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