Alternative to Kobo to solve line wrapping problem

Question

I was given a Kobo as a gift. I like the idea of reading a book on an electronic device because I'd like to be able to click and see a definition of a word that I'm not familiar with, rather than going to look for the dictionary.

However, I'm unhappy with the width of the device. Unless I make the font very small, every line is getting wrapped/carried to the next line. Example:

I suppose I either need a format of book that will allow for fluid display of the text, or I need a larger device.

I would like to read pdfs as well as books. I don't like two-column pdfs, where I have to page-down to follow the whole left-hand column, and then jump up to the right-hand column.

Answer 1

I also own a Kobo ereader.

From what I can see, the rather messy output that you get is probably caused by a badly formatted ebook file, being it .pdf or .epub. It is just a supposition, but I really think that this layout is not your ereader fault. If this is really the case, there is not much you can do about it, other than trying to find a better version of the file.

You can do a quick test by downloading a properly formatted ebook file (i.e. this freely available version of Dracula) and seeing if you keep having this problem.

Ereaders are mainly intended to be used with reflowable text ebook formats, like .azw for Amazon Kindle and .epub for the rest of the world; when acquired from legitimate sources, they are usually properly formatted.
Even if ereaders support the .pdf format, it is mainly for the sake of completeness, it is a format mainly used for fixed layout pages and is not really suited to be read from a small screen; whenever you can you should rely on the above-mentioned formats.

Answer 2

This looks more like an improperly formatted eBook than a problem with your ereader's screen size. It looks as if there's a hard paragraph break or line return after every line of text in the file. If the file is not DRM protected, you may want to consider using Calibre to convert/reformat the file and use it heuristic processing feature to unwrap the lines.