Kobo Books

Category

Description of App

Download our FREE app and start reading millions of free and affordable eBooks from the palm of your hand. Shop the Kobo Store by visiting Kobo and you'll have access to over 2.5 million eBooks, newspapers and magazines. With Kobo, reading on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch couldn't be easier.

Great reasons to try Kobo:

#1: Make reading more fun and social with Reading Life™.

  • Track your reading habits with interesting stats and compare with friends
  • Earn fun and surprising awards
  • See what books your friends are reading and find your next great read
  • Discover your book's pulse – see who's reading the book and share ideas & comments about what you've just read with the Kobo community!

#2: Share passages, notes, awards and more to Facebook and Twitter!

  • Add Kobo to your Facebook Timeline to instantly share your reading activity with your friends and track your reading life on Facebook.

#3: Add books to your library from e-mail, the web, or your Dropbox or iDisk account.

  • Add books in EPUB and PDF format using iTunes, Safari, Mail, Dropbox, or MobileMe iDisk

#4: Look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary or Wikipedia and Google with a simple finger press.

#5: Get the latest news and trends with newspaper and magazine subscriptions.

  • Enjoy your first 14 days for free!
  • Get the latest issues delivered directly to your library

#6: Customize your reading experience.

  • Enjoy crisp, clear text, and choose the size and style of text that you prefer
  • Turn pages just like a real book; the 'page curl' animation even captures the look!
  • Try Night Mode for easier nighttime reading
  • Personalize the look of your library background and bookmarks (iPad only)
  • Easily create personal shelves of your books, newspapers, magazines and documents
  • Read in portrait or landscape mode
  • Add notes as you read

#7: Enjoy library synchronization across all your Kobo apps.

  • Use multiple Kobo apps with a single Kobo account, and let Kobo keep track of your books, Reading Life awards and bookmarks for you
  • Access your notes and highlights made on other devices (across iOS apps, Kobo Touch eReader, and Kobo Desktop app)

Version

5.9

Free or Paid

Free

Apple Watch Support

Not Known

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

Accessibility Comments

This application is not accessible. Despite following instructions on how to improve accessibility, I was not able to successfully change the appropriate settings. Logging in is an ordeal, and finding your books is equally as difficult. I would not recommend this application.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads a few page elements.

Button Labeling

Few buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

Some parts of the app are accessible with VoiceOver, but not enough to make it usable.

Options

Comments

By Anne Robertson on Monday, December 24, 2012 - 02:15

I've been using this app for almost 3 years and, although it did have a period of total inaccessibility, it has been working well for a long time now. The version I have is 5.3 as I'm in France and this is the latest version available here. Buying books cannot be done from within the app, but it is easy to do. The search results on the Kobo website appear as level 3 headings. The purchased book appears automatically in Library in the app. The Library button is just above the Library label at the bottom left of the Home screen. 6 titles appear on each screen of the Library, and a three-finger swipe up will show the next screenful. Double tap a title to open the book. I find Kobo easier to navigate than iBooks.

By AppleVis on Monday, December 24, 2012 - 02:15

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team
There appear to be conflicting views on the accessibility of the Kobo app, so it would be interesting to hear what any other Kobo users have to say.

By Bryan Jones on Monday, December 24, 2012 - 02:15

After reading Anne's comments I went back and spent some more time troubleshooting version 5.9 of the Kobo App on my iPhone 4S and was able to successfully navigate my library and read books, two functions I was unable to perform during my initial test run. Here's what solved these issues for me. 1. The issue of no book titles being read by VO in the Library screen was fixed by logging into my Kobo account. After I logged in, all titles showed up and were read properly by VO. When I signed out again, only 3 items remained in my library and VO did not read any of the titles. 2. The problem where the phone was locking up for 15 seconds at random times was probably related to the initial downloading of the full book. This time, after I logged into Kobo, I opened a book, _Ghosts of Spain_, let the phone sit for a while, and then was able to navigate and read the book without experiencing any delays.
I've now got hold of version 5.9 and although it is different from 5.3, I was still able to set the page transition style to Scrolling by tapping the iPhone Toolbar Settings button at the bottom of the screen when in a book. I Got out of Settings by tapping the unlabelled button at the top left of the screen. You can tap the iPhone Toolbar Contents button to select a chapter or double tap and hold the link at the end of the chapter to go to the next one. Tapping the Library button gave me access to all my titles although they seemed to be in a random order. Double tapping on a title opens the book. Double tapping with one finger in the middle of the screen will show or hide the toolbars.

By Kelly Sapergia on Saturday, August 24, 2013 - 02:15

After reading the comments about improving accessibility when using this app, I thought I'd give the latest version released in June a try. I created a Kobo account on my desktop, then signed into it on my iPod Touch. That was fine, but after that I couldn't seem to do anything. Voiceover didn't read any of the free book titles, so I chose one at random. A screen came up with a synopsis of the book, but most of the buttons wouldn't work, such as the Read Now button. The only other button I tried was the "Next Tooltip" button, which brought up a screen where I could review the book. Until Kobo decides to add true Voiceover accessibility to this app, similar to iBooks or Kindle, I'd stay away from it. They have two Twitter accounts: @kobo, and @kobohelp in case anyone wants to try contacting them that way.

By Steve Griffiths on Friday, January 24, 2014 - 02:15

v6.2 came out in early December and I tried it on my iPad mini and my iPhone 4S, both running iOS 7. I can't read my books on the iPad mini at all. On the iPhone, a setting needs changing, and I can't find a way of doing this with VoiceOver running. If you can get a sighted user to do it for you, it's then possible to read your books. Here's the detail. Using VoiceOver, I have two major issues on the iPad. First, the Sign In screen is read as "web store container", and I'm not able to enter the required details. The only way around this is to turn VoiceOver off, sign in and then turn VoiceOver on again. Not ideal, but so long as I don't sign out again, I only need sighted assistance once. The second iPad issue is that VoiceOver constantly interrupts itself with "page 1 of 3", "page 2 of 3" and "page 3 of 3" at roughly 6 second intervals. Although it's just about possible to put up with this while browsing the library of my books, it makes reading a book impossible. I notice that before I've signed into Kobo, the app cycles around three screens giving information about the app, and I would guess that the interruptions are related to these screens. On the iPhone, the sign in screen works OK. When I tried the v6.2 update before Christmas, I got the same interruptions as with the iPad. But I've just tried it again and the interruptions no longer happen. This seems odd, but I'm happy if it means my books read OK. However, on the iPhone I can no longer access the iPhone toolbar menus that appear at the bottom of the screen when I double tap while reading a book - although the menus appear on the screen, VoiceOver acts as if they aren't there. You have to be able to get to these menus at least once, in order to change the page transition setting to "scrolling", after which a two finger swipe down reads a chapter of a book. If this setting isn't changed from the default setting of "none", you can only read a book one sentence at a time by swiping right; a two finger swipe down does nothing but cause the app to hang. The change to "scrolling" only has to be done once, by someone not using VoiceOver, after which I can read my books with VoiceOver. I'd be interested in knowing what experience other VoiceOver users have with the v6.2 Kobo app.