I’ve been gifted a Sony PRS-T3 over a decade ago. I’ve recently gotten into reading again and used it to read a manhwa/webtoon/web novel (or whatever the Korean ones are called) and most recently a light novel.
It’s functional and perhaps even decent (especially given its age) but my main gripes with it are:

  • Size: It’s much too small to fit an entire manga page with readable text, so you need to use hacks like kcc which is suboptimal. I’d like the display to be the size of a typical manga or slightly larger.
  • Lack of customisation: It has this ugly indented paragraph style in books which I don’t like and the selection of fonts aswell as font rendering isn’t great.
  • Artifacts in images: When anything more complex than text is on display (and even with text it’s subtly noticeable), you always see ghosts of the previous image. This is perhaps the most critical flaw for the purpose of reading Manga. Image quality in pictures isn’t great to begin with either.
  • Slow: Page turning is fast enough but doing anything else it turns into a slog. Switching between “books” (the manhwa had each chapter as a separate book) was annoying to say the least.
  • Bad UI: It’s just generally poorly organised and common things required way too many interactions (which, mind you, are slow).
  • No light: I appreciate not requiring a light but I’d sometimes like to have the option.
  • Ergonomics: It’s light but not very comfortable to hold. I think I’ve seen readers that have a thicker end on one side so that you can better hold onto it? I’d appreciate advice here.

It’s also showing its age; I had to tape the lid already as the material started to disintegrate.

I did very much appreciate how simple it is though. Open the lid, it immediately turns on, (I enter my PIN) and I can continue to read my book where I left off. Just like a real book but more convenient. I’d like to retain that property.
Battery life is also still great, even after all these years. I can close the lid and leave it sitting around for weeks and return to it with barely any battery drained. Again like a book where I don’t have to worry about any battery charge either.
It’s also quite light which I like, though a little bulky but totally acceptable.

Deal breakers:

  • Enshittification: If the primary purpose of the reader is to sell books rather than read them, I don’t want it.
  • Espionage: I don’t want Google, Amazon or anyone else spying on when I read what books. I’m probably going to have its networking off anyways but I don’t want anyone spying on me offline either.
  • Gesture-only page navigation. Physical buttons please.
  • Ads of any kind.
  • Any power/data connector other than USB-C

I don’t care for DRM. I’ll be loading epubs onto the reader from another machine.

I don’t think I need colour. I mean, it’d be nice I guess (especially for manhwa, those appear to frequently be coloured?) but if that compromises on greyscale or text clarity, no thank you. I also don’t know whether e-ink can reproduce colour accurately enough that it’s even an upgrade over greyscale and doesn’t just look ugly.

FOSS firmware would be amazing but my research suggests that’s not really a thing? I’d settle for a decently customisable proprietary firmware as long as it doesn’t suck donkey balls or needs to be connected to the internet.

I don’t need to draw on it.

Price is secondary but I don’t like wasting money either.

I’m in Germany/EU.

I don’t have a single clue about the e-reader market. I’d appreciate any advice on what I want and, more importantly, don’t want given the constraints and desires I described.

  • @[email protected]English
    4•4 days ago

    Hey there!

    Not the above guy, but I’ll share my thoughts too.

    I’ve owned two Kobo devices (the 7" Libra Colour and the 6" Clara BW), and many others, and I can highly recommend them.

    I’ve also heard of KOreader before which now I realise the KO might refer to Kobo?

    KOreader is a FOSS third-party reader application that can run not only on Kobo readers, but also Pocketbooks, Kindles, and Android devices—if you have an Android device with F-Droid, you can try it out right now. It’s extremely popular, and for very good reason—KOreader is absolutely fantastic, and I don’t think I could ever go back to reading books any other way.

    the Kobo Libra 2 or Colour or the Kobo Sage (B&W) are solid options

    Only the latter is available here sadly.

    I personally wouldn’t recommend the Sage, after the week I spent with one. Although it has a gorgeous 8" display, I found it to be somewhat unergonomic to hold, and it has a notoriously bad battery life.

    8" is edging it really close, I’d have to test it somehow. Ideally it’d be 10" diagonally as that’d be about as large a manga page is IRL.

    The only Kobo I’ve found available here that is 10" diagonal is the Kobo Elipsa E2. Is that one any good?

