I have been wanting to have an e-reader so I can stop piling up physical books (takes a lot of space) and im not sure if i should straight buy an e-reader (do they have programmed obsolence issues too?) or an affordable and durable netbook/notebook/tablet
E ink is great if you are a big reader. It’s the closest to reading a book. There is no screen fatigue with it.
I don’t know what is current, I’m still using a Kindle Keyboard which I love. A friend gave it to me when they upgraded. I sail the seas and use Calibre to manage it.
I have a tablet from work, and use Librera from F-Droid on it, which let’s you set custom text colors and background. It’s Ok for shorter reads (I use it for work related PDFs, and books) but it’s not as satisfying as e ink.
Does Kindle Keyboard last long? Also since it’s from Amazon and you mention the seas… don’t they lock you out of your device? I have heard multiple times of Amazon locking people out of their account, not sure if locked out of the device, just for misdetecting them to have books they didn’t buy. My only issue with E ink would be black/screen only display but I could try getting used to it. The only other use I would think of possible issue but I guess I could resort to my personal computer to, is when reading a book/PDF in a foreign language with an open-source dictionaries of those you can click on words (I heard Kindle has that too though, right?) to view the meaning
I just looked it up and my Kindle was released in 2010. I don’t know if newer ones last that long.
I never let it connect to internet, I never had an Amazon account. Since it doesn’t connect to the internet, or an account, it is mine. Calibre does a great job of managing it, and backing it up.
Others will know of things that are more up to date. I was mostly commenting about e ink.
If you want to read comics/ Manga I would think you want something with color, I have no experience with that though. There are many modern ereaders that do offer color e ink.
And yes, I have a few dictionaries in different languages on my Kindle.
Besides the low effort reading with e ink, there is also excellent battery life. I still get 10 days with my 15 year old device. That may or may not be important to you.
To be clear, I am not recommending a Kindle, since 1) fuck Amazon 2) maybe the new ones are shit, I don’t know. I am recommending an e ink device if you are an avid reader. They won’t do anywhere near as much work as even a cheap tablet, to me that is a bonus. If I’m reading I want to do that, no notifications, no work calls, etc.
Thanks for the input, I do occasionally read manga/comics but it’d not be a dealbreaker for me to compromise on it for a while
If you are not familiar with it, here’s the link to Calibre. It has everything you need to manage your device. Transfer, backup, view, edit titles and descriptions etc.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
Thank you for taking the time to share it with me, I am a bit familiar with it, I used it to convert formats before but I ended up using shell/python scripts in the end to be more sttaightforward converting files, I will look more into it as soon as I get an E ink to try it out on book transfers, I have bought books outside Amazon and it’d be very helpful for me to have Calibre then