Kobo Books for Windows 10/8.1

Rakuten Kobo Inc. (or Kobo for short) is a well-known Canadian e-book selling company. In fact, alongside Amazon and Barnes & Noble, it could actually be considered one of the “big three” of e-reading. This is due mainly to the fact that the company has its own reader (unsurprisingly known as “the Kobo”), which goes toe-to-toe with the Kindle and the Nook.

Unfortunately, it’s not the e-reader that I’m going to review today, but an application called Kobo Books.

If you’ve ever visited kobo.com, then this application doesn’t really have the means to surprise you. While it’s not a clone, it is certainly designed to look a lot like the company’s website.

The main purpose of the app is to offer you the possibility of browsing through Kobo’s online library without using a browser. Instead, you can use this desktop app to search for the titles you want, buy them and download them on your computer.

Did you ever try reading a book from your desktop? Have you ever finished one? Unfortunately, reading books on the desktop doesn’t really have a “natural feel” to it, and many find it a very tiresome activity. I can’t really say if Kobo has created the application that could change that, but I’ll admit that it has a comforting design.

Once you open the book, you can easily browse through chapters or change elements such as color theme, text alignment, page layout, font and font size. The books that you get from Kobo are automatically added to your library; here you can keep track of what you’re reading and what you’ve finished, although I’ve failed to understand how you can add books to the “Want to Read” section.

Apart from that and the (sometimes) overlong loading times, Kobo Books seems like a well-designed app. Still, you probably won’t need it, unless you’re a fan of the Canadian online bookstore.