Help me, since Amazon no longer seems to be safe ...

[Keybounce]

I am in need of a replacement ereader. I attempted to use the comparison table, but ... I really don't know what i'm looking for from that.

Here's what I want / need.

My Must:
#1. E-Ink. Not any LCD/etc computer screen. This is a reader.
#2. I need to be able to force my own font of choice, no matter what the publisher thought. Sorry, but just because you think that font X looks good to you, that doesn't mean it looks good to me. (Dyslexic, and no, "open dyslexic" looks *terrible*.)
#3. If it has a light, then *it MUST* be able to read with the light completely off. At night I use a red flashlight to read in bed, and if it insists on a white light, that makes it a pain.

My want:
#4. When closed, please display the cover of the current book. (Kindles either show an ad, or a generic book/typesetting-related picture).
#5. Give me the option to use *less* of the screen (I read faster when I'm only needing to work with as much of the screen as my eyes can take in at one glance.)
#6. Better font choices for large fonts (... Kindle seemed to let me choose between about 20, 36, 48, or 72, with no other choices in-between -- and I really wanted something a little bigger than before the jump, and smaller than those last two sizes)
#7. Do not force right justification. I read better with jagged right lines.

My "This would be nice":
#8. Let me read comics. Or look at pictures. This means easy to zoom in, and move around; this means seeing one panel at a time as well as page at a time (... sometimes a panel is a page; sometimes the page's layout matters; sometimes panels are contained inside other panels; sometimes the page layout is deliberately a mess.)
(Kindle's had no good way to zoom, and move around. Heck, PDF on a kindle was dead for the same reason -- way too small).


Kindle keyboards and kindle 4's would permit me to force an alt font (for almost every book), jagged right edges, and both of those required mounting it on my computer and editing config files.

Does not have to be a current model as long as there's a good supply on ebay.
Either needs to be water-resistant enough that rain or a brief landing in a puddle does not kill it, or needs to be cheap enough (ebay) that it can be replaced without concern. (I had a kindle get killed from rain when I did not have it protected well enough, and one drop of rainwater got inside...)

[Elfwreck]

Pocketbook is e-ink, allows you to install your own fonts, allows you to turn off the frontlight entirely.

When closed, it's blank. If there are settings to change this, I don't know about them, but I also don't care about them. Opening the "home" page shows you the cover of your most recent book + smaller covers of next-most-recent books. I don't know of an option to show the full-page cover once you've started reading.

I don't think it has a way to use less of the screen without editing the ebook files. But this isn't something I've ever cared to do; I don't know if there's a force-a-margin option somewhere.

Does not force justification.

Font sizes go up to 39 pts; this has some variation depending on the ebook - in most books, I'm happy with 10 pt; sometimes I move that up or down a bit. If the ebook has the font set to "1.2" size, then the jumps as they get larger will be bigger.

Image and PDF support are both lousy/mediocre. PDF may have a reflow option but if so, it was so awful I gave up on it. (However, the larger screens may be fine. The issues with images and PDFs are "they don't show up well on a 6" screen and there's no option to zoom.")

Includes button for page turning. Some models have an SD card slot.

Navigation includes "most recently added" reverse-chrono list, "library" that lets you go poking through folders, and a search option that's pretty decent.

Prone to showing the subtitle as the title for some books.

I've been very happy with my Pocketbook HD3 and plan to replace it with a newer model with an SD card. (Which hopefully won't have the "can't show some emojis and then the book crashes" bug. Other Pocketbook people have told me they don't have this, so it may be model-specific.)

[DNSB]

You might be happy with a Kobo ereader. It fits many of your needs.

You can choose your own font and adding new fonts is simply a matter of copying them to the device.

You can set the light level to 0.

Out of the box, it will display the book cover as the screen saver. Personally, I use a set of random images (mostly M. C. Escher).

Not sure what you mean by less of the screen? Do you want to set very wide margins to reduce the amount of text on the screen?

Kobos have a wide font size settings from flyspeck to do you really want 3 letters on the screen?

If you use kepub format (Kobo's proprietary modification to epub which mostly adds a mass of spans for locating text), you have the option to zoom images. Kobo's have two renderers, one is an older Adobe RMSDK for compatibility with Adobe DRM such as library loans, the other is WebKit based and has much better ePub3 compatibility as when reading ePub3 fixed layout ebooks.

Not sure what you mean by right justification? I suspect it is what I call fully justified text which has equal left/right margins. My personal preference is left justified/ragged right. You can set justification to off, left and full.

My daughter uses her Kobo for reading manga and seems happy enough.

Newer Kobos are water protected (HZO conformal coated electronics).

Also note that IMNSHO, Kobo ereaders and calibre are that proverbial marriage made in heaven.

[Keybounce]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Not sure what you mean by less of the screen? Do you want to set very wide margins to reduce the amount of text on the screen?

Kobos have a wide font size settings from flyspeck to do you really want 3 letters on the screen?
...
Not sure what you mean by right justification? I suspect it is what I call fully justified text which has equal left/right margins. My personal preference is left justified/ragged right. You can set justification to off, left and full.

Yes, ragged / non-justified. Some kindle books force full justification even with trying to modify the reader.pref file.

As for the font size, imagine having a choice between 5 very big lines, or 8 much smaller lines on the horizontal layout, and wanting something in-between. That's the kindle model.

