I'm a little late to this party but here's my $0.02.
I have an Aura HD and also have a lot of PDFs (~150). I need to read the whole screen and don't like tablets either. But the Aura HD out of the box is an atrocious PDF reader. Koreader, which you can get on this forum, makes it tolerable but not perfect. Reading PDF in landscape on this screen works quite well. I've since bought an Onyx Boox T68 and love it. I'm not going back to the Kobo.
- The screen is identical to the Kobo Aura HD.
- Out of the box the reading software works as good as koreader. I really like being able to search my book sometimes which koreader wouldn't do.
- It's an Android device and the Onyx folks have done a good job on the default launcher. The home page is a list of your current book and recent reads (or newly added books if you prefer).
- A lot people are installing alternate launcher and readers but I didn't think I could improve on what was included. It is nice to be able to install other apps. I've got most of my magazines on this reader too.
- I don't think I've seen better text reflow in an app. There are two areas where it's deficient. Tabular data is included and you can tell it's tabular but it could be improved. And figures are usually (maybe always) missing. But I reflowed this PDF and the Boox handled two columns well but fell down with three columns.
Now for the bad
- Touch accuracy can be a problem. Mine's good but there are a lot of complaints on the forum.
- Some complain that when the battery power drops below 50% they start having boot loops until they charge it.
- For some (including me) the current firmware indexes files every time you start. It got bad enough I switched to the Booxtor firmware.