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These answers are about the Kobo Aura HD from someone who's never owned another eReader
clear and high contrast screen.
I find the clarity fine, I'm fairly picky (I turn off font anti-aliasing on my computer because it looks too blurry). The contrast isn't quite as good at paper, but the frontlight clears up any problems of that nature without making the screen annoying to read.
The HD doesn't have the capacity layer of the aura (and does have better DPI) though.
good font rendering, justification, hyphenation, graphics and grey scale conversion
The complaints I have here are
Only half the available fonts handle greek characters (and presumably other non-ASCII characters) and my favourite font (Kobo Nickel) isn't one of them.
There's no separate top and side margins. When reading with the light above you the top part of the surround often casts a shadow large enough to obscure the first line of text if you set up margins sufficient at the sides. It's easy enough to read from a tilted device though, so this is a very minor annoyance.
I haven't yet come across the option to disable the page number at the bottom of the screen, which I don't want to see for fiction so is just wasting space.
display customisability. It would be nice to be able to use user-loaded fonts and to adjust margins, justification, line spacing, paragraph spacing and indentation on the fly.
Apart from the last two that's all possible.
lightweight hardware
It's lighter than a book, for me that's all that's required.
easy one handed page turns
You can use gestures at any point on the screen to go backwards and forwards and they don't have to be particularly long so it's easy to change pages one handed.
clean UI. While it is shown on the default home screen it can all be dismissed with a long press except for the sync button. By default the home screen shows recently opened functions and books.
One minor quibble is that the library is two clicks away rather than one by default. While there is a library tile that can appear on the home page to bring it one click away I haven't found any way to ensure it stays there rather than getting displaced if you open a lot of other stuff.
Can I jump to the chapter I want quickly? How about hunting for a particular page if I left off reading on another device?
There's a table of contents button as well as buttons to go back/forward a chapter. There is also a slider to jump about in the book but it's not particularly precise and as far as I know you can't enter a specific page number to jump to.
good sorting options would be nice. Things like alphabetical and by authour of course, but also by page count, file size, time loaded, last read.
You can filter by:
Reading
Unread
Finished
You can sort by:
Recently Read, Title, Author, File Size, File Type
You can show books as a list with covers and information (title, author, status, format, size) or as covers-only.
I believe you can create collections (both on the device and in calibre) to subdivide your library but I haven't got round to this yet.
fast.
I've not put too much on there yet (36 files) but I've not had a problem so far. I've tried the 13MB epub version of Project Gutenberg's Vitruvius and the 400 page pdf format Dominions 4 manual and have no speed complaints of either. If there are any freely available files you'd like me to try I'd be happy to do so.
Support for other formats like RTF or PDF
I don't think LIT works (although I haven't actually tried it) but Mobi, PRC, ePub, PDF and RTF all seem to run fine.
Lots of sideloading options.
I did hear there was some issue with things not being correctly recorded if you loaded them on directly (causing issues if you had multiple files with the same title) but calibre supports it so you can get it on through their even if directly copying it over isn't suitable.
It supports Micro SDHC cards, but doesn't seem to support exFAT (for SDXC cards of 64GB and higher).
Overdrive built in would be convenient for library books.
Not tried yet, but my local UK library using Overdrive claims Kobos are supported.
Lighted display maybe?
The light is very good, while a standard light is preferably to completely darkness with the front light on it's definitely useful for all those marginal situations like reading in a car.
Wikipedia support maybe? I don't find included dictionaries to be all that useful
Wikipedia and the ability to add your own dictionaries.
I have been reading on eink long enough that my mind no longer even sees the page turn anyway.
I've had it for a month and I don't see it, definitely one of those aspects that's now good enough for most people.
Store.
Kobo aren't perfect on the storefront side, but if you do decide to buy then the vast majority of their books are usable on other eReaders unlike B&N and Amazon.
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