No specific advice on Kobo settings; I haven't dealt with any of the store-specific ebook options.
It's one of my longstanding rants that ebooks are never going to be seriously mainstream as long as they're inaccessible to kids, which means "as long as you need a credit card to buy them." (I always giggle maniacally when publishers wring their hands about the low sales of YA titles in ebooks. Because, duh.)
Also worth checking: the Patricia Clark Memorial Library at Mobileread has public domain & a handful of other books-with-permission; usually, those are better-formatted than the Gutenberg editions. Many are hand-proofed against original print copies (many early Gutenberg books are sloppily proofed) and formatted more carefully.
There are also a number of free & low-cost children's and YA books posted at Smashwords, but I don't recommend you send an 8-year-old there to poke around; there's also a lot of questionable content. (Including erotica, which most 8-year-olds I've met have no interest in, and books with violence, which parents might want to steer them away from, and books with atrocious grammar and bad spelling, which parents might be even more concerned about.)
When my young teen got an e-reader, she discovered Fanfiction.net and I can barely pry her away from it now. Both of my daughters' writing skills improved noticeably after they started reading at ff.net... it's like they suddenly realized that words can be fun and had a reason to want to get better at them.
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It's one of my longstanding rants that ebooks are never going to be seriously mainstream as long as they're inaccessible to kids, which means "as long as you need a credit card to buy them." (I always giggle maniacally when publishers wring their hands about the low sales of YA titles in ebooks. Because, duh.)
Also worth checking: the Patricia Clark Memorial Library at Mobileread has public domain & a handful of other books-with-permission; usually, those are better-formatted than the Gutenberg editions. Many are hand-proofed against original print copies (many early Gutenberg books are sloppily proofed) and formatted more carefully.
There are also a number of free & low-cost children's and YA books posted at Smashwords, but I don't recommend you send an 8-year-old there to poke around; there's also a lot of questionable content. (Including erotica, which most 8-year-olds I've met have no interest in, and books with violence, which parents might want to steer them away from, and books with atrocious grammar and bad spelling, which parents might be even more concerned about.)
When my young teen got an e-reader, she discovered Fanfiction.net and I can barely pry her away from it now. Both of my daughters' writing skills improved noticeably after they started reading at ff.net... it's like they suddenly realized that words can be fun and had a reason to want to get better at them.