Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Nook is Barnes & Nobles' ereader and they are not very committed to ebooks. Used to be in UK and now only North America or USA? They are a USA bricks & Mortar bookshop. Owned by a "hedge company" that also owns a UK chain.
Onyx Boox is a small Chinese company and the advantage & disadvantage is that they use Android. Expensive and the larger Color model twice the price of a Nxtpaper 14.
Then reMarkable is almost a one trick pony, small Norwegian or Scandinavian company more focused on PDFs and notes. Terrible to interface. No Calibre support. The reMarkable 2 is hardly different to the original remarkable (last time I looked they ran same FW revision) and like a poor clone of a Sony DPT model. Inferior to Kobo Elipsa. They now have a colour model (Kaleido 3).
Bigme is a tiny Chinese company big on hype and failed product development.
Pocketbook are not bad, a small Swiss - Ukrainian company.
Kobo (and Tolino) are owned by pretty large Japanese Rakuten, who also makes TVs and the Viber Chat app. They used to own Overdrive but sold it. Sony transferred their bookshop customers to Kobo when they got out of ereaders (The DPT range was never marketed as an ereader).
We are ten years past peak eBook based on eink. The only significant change on Kindles since the Voyage / Paperwhite 3 (10 years ago) / Oasis 1 (all 300 dpi 6" screens) for people reading reflowable novels, the most common ebook, is a 7" screen. The Scribe and Colorsoft are more niche models and the Scribe is a failure for business or off line use because the PDF has to be sent to Amazon and then the resultant proprietary annotated KFX has to tb send to Amazon to get the annotations. The Elipsa can do that all off-line, including writing to text in notebooks, though not on PDFs. The full Nebo package on iOS or Android (Kobo has to use a cut down version due to eink) does to realtime text preview of handwriting and PDF import/annotation handwriting to text/export ALL OFFLINE!.
There used to be iRiver (made mp3 players before Apple) and Sony as well as various smaller companies. Mirasol came and went on one HW for two Chinese bookshops. Not sure if Binatone only did LCD models.
There are loads of obsolete tech Chinese models from tiny companies.
Really Kobo is best and for some different features the Pocket book non-Android and the Onyx Boox Android. Neither reMarkable or Bigme or any of the random Chinese makes are worth considering for reading novels.
The Nxtpaper 2.0 or 3.0 and similar from others on OLED and LCD are now far better than Kaleido for colour and can equal eink with a front light needed. Battery life is now 15 to 30 hours (depending on model reading a novel (with or without music and can play unrelated music). That long life and no glare, no headaches, some 4:3 and 3:2 aspect models etc means that eink has only an advantage for 5" (why are there none?) to 8" sizes for reflowable novels in ambient light good enough for no frontlight.
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The Remarkable Paper Pro doesn't use Kaleido 3. It uses E-Ink Gallery 3 which is part of why it's so expensive.
Barnes & Noble and Nook's are U.S. only. Not a thing in Canada.