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. 😁
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.
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.
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.