Replacement for Neo?

[kerravonsen]

A while back, I bought a BeBook Neo (for far too much money, too). It's served me pretty well, but it's now on its last legs. So I'm looking for a replacement. Interestingly enough, the features I'm looking for now are not the features I was looking for then; some things that I thought would be great were useless, and other things that I didn't even think about turned out to be very nifty.

So what do I want now?

Must haves:
* E-ink
* SD card or micro SD card slot
* MUST be able to sideload from said card, and navigate by directory. I have my whole collection organized the way I like it, I just want to be able to copy it across intact. There are over 1000 books in my collection (mostly from free places like Project Gutenberg and Baen Free Library, but why not?). Definitely too many to have to convert to some other system.
* Can read EPUB, PDF, HTML and TXT.
* Remembers where you are up to in any given book, so that when you open it, you're where you were when you last looked at it.
* Ability to adjust font sizes (and have it remember)
* Size: anything between 6 inches and 9 inches.

Would be nice:
* Ability to jump to any part of the text (with the Neo, there was a slider at the bottom of each page that one could click on to skip forwards and backwards).
* Touchscreen (using fingers or pen)
* glow-light

Don't need:
* WiFi
* Shopping
* DRM (I refuse to buy DRMed ebooks)
* audio

Must NOT have:
* requirement to register somewhere before it works
* requirement to use MS-Windows software before it works (I run Linux exclusively)

Budget: something under $200 would be good.

Other limitations:

I live in Australia, which means that my choices in what to buy are limited.
Local major shops (Officeworks, JB HiFi, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman) seem only to sell Kobo and Kindle (with one shop also selling a "Sony Wi-Fi Touch" without saying what model it is). I've managed to track down one place that sells Pocketbooks as well. (http://www.i-tech.com.au/Search.aspx?keyword=pocketbook)

I could be wrong, there could be local shops that sell other brands as well, please tell me about them if they exist.

Otherwise I would have to try buying from overseas, with the added hassles of (a) postage, (b) longer time to arrive and (c) lack of warranty.

So... given all that, what advice do y'all have for me?

[Zetmolm]

Your most restrictive requirement is probably "navigate by directory". That practically limits you to PocketBook, Onyx, Bookeen.

You found a place that sells PocketBooks. Excellent! The 623 aka Touch Lux meets all your requirements easily. I made the switch from BeBook Neo to PocketBook a year ago, and I am more than happy with it. Highly recommended!

The BeBook Neo is a rebranded Onyx reader. If you're happy with the brand you could try to find a recent Onyx model but I don't know how easy that would be in Australia. Also, bear in mind that Onyx is making the switch from Linux based firmware (which you have on the BeBook Neo) to Android. If you buy a Linux based model now it will be most similar to you BeBook (but better because there is 3 more years of development in it), but you won't get any further firmware updates. If you want an Android based model it would be better to wait a bit until they release a decent model with at least Android 4.

I've looked at Bookeen and their firmware is less feature-rich than Onyx or PocketBook. In that sense a switch to Bookeen might feel like a step backwards.

[kerravonsen]

Thank you!

The pocketbook Touch Lux looks very promising.

I'm a bit confused, though. According to the wiki Reader Matrix: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix the Kobo Touch is supposed to have Folder Navigation - is the info on that page out of date? Or is the Kobo's Folder Navigation broken in some way?

[davidfor]

The matrix is wrong. None of the Kobo e-ink readers have folder navigation. The folders can be copied to the device intact, but they aren't displayed anywhere.

[ProfCrash]

All of the e-readers have some sort of filing system. Collections/Folders/Bookshelves. Most of them use a folder system but are pretty limited. It sounds like you are looking for something a bit more complex.

[Billi]

If you're looking for something very similar to your Neo you may want to have look at the boox i62hd. The most remarkable improvement is the screen, the firmware is very similar. It's slightly reduced at the moment but the shop is in Germany and I don't have any idea about mailage and taxes.

http://ereader-store.de/en/onyx-boox...oft-touch.html

[kerravonsen]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

All of the e-readers have some sort of filing system. Collections/Folders/Bookshelves. Most of them use a folder system but are pretty limited. It sounds like you are looking for something a bit more complex.

I don't like the limitations of merely having "collections" especially since, so far as I can see, one would have to re-add everything one at a time in order to create a collection in the ereader, since most of them seem to chuck everything into a database and only let you look at things which are in said database. A database of their own design, with a one-size-fits-all database schema.

I have two distinct sets of ebooks. The "pro" books are fairly simple - they're novels I've bought or downloaded for free; most of them are indeed arranged by author - though I have the collection split by "free" and "bought" books. And the non-fiction tends to be arranged by topic rather than by author. And some books are collected by series rather than by author, where it's a multi-author series.

The second set is more complex: it's my fan-fiction collection. That's arranged primarily by fandom, but I have the whole thing set up as a tree of HTML pages which can be browsed by a browser, and various pages which have specialized indexes - unread stories, stories by length, by character, by author, by ranking... I even set up some javascript-only search pages so that I could do searches from the browser on my Neo (though I gave up on that because the response time was too slow). Each story has its own page (with the story itself as an attachment to that page) where I can write notes about the story... the whole thing is basically a wiki (using IkiWiki, which means it compiles down to static HTML, which means all one needs is a simple browser, not a webserver).

That setup is not something I want to give up.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by kerravonsen

I don't like the limitations of merely having "collections" especially since, so far as I can see, one would have to re-add everything one at a time in order to create a collection in the ereader, since most of them seem to chuck everything into a database and only let you look at things which are in said database. A database of their own design, with a one-size-fits-all database schema.

This depends on your reader. I bulk-create collections in Calibre and they transfer across seamlessly.

In some ways collections are more flexible, not less: they behave as tags, so a book can be in more than one collection. So a book of short stories, say, might be in all of my shortfiction, shortlist (to read first), and australian collections.