What are the best e-readers on the market?

I’m a lover of physical books but I’m looking to get an e-reader as well, for those books that are hard to find physical copies of, or are just very expensive.

I’ve ruled out Onyx, because I try to avoid Chinese tech as it’s usually poorly made. But I’m not sure whether Kindle or Kobo is best. Is being tied to Amazon’s ecosystem too restricting? Are the Kobo e-readers compatible with everything you need? Which ones have the best screens, ideally how a physical book would look?

So many questions, but hopefully some of you can help. 😁

Teknikal,

I like Kobo it pretty much let’s you load anything you want manually I even did a mobi once by accident and was really surprised it worked.

Mr_Blott,

Been using Kobos for a decade and I’ll gladly admit they were utter shite to start with

They’ve changed dramatically and are now twice the price and ten times the quality

Plus not giving Gif Bozo money

Thewhizard,

I have only had kindles so I don’t have anything to compare to. But I love them. The paper white is the best balance for features vs money. I have an oasis now and I feel like I just paid more money for nearly the same thing. I don’t like being stuck with amazons book store. But it does have most of the books if ever want to read. Classic books can be a lot cheaper or free. It hurts to pay more than like $8 or $9 for a digital book, but I will confess that I do it anyway if I want the book badly enough. After all, I get many, many hours of entertainment from it. In my limited experience with uncommon books, if it is uncommon in printed form then it probably isn’t on the Amazon kindle book store. Obviously that depends on the book. I have sent PDFs to my kindle before and it was fairly easy, but I’ve never had to do it often. I don’t know if other competitors do this, but one complaint is that you can’t zoom on a picture. For example, many fantasy books have a map in the beginning, and depending on the map, you might not be able to read much of it.

BirdObserver,

Outside of buying stuff directly via the OS on the device, you’re not locked into Amazon’s store. I upload stuff to my Kindle with Calibre all the time (which works much better than the “send to kindle” function Amazon would prefer you use).

wjrii,
@wjrii@kbin.social avatar

Calibre and a paperwhite works way better than I'd have thought a locked down device would.

tjhart85,
@tjhart85@kbin.social avatar

Conversely, I use 'send to kindle' from Calibre all the time and absolutely love how easy it is to send a book to any of the 3 kindles in the house. I just send it and the book is there a few minutes later. The only time I've ever run into any issues with it is when I was loading up a Kindle for a kid with a TON of books and it wasn't happy about so many emails.

Overall though, I agree with your message: you're not really forced into using the Amazon ecosystem at all if you're willing to put in a tiny amount of work and the Kindle's are either sold at a loss or at such a small markup that it might as well be one that it's difficult for me to consider the competition since they cost so much more.

BirdObserver,

Yeah, I used “send to kindle” for a long time and it’s perfectly fine for just getting stuff on the device easily (especially since you’ve got multiple devices and might want to use the Amazon cloud), but there were a couple things about it that annoyed me and got me to switch. The first is obviously that it converts everything to a “document” pdoc file instead of a book (which is obviously more of a psychological thing to make anything not from Amazon seem like “the other”), but the second issue is that the mandatory conversion would seriously screw with the formatting of the book and they just looked worse than their “native” Kindle versions, with weird spacing and big margins on some books and no way to fix it.

Calibre is admittedly kind of a pain at first (not only do you have to plug in your device to a PC, the software is often unintuitive and confusing), but I think it’s worth checking out if you’re not buying books from Amazon but still want to get the best e-reader functionality out of the device possible (and it’s a nice way to see your non-Amazon ebook collection separate from the device). I convert all books to the AZW3 format with it, then use a plug-in called Quality Fix (specifically a function in it called “fix ASIN for Kindle”) and it makes all books pretty much indistinguishable from their Amazon counterparts.

tjhart85,
@tjhart85@kbin.social avatar

FYI Kindles now support ePub natively and it's fixed a lot of the random issues that used to occur with the spacing and such with no need to convert into AZW3 first (they recently dropped support for AZW ... at the same time they added ePub). It helps that I get everything I can in ePub format or convert to it when I can't.

