[meeera]

The benefits are all the various tweaks and hacks you can use - from fine font and display control, sideloading your own fonts, to installing alternative reading software like Koreader, tweaking to include night mode and fullscreen mode, etc. None of these need rooting, you can just install them.

If all you want to do is read in a handful or fewer of default fonts at the sizes and margins you're given, and have a great ecosystem and customer service and good dictionaries etc, grab a Kindle. But the H2O is lovely hardware I confess, and I greatly prefer the flexibility of the firmware too. And the fact that if it gets grubby I can just wash it down. The screen size makes quite a big difference to me too.