[compurandom]

So I have books for basically two different purposes.

There are books I read once and toss. A lot of those I get from the library or otherwise borrow. Amazon's "stream" concept would work very well for me there.

Then there are books I use for reference or read over and over for some reason. These books I want to own, I want to have them with me always if possible. For these books, I need expanded storage (currently 16-50 G depending on the subset), and I want to own them. Unfortunately, amazon has a history of deleting bought books from the device, and for this reason alone, I can't accept or trust their walled garden.

And the vast majority of my owned digital books are from free sources (pdf manuals from vendors, gutenberg press, self authored, etc.), so for me side loading is also a must.

So with these features in mind, Kobo is already (nearly) the best device for me.

If not considering any specific device, and you asked "what makes an ereader better", I'd put qualifications in this order -- others may swap the order:

1) Clear readable text, especially in direct sunlight so I can read outside, but also at night and in dark rooms; the former allows it to replace paper books, the latter makes it replace paper books. Without this, I'll go back to paper books or just read on my computer screen.

2) Ability to index and sort books so I can find them. I have a couple thousand books, this is critical. My physical bookshelf is sorted by topic and/or usage. My ereader has lots of tags on books. If I can't sort and find my books, the ereader is useless. This was one of the things I hated most about the nook. 5 books at a time with a very limited ability to organize them. This is also the feature I miss most from my Sony PRS which supported hierarchical shelves. (I'll take boolean tag search over heirarchal shelves in a hot minute, but I've never seen any e-reader support that!)

3) Good ecosystem for obtaining new books. For many people, this would be #1. For me, this means being able to side load at will, being able to get books from the library, and having a good selection and prices of books from the store. I've nearly stopped buying paper books from B&N because they have what I want only 1/10 times, but I still keep giving them chances.


Oh: re "clear readable text" this also means good fonts. I got a paper book with awful fonts from amazon recently, almost made me regret buying it. And there are so many poorly formatted epubs. Kobo lets me fix that mostly, but calibre does it even better.