All in all though, as long as we're all happy with our workarounds, it's all good :-)

I kinda like that mine costs Amazon fractions of a penny in compute time though!

amzd,

IMO the one you already have. I use my phones Books app. It can read epubs and you can buy books in the store too. Also has settings for different colors, I really like the white on black dark mode theme.

Kage520,

Eink is so much nicer to stare at long term though

Anticorp,

Kindle is annoying if you want to move your books around and the author didn’t release them without DRM like the awesome Brandon Sanderson does. There used to be a crack using Calibre, but that didn’t work last time I tried it, because Amazon keeps changing the format to prevent people from being able to control their own content. It sucks.

I have the Oasis and the form factor is pretty good. Not as good as the older Nook was, but okay. The old Nook had a really good form factor, tactile rubber, and was very lightweight. They released a new Nook a couple of years ago that was pretty close, but it’s gone again last time I checked. I had the Kindle Voyager before the Oasis and it’s okay. The Paper White is pretty good, but I want physical buttons, and a large edge to hang onto so that I don’t accidentally change pages by touching the screen.

The Kindle store is nice because they have pretty much everything, but it’s kind of expensive. Recently my Kindle started updating the store every single time I open it, which is very annoying. There doesn’t seem to be an option to disable the automatically update.

Text selection on the Kindle is great! I play around with the Nook whenever I go to Barnes and Noble and it’s not as good. On the Kindle you can hold one word, then tap another word somewhere else, and it’ll highlight everything in-between and the two words you touch.

I’ve looked into Kobo a couple of times when frustrated that I couldn’t move a book to a non-kindle device, but they’re pretty expensive. My Oasis was also expensive, but it still works, so I’ll probably stick with that until it stops working.

Best of luck! eBooks are awesome and I greatly prefer them to real books now.

Boozilla,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve had an Oasis since 2017 and I generally like it. I am not crazy about all my e-books being hosted in the Amazon cloud. But I made that bed over a decade ago, and will have to lie in it. I do love the convenience of e-books, too.

One thing that annoys me about Kindle is that if it can’t connect to the Amazon cloud for some reason, it will burn through the battery pretty quickly as it desperately tries to connect over and over again. This is an issue in my house, because my WiFi is filtered by a Pi Hole. So I end up leaving my Oasis in Airplane Mode most of the time. The battery lasts a lot longer that way. When I want to sync or download a new e-book, I just take it out of Airplane Mode for a couple of minutes.

Anticorp,

I guess it is trying to connect to sync your read progress. That’s another benefit that I forgot to mention. You can read on your Kindle, and then if you’re on the bus or something, you can read on your Kindle app on your phone and pick up right where you left off.

thelsim,
@thelsim@sh.itjust.works avatar

I used to own a Kobo Aura One and was very happy with it, until the battery decided to balloon and it got destroyed.
I did a bit of research for the replacement. Initially I was happy to go with another Kobo, but the Mozilla Privacy Not Included article about Kobo e-readers made me reconsider. It’s from 2021 so maybe by now they’ve changed their policies but it prompted me to look a bit further.
In the end I bought a Pocketbook Verse Pro and I’m very happy with that one. It has a nice screen, is small and fast enough and comes in pretty red (which is already covered up again with a protector :) It supports all the usual formats and that’s about all I really need from it.
Pocketbook is a Swiss company, so I’m not sure if you can get them easily in the US.

zergtoshi,

Well, you don’t need to give your Kobo network access to get ebooks on it. Transferring ebooks via USB cable works fine.
Their privacy policy might still be bad or they may have improved it.
Either way, they can’t collect data if the device isn’t online.

thelsim,
@thelsim@sh.itjust.works avatar

That’s true, and I’m not saying that Kobo is a bad buy or anything. For me the reasoning was that if there’s another company that has a better privacy policy and delivers a similar or better product. Then I prefer to choose the other one on principle.

