The omission of ePub support on the Kindle never bothered me when I read on one. I run all my books - even purchased ones - through calibre to tweak the formatting to my satisfaction anyway. Therefore it does not matter to me what the input or output formats are. ePub -> azw/kePub or azw -> azw or azw -> ePub/kePub are all one extra step I have to go through no matter what reader I use, which makes wireless cloud delivery and multi-device synchronization useless features to me.
My reasons for purchasing the Aura instead of a newer Kindle were mainly the lighting and "purity" of the e-ink screen - I haven't seen the Voyage in person yet, but I have seen the demo paperwhite 2, and the screen was a let-down. From what I understand, the capacitive layer is an extra over the e-ink screen, which combined with the cool temperature of the lighting, this made the paper-white look more like an LCD display than an e-ink screen to my eyes. Text on the non-touch Kindles seemed darker and more "printed on paper" than on the touch-screen paper-white. I can live with the relatively less reliable touch input with infra-red on the Aura and the lower resolution (264 ppi on the Aura vs 300 ppi on the Voyage), but I cannot compromise on the actual realism of the reading experience itself.
The new textured glass layer on the Voyage makes things worse. What were Amazon thinking?? Have a look at the comparison here (around
00:45 to 0:55 in the video) -
( Link to video in case embedding does not work -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jdXo0z6Vyg )
That amount of glare on an e-ink screen is absolutely unacceptable to me. I plan to read in my office that has bright lights, and having to keep adjusting the angle I hold the device at to avoid catching the lights would drive me crazy. Apple seem to be in the process of mitigating this problem with the unavoidable glass screens on their iPads, but Amazon inexplicably seems to be going in the opposite direction!!
The bigger screen and more customization options on the Kobo are bonuses for me. If Amazon had ditched the textured glass and the capacitive touch and fixed the lighting, I'd probably have replaced my Kindle Keyboard with the Voyage for the mere fact that Kindles are easier to purchase in my country than the Aura and I have no complaints from my experiences with Amazon customer care. Happily things worked out and I got a friend of a friend who was flying in from the UK to get me the Aura. I think Amazon have made some poor choices with their hardware design over the past couple of years. For friends and family who are new to e-ink, I might recommend the basic non-touch Kindles because they are easily available here, but I would not recommend their pricier models to someone looking to upgrade.