My Kindle seems to have crapped out, so I am looking at replacing it. This is the third Kindle i have had and I’m tired of having to replace it every few years. Plus, I no longer trust Amazon. So I’m contemplating a different type. There seems to be a pretty wide variety of types available so I’m looking for advice.
Concerns are:
Ability to transfer my current library. I’m not sure if this will work as the current one is dead, but maybe there’s a service which can do this?
Availability of new books. By this I don’t necessarily man recently published, but pretty much anything I might want to get. I’m willing to spend some money replacing what is on the Kindle if necessary.
Ability to borrow from my local library might be nice, but I don’t view it as necessary.
I am a fan of the Kobo ebook readers. They work with epub which most libraries support. Transferring content from Amazon to a Kobo ebook is possible, but not straightforward, for that you probably need the program Calibre for ebook management which has plugins for converting ebooks you have to different formats. There is also a plugin to connect directly to Kobo ebook readers.
At one point I tried the Barnes and Noble Nook, and that was fine, but I preferred the Kobo both because of ease of use, and the content available on their store. Currently, what I actually use is a Samsung tablet. It is not great for reading in bright light, but it is the right size (I got a 8 inch one) and it allows me to have several reading apps on it.
If you don’t want a Kindle, I would say go with a Kobo.
I have a nook that I’ve had for a long time, but the battery was starting to go and it was always a little slow. I wanted to get a new nook, but B&N isn’t really supporting them that well, and getting library books onto it was a real pain. So, I switched to a Kindle – as you know, getting books onto it is pretty easy. I’ve had it for less than a year, no issues yet.
Honestly, I liked using the nook better – it didn’t accidentally turn two pages at once like the Kindle does sometimes, and holding the on button to turn on the backlight was a great feature when I had to use it in the dark. But, ultimately, the hassle of getting books on it and lack of real support from B&N had me switch to Kindle.
The research I did at the time seem to indicate that Kobo was the best alternative to Kindle.
My iPad is kind of old and creaky and probably due for a replacement, but I use apps on it to read (Mapleread for my books, whatever reader my library uses when I get one from it, etc). I don’t like apple’s iBooks on my specific iPad or in general. I like having the iPad because I can use other apps well. I found the apps on a Kindle not as good, but tbf that was a while ago. Throwing open Safari to look up a term I don’t understand that the in-app dictionary isn’t enough for is great. Or if i’m all snuggled up and cozy I get my text alerts on it so I don’t have to get my phone if it chimes.
Reading on an e-reader is much easier on my eyes – it looks like you’re looking at a book, including needing a light source. I don’t like to read with the internal LEDs on, but I will if I have to when I’m in the dark.
I see people with Kindles and these beautiful e-ink screens with the build-in light all the way up in a fully lit room. I guess they want the Kindle to look like a regular phone screen for some reason. That reason is probably because Kindle has the light all the way on by default (unlike the nook, which has it off by default).
If you don’t mind trying out Chinese tech (and whatever risk of being spied on by China that might entail), I would recommend a Boox device. You can download the Kindle app, and it works a lot better than an actual Kindle. You can download other apps as well, including the Kobo app, the Barnes & Noble app, and the Libby app for borrowing books from a library. I have a Boox Note 3 that I’ve had since 2021. It works just as well as it did the day I got it.
If these are books you bought from Amazon, and they have DRM (which many but not all do—it’s up to the publisher), there is no easy way to transfer your library to a non-Kinle ereader. (It may or may not be possible to strip the DRM from your ebooks so you can transfer them, but this is not something I’ve ever tried to do.)
ETA: If you have an ereader that can run the Kindle app (as @FlikTheBlue claims the Boox does) you shouldn’t have any trouble accessing your Kindle books through that, although I can’t speak from experience.
Note that the light on a Kindle or other e-ink ereader is different from the light on a phone or tablet. The phone screen is backlit, with the light actually producing the images on the screen and shining up into your eyes. The Kindle is frontlit, with lights from the edges of the screen shining down onto the surface.
The early Kindles did not have lights, and this apparently confused some people; they expected screens to light up and weren’t expecting to have to use an external light source like you do when reading a physical book. Nowadays all Kindle models do have (adjustable) lights, which make it easy to read in low-light conditions, and as far as I know there’s no downside.
I have a couple Kobos and like them well enough. I switched from Amazon/Kindle a few years ago. They have (front/side) lights and color these days too, like the Kindles. And some models have physical page turn buttons, which I really like. They’re waterproof too, so you can take them into bathtubs and pools and hot tubs and such… that’s oddly where I tend to do a lot of my reading, lol.
As for bringing your Kindle library over, ah, well… you cannot legally do so due to the DMCA (cracking their ebook DRM is illegal in the US, in and of itself). There may or may not be per-se illegal ways to do that on your own, but you have to search for that elsewhere; we’re not allowed to discuss that here.
Kindle generally has a larger selection of books, both because authors/publishers can be lazy and because sometimes Amazon pays for exclusives. And on Kobo you don’t get the paper + ebook + audiobook discount that Kindle used to offer, or reading/listening progress sync (where you are in the book) across multiple