check out the Amazon Kindle Basic 2014 Touch Edition and the Kobo Aura H2O. Both of these readers are the latest and greatest and are getting a ton of media attention. Today, we look at the overall reading experience with eBooks and PDF files and also evaluate the big differences between them.
The Kobo H2O has a dynamic home screen, whenever you open up books, the internet browser or other core functions, they are added to the home area. This enables you to quickly access content, without having to constantly jump into various sub-menus. The Kindle Basic home screen is basically your library shelf.
Kobo gives more flexibility and control over the eBook reading experience, but the advanced options may be overwhelming for some users. They tend to have scroll bars that you can employ to augment the size of the font and even allow you to load in your own font styles. Amazon aims for a more simplistic system, which just gives you different font sizes, margins and line spacing.
The Basic really excels in reading PDF documents. You can pinch and zoom to isolate particular regions and you get a small preview window on the top left corner. This assists you in determining where exactly you are in the document if you have really zoomed in. One of the things I really liked was the ability to use highlights, take notes or use the translate feature on PDF Files. The H2O does not have pinch and zoom, and instead you have to utilize manual zoom, which is not very intuitive.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.