Good article, especially for the general public. I have many colleagues giving up on ereading entirely because text often looks just hideous on the Kindle (conservative profession)...
In general, it is in line my conclusions (being an owner of H2O and Paperwhite as well). Kobo needs *some* work on speed AND definitely needs to provide Much better cloud services (open up the ecosystem for third party content), although this might interfere with their business model (because their store is atrocious to search in, so they’d need to change that as well). Conversely, Amazon needs to improve their text engine and perhaps generally open up their ecosystem a bit more to third party content. If highlights and annotations of personal documents were available on kindle.com, there’d be no reason not to use the service (and thus the device and store as well).
Having said that, I really like that the H2O gives you the option of an expanded view of your annotations plus notes. Since I use Mac and iPad for work I have found that it actually helps to keep copies of my books in iBooks and just review all my highlights on the Kobo and add those that were actually important (along with expanded notes) to my iBooks copy. In my opinion, a workflow superior to just dumping the myclippings file in clippings.io and never looking at the stuff again (I do still dump the file but proceed in the same way as with Kobo highlights from the reader). Also, did you know that the Kobo software has a option that allows you to export individual txt files for annotations (must be enabled by a simple entry in a user settings file on the device, not completely trivial but not really hard to do either).
Pocket too is a great plus and one of the main reasons for using my H2O much more than my Kindle. Those books I have on Amazon I can load on my Kobo very easily, or just read them on the iPad
As for PDFs, well, there’s my iPad. But I disagree with both being crap. I actually found the PDF reader on the Kindle not too bad, considering it gives you and ok text size in horizontal mode and lets you highlight just like in books. That being said, I find it strange that Kobo isn’t so much better in this regard. Their engine supports standard Adobe annotations (try adding highlights and notes to a PDF on the Mac and viewing them on Kobo, it displays everything in the same neat way as in books), it just won’t let you add them. If Kobo could add that, they’d be so far ahead of the curve in terms of standalone features, it would be insane (there’s Koreader of course, but it seems that this is not the kind of reliable piece of software one would like to work with, although it may be fine for emergency cases, and it supports Evernote export of highlights, notes not possible).
Like I said, I’m currently a bit of a fan of the H2O, and this has much to do with the fact that reading is just SO PLEASANT on it. It behaves like a paper book in so many ways (down to the minor annoyance that annotations cannot be processed digitally) and seems like the perfect companion for me right now in combination with an iPad.