OK, how about a me-too post?
I've tried reading on devices for a very long time. I think the first was my HP-200LX, which was a DOS-based "palmtop" machine. It was funky, and you'd have to read everything sideways. The screen was wide but short, so the reading program would display text rotated 90 degrees. It was a clamshell device, so you could open in much like a book, and while I thought the narrow column would be a pain, it was no different from reading a newspaper (if you remember those...) And they mapped the keyboard so that those keys which were "handiest" for the reader would navigate the book. Primitive, but OK.
Then I moved to Palm Pilot. That was a bit better, but still had negatives. But it was perfect for travel (I did a lot of that for work).
And I still told people that reading on a screen would never replace real books.
Many years pass, and I get a Sony PRS-T1. I've really never had a better e-reader experience than this. The hardware and software were "just right". Ultimately, though, it had limitations that forced me to look for other solutions. No backlight, and using a clip-on light made the thing too heavy. (I tend to read before going to sleep, and fiddling with lights after reading just wakes me back up.) And the screen was just a bit too small for my taste.
So I start looking around. I can't recall if I went Nook or Kobo next, but ended up with both. (I think it was the Touch.) Kindles were not a candidate, because I knew that Amazon would use it to imprison "customers". But the Touch was amazing. I later got a Glo (and a Mini, and one of the others...you'll see the pattern here).
Why I love Kobo: You can easily modify the device. One of my Kobos put the entire system on an sdcard in a slot inside the device. So you just had to open the case, extract the sdcard, and make a bit-copy of it on your computer. And no matter how badly you screwed up patches or hacks, you could just reflash the sdcard and be back to stock. I miss that on newer devices, but the rest of the openness is still there.
It's just a linux kernel, a Busybox, and the proprietary Kobo code. The features are right, and the software is fine. The only thing missing in my quest for the Holy Grail of ereaders is: size.
I use a lot of reference material. Cisco configuration manuals, etc. These do not do well at all in epub format. PDF is the way to go. But all ereaders end up doing things with PDF that make them a pain to read. So the Kobo was good for fiction and non-fiction, but not for technical material with tables and figures.
I then diverted to tablets. I found the Sony Xperia Tablet Z was just about right. Bigger screen, I could load my preferred reading software (FBReader), and PDFs looked good. Maybe a bit small for me. And it was slow at rendering those PDFs. I've tried some others; even a Pixel C (Google is about like Amazon in my opinion, so this was not an easy sell). They did fine.
But I'd really want a PDF reader to show me a US Letter or A4 page at 1:1. I want this to be like holding a sheet of paper. They've started to make these, but they are not general ereaders. They seem to be aimed at PDF-only, and "annotations". (I have no idea what the annotation craze is about; I assume it's for college students.) And they run $800-$1200, which is pretty steep for a single function device. And there's about zero chance we'll be able to hack them very well. Certainly nothing at all like the Kobo.
Enter Elipsa. It's only a 10-inch screen, but I was used to that from my tablets. And it does multiformat reading, nicely hackable, and it was $400. Still way to high for my taste, but half the price and 5x the features of the others, so I bought one.
I've had it about 1 week, and there's simply no going back. If they ever bring out a 13-inch screen, I'll be all over it. But I'm not sure the economics there would match Rakuten's business model.
In the meantime -- anyone want to by some tablets?