zergtoshi,

Your reasoning makes sense.
I just wanted to point out a way to use Kobo readers without privacy issues for people who already own them. I should’ve stated that more clearly.
People still looking for an ebook reader should consider leaning onto your reasoning.

originalfrozenbanana, (edited )

Kobo is compatible with Overdrive and Kindle, and they have their own store if you want that too. I love the screen and the battery lasts about four hundred years per charge. Way better than giving money to a monopoly

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

It is not compatible with Kindle unless you remove the drm and convert it, but it can be done. It is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions which is pretty much what every store except Amazon uses.

originalfrozenbanana,

Sorry I was thinking of the Libby phone app, for some reason. Thanks for the correction!

Anticorp,

and the battery lasts about four hundred years per charge.

LOL

Drusas,

I know everybody hates Amazon and they want an alternative to the Kindle, but my Kindle is waterproof and I almost exclusively want to use it in the bathtub. I also want one that doesn't have a strong backlight and feels natural to look at. The Kindle is damn near perfect.

Grass,

I’ve taken my Kobo into a stream that people cliff jump into. I felt off about it because it doesn’t look waterproof even though it is advertised as such. Maybe I’m just too old for waterproof electronics.

Drusas,

That's fair. I mostly want my device to survive if my dog knocks it into the bathtub. This has happened before and it will happen again.

Godort,

This is probably not what you’re looking for, but if anyone is looking to make their own Ebook reader I recommend checking out The Open Book Project

Grass,

Have you built one? I was looking into that before but I think I held back because it couldn’t handle images or something.

sparky678348,

You might be shocked how quickly you get used to reading on your phone. A nice epub reader (I recommend a nice app called FB reader) + libgen and you’re golden.

I also have a nice 7-in tablet that I got for reading, one of Samsung’s non-flagships. I use my phone more out of pure convenience, but I have definitely put my hours in on both. Usually I’ll load up a book I’m reading on both and kinda go back and forth.

Grass,

I did this before but couldn’t keep it up. When I got my first OLED phone I was able to do it with inverse colour and 2 notches over minimum brightness, plus blue light toned down. I read Atwood’s maddaddam trilogy like this.

DesertCreosote, (edited )

I’m going to jump on the Kobo train along with everyone else. I have a Kobo Libra H2O that I really love. I had a couple Kindles before deciding that I really didn’t want to stick with an Amazon product, and chose Kobo because of its integrations with Overdrive. It’s really nice to be able to check out a book from the library directly on my e-reader.

The screen is bright when it needs to be, but dims down quite nicely. The touchscreen is fairly responsive, though it’s e-ink and there are limits to refresh rates. The physical buttons to turn the page are perfect, and I still can’t believe Amazon took them off their Kindles (though I guess I understand them removing the keyboard… even though I liked it).

I actually like mine so much, I bought a second of the same model after I somehow managed to lose my first one. So the one thing I wish they had was integration with Apple Airtag or one of the other device tracking networks!

speck,

Can you do things like highlight text on a kobo? And can you then export with all the edits?

Also, can you the plug into a computer and transfer books over?

DesertCreosote,

You can definitely highlight text. I haven’t tried exporting with edits, though, so I can’t speak to that.

You can plug it in and transfer, but again, I haven’t personally done it. I get most of my books from the library, so I just use the Overdrive stuff for that.

speck,

I should follow the law of the internet and insist that you can't export edits and that's why Kobo sux and then someone can let us know if it can!

In all seriousness, I appreciate the input, thank you! I just don't enjoy reading on my ipad as much as I did on the Nook I had, back when. So the recent posts about e-readers has me considering getting one. But I also need the ability to highlight and jot notes when I read.

joeyv120,

I did a lot of research and ended up buying a Kobo for my wife who was looking to switch from paperback. At the time the Clara HD was the newer model in the size and feature family she was looking for. I made the choice based on e-ink quality, wide compatibility of formats (including public library rental), and price.

Keep in mind that Amazon keeps device prices artificially low by pushing ads to your screen. I have had four different Kindle Fires over the years, and hate how intrusive the advertising is on their devices.

After spending a year or so jealous of my wife’s Kobo Clara HD, I bought myself the then newer Kobo Libra 2. Then she was jealous of my Libra and bought herself one, and gave the Clara to our kid who is a bookworm as well.

We love our Kobos.

hedgehogging_the_bed,

I’ve got 3 Kobos in my house and we love them. I got one of my best friends to switch to Kobo after her final Nook died. If a Kindle doesn’t appeal to you, a Kobo might be exactly what you want. And they have a huge variety of models to choose from.

rabidpug,

How bright are Kobo’s in a dark room? My wife and I have used kindle paperwhites for years but at some point they changed their backlight and now it’s a beacon at night even on the lowest brightness

Anticorp,

You can pay $20 to permanently remove the ads from Kindle. At least that’s what it cost when I bought mine. Definitely worth the money if you hate ads as much as I do.

jefff, (edited )

Last I checked, Kobo will be better specs (screen, water proofness and connectivity) for the money, and if you’re technical it can be modified very heavily, including pretty easily user expandable storage.

Kindle will have a more seamless Amazon experience and maybe better support.

I have a Kobo Clara HD, and I love it to bits. Warm temperature backlight, and I have installed custom firmware on it which lets me use a different reader app, and run an SSH server on it so I can remotely transfer files etc.

PixelAlchemist,

And you don’t have to pay to remove ads because there are none. I have 2 Kobos and I love them

Anticorp,

While that’s annoying, it’s worth mentioning that it’s a 1 time fee. Basically it’s just more expensive to purchase the one without ads. It was $20 more when I got mine, but idk what it costs now.

phanto,

I hate to recommend Boox,but I have an Onyx Book Poke 3 color, and it’s basically an Android tablet that just pretends to be an e-reader. Any format, any audio, any webpage… Comics too. Had it for years, never let me down. Not as good of battery life as the Kindle, but with Calibre on my laptop and the Boox, I don’t ever pick up the Kindle anyways. Instinctively, I wanna crap on Boox as I don’t like some of their business practices, but the Poke is actually my go to e-reader, so…

As an alternative, I know that there are some e-ink e-readers in a phone sized form factor from a few companies, such as Hisense. Can’t say too much about them as I don’t have one, but half the time I read on my phone because it’s small enough to come with me everywhere. Just a thought.

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Yeah Boox seems nice but I won’t support a comany that violates open source software licenses.

phanto,

Agreed, sadly. I wish there was a good, inexpensive, color e-ink e-reader running Android that I could have gotten at the time.

Tsubodai,

Lurking to see what folks think… I have a really old nook which I rarely use anymore. Reasons for getting it was my ebooks are all in epub format, and I heard scary things about Amazon doing shady things with my books/data.

After setting up a home server, I now self host my books and haven’t found an easy way of transferring books onto it, other than plugging it in with a cable. (Tried rooting it, kind of got it to work but it wasn’t great).

I really miss being able to send any new epubs to it over WiFi/email/without needing a cable.

Now I usually read books on my phone, using Moon+ reader app and a WebDAV (LAN) connection to my server. Calibreweb is running to enable me to grab books when I’m travelling/away from home, but for long trips I’ll sync the nook up with a cable. Battery life is incredible compared to a phone…

Semi-Hemi-Demigod,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

I'm not a reader but I do have three readers on my Christmas list. Based on this thread they're getting Kobos

diaruemnus,

I know you said you’ve ruled out Onyx, but I just purchased the Boox Palma, and I really can’t complain about the quality of the device. It’s light years ahead of anything by Kobo, which I was considering.

I didn’t realize that Onyx is a GPL violator until after I purchased the device, but they really engineered an awesome little solution otherwise. Conflicts of interest are hard. :-(

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