    I read a ton of manga on my Libra Colour (and I know many other people read manga on the Libra as well). From what I’ve been told, 7" is about the size of an actual BW manga page.

    In any case, I’ve found it to be absolutely fine. In KOreader, I use the “fit to width” option, which makes the page fit the whole width of the screen (and display about two-thirds of the height of the page at any time); I end up pushing the “next” button twice for each page, but as I like to read slowly, I don’t mind at all.

    The key factor that made me stick with the Libra over the Sage (besides the aforementioned battery life issues) was that, in KOreader, a page shown in “fit to width” mode on the Libra was the same width as one shown in “fit to height” on the Sage—that is, although an entire page could be shown at once on the Sage, it wasn’t actually any wider than it was on the Libra. For me, an extra page turn each time was worth the vastly superior ergonomics, battery life (especially the new Libra Colour, which has an enormous battery which), build quality (the Libra feels sturdier and more rugged than the Sage), and portability.

    If size is the most important factor, you’ll probably have to sacrifice ergonomics and physical buttons. I don’t know of a >8” screen that also has physical buttons.

    I may have to backtrack on the buttons if it’s really that uncommon. I’d have expected most devices to have physical buttons because it just seems so obvious to me to have them.

    Some of the InkPad’s have physical buttons at that size. I only tried one, the InkPad X Pro—and while it was significantly cheaper than the same size Kobo, I wasn’t very impressed with the UX (particularly how slow the thing was). I also found that I didn’t actually like the larger screen when reading reflowable text (epub novels, etc.).

    I planned to try the Elipsa 2E after I returned the Sage, but I actually enjoyed the Libra so much that I decided my search was over.

    Do I need any account or accept any sort of human rights abuse consent formprivacy policy in order to use Kobo devices?

    You don’t. It’s very easy to bypass the account registration on a new Kobo. You don’t even have to turn on the Wi-Fi.

    After that, you can install KOreader if you wish, which is just done through a shell script, or you can also enjoy the built-in reading software (which is pretty good as well).

    How would you rate the likelyhood to enshittify or otherwise turn into an adverse contract partner given your past experiences with Kobo/Rakuten?

    I don’t want to be the one to say something good about a company, only for the future to prove me wrong—but, as I can tell, Rakuten seems very well regarded in the community, and I don’t think they have a record of screwing people over.

    • AtemuOP
      2•3 days ago

      Not the above guy, but I’ll share my thoughts too.

      Much appreciated :)

      if you have an Android device with F-Droid

      Yeah I think that’s how I heard of it ;)

      Although it has a gorgeous 8" display, I found it to be somewhat unergonomic to hold, and it has a notoriously bad battery life.

      I think battery life isn’t that important of a factor for me. As long as it’s in the range of “I need to charge it every once in a while” rather than “I need to make sure to charge this every day”, it’s probably fine.

      Comfort is more important but hard to judge without actually holding it.

      From what I’ve been told, 7" is about the size of an actual BW manga page.

      From what I gather online, Manga is apparently printed on JIS B5 paper which is 257mm x 182mm which has a 12.4" diagonal but the small hand books Manga you typically see is B6 which is 128mm x 182mm (8.7" diagonal).

      The diagonal isn’t really that meaningful though as the aspect ratio of JIS B paper and e-readers is different. A 10.3" reader with 4:3 aspect ratio is 157mm x 209mm and an 8" one 122mm x 163mm.

      While 8" is almost wide enough for B6, it’s not nearly tall enough, even for B6. 10.3" is quite a bit larger than it needs to be for B6 and quite a bit smaller than B5 which sounds much more ideal.

      I use the “fit to width” option, which makes the page fit the whole width of the screen (and display about two-thirds of the height of the page at any time); I end up pushing the “next” button twice for each page, but as I like to read slowly, I don’t mind at all.

      Ah, that doesn’t fit my style unfortunately. Manga is also frequently laid out a way where some elements might be the entire page tall.

      You don’t. It’s very easy to bypass the account registration on a new Kobo. You don’t even have to turn on the Wi-Fi.

      Neat thanks, that’s what I’ll do then.

    • @EvilBit
      1•3 days ago

      Oh hey, didn’t see your very thoughtful and informative reply. Thanks for jumping in! I didn’t realize KOreader was something you could put on a kobo device. That’s wild.