[cheflo]

Hi,
I'm looking into buying my first ereader and after doing some research, I have found that the Kobo Glo HD (with KOreader) and the Amazon Paperwhite 3 most closely matches my criteria of an affordable device with a great ebook reading experience coupled with good PDF reading and decent annotation capabilities (I will replace paper taken annotation, I don't want a tablet since it hurts my eyes).

The Paperwhite is currently slightly ahead in terms of features (since it allows PDF annotations, KOreader only does highlights I believe), but part of what plays into my decision, is the philosophy of the company behind it. Since I am new to the ereader world, I don't really know the reputation of Amazon and Kobo in this area. Some quick research yields that Kobo is supporting Epub, which is more of an open standard than Amazon's modifications to MOBI. I noticed that Richard Stallman had some negative comments on Amazon kindle book distribution model, but I don't know if that is just because Amazon is the bigger player and more prevalent in the US.

Is there anything to consider from the open source/respect user rights/privacy side of things? Has Kobo somehow supported the development of the open source ereader tools (KOreader, ko2pdfopt, KoboStartMenu, etc), or do they just happen to be similar in name?

Edit: I updated the title to reflect what is actually being discussed below.