For "use less of the screen" -- I actually want *one less line*. In horizontal mode, with "fewest" words per line, my eyes can take in the width of the screen very nicely. But there is one too many lines of text on the screen. It basically doubles the time I need per screen to read.

So ... I'm an odd-ball. I want my "text reading zone" to be a fairly small section of the screen, based on what I can read with a glance, and just be reading as fast as the kindle can draw the next page for typically 80% of a book. And occasionally needing to go back, and read slower.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Pocketbook is e-ink, allows you to install your own fonts, allows you to turn off the frontlight entirely.

When closed, it's blank. If there are settings to change this, I don't know about them, but I also don't care about them. Opening the "home" page shows you the cover of your most recent book + smaller covers of next-most-recent books. I don't know of an option to show the full-page cover once you've started reading.

Recent models have warm light, a feature I don't use. And Dark Mode, which I used to like but no longer favor on eInk devices. Having some light on in the room is just much better.

Power-off screen can be PB logo, book cover, random logo, or blank (on my recent devices anyway)

I don't think it has a way to use less of the screen without editing the ebook files. But this isn't something I've ever cared to do; I don't know if there's a force-a-margin option somewhere.

Minimal margin on mine is about 1/8" on mine. Not sure why anyone would want less than that.

Also most models have TTS which highlights text as it is read. Those also have audiobook support (.m4b, .mp3) and speakers or connect to Bluetooth, you can read and control play of audiobook at the same time (i.e. follow along in the text.).

My biggest gripe is there is no way to adjust font weight (apart from turning it all Bold). I'm not very picky about it, and have never installed custom font.

And the PB covers are quite inexpensive and add very little weight. No need to shop for anything else.

[Frogm4n]

Several of your musts and wants seem to be about ancient features or limits of old Kindles. Many of them are available or no longer an issue on slightly newer models than the K3 and K4. Is there a particular reason you seem to be focused on those? You can get a Kindle that runs firmware 5.9.6, which adds user font support, or 5.13.5 that adds book cover support as long as the Kindle is not ad-supported.

Margins was a problem of the ancient and very limited MOBI format. You should be able to use AZW3 or KFX and get the margins aligned as you want. Even better, you can jailbreak all reasonably modern Kindles (for now) and install KOReader and have a highly configurable reading program that will read non-DRM EPUB and PDF directly.

Only the early models with a frontlight couldn't be turned off. I don't recall when they stopped that, but it wasn't too long after. I want to say the PW1 and PW2 were the only ones but that's just a guess.

You can reference which models support which max firmware versions here.

[Keybounce]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

Is there a particular reason you seem to be focused on those? You can get a Kindle that runs firmware 5.9.6, which adds user font support, or 5.13.5 that adds book cover support as long as the Kindle is not ad-supported.

Margins was a problem of the ancient and very limited MOBI format. You should be able to use AZW3 or KFX and get the margins aligned as you want. Even better, you can jailbreak all reasonably modern Kindles (for now) and install KOReader and have a highly configurable reading program that will read non-DRM EPUB and PDF directly.

Only the early models with a frontlight couldn't be turned off. I don't recall when they stopped that, but it wasn't too long after. I want to say the PW1 and PW2 were the only ones but that's just a guess.

So I use Calibre and use "old" format as my output. Why?
Simple reason -- for dyslexic reasons, I use Comic Sans as my reading font.
When I use "old" format, italics are marked as "<I>", and display properly.
When I use the newer format, italics become a class (div? span?) tag, and suddenly only display as normal (non-italic). (Comic sans does not actually have an italic face).

As for why I use the older 3/4's: Given that the device is destroyed by accidental / minor water damage, given that all the "paperwhite"'s that I've tried had a forced white light while reading, given that it seems the only way to get a non-light, water-resistant kindle is a very expensive one with tight/non-end-user friendly software, I want to use an older model instead.

Amazon chose to say "We want to control how you read", to where I no longer wanted the newer models. So, unless that has changed, or unless there's a better reading program for that hardware (Ok, I *like* the paperwhite display, if the light is off), I want the more end-user-friendly older stuff.

that adds book cover support as long as the Kindle is not ad-supported.

I really, really do not mind "ad supported".
But consider that the g4's no longer talk to the kindle store, no longer download ads, but still insist on displaying a generic cover. An advertisement is one thing; the book cover is another.

Display an ad on the home page? Fine.
Display an ad when I turn the kindle on? OK.
Force an ad over the book cover when the kindle is not in use? Why? That's a pure negative to the end user.

[salamanderjuice]

I second Kobo. They let you turn off the light completely, and you can use any font you want with no real trouble. Has a ton of font sizes, let's you use the book cover when in sleep mode. You do get decent control over margins out of the box but maybe not as much as you want?

[Quoth]

You can vary font weight on most of built in fonts on Kobo as well as size.

[DNSB]

The only issue I have with margins and Kobo ereaders is that you can't set the L/R margins smaller than the CSS in the ebook specifies. I ran into one book that had the L/R margins set to 2cm (~.8 inch) in the body CSS selector. On my 6" Kobo Glo, that chewed up 4cm of the 9cm width or 44% of the screen area. One of the first books where I edited the CSS to set the default L/R margins to 0. Probably the start of my whole edit every ebook before reading it work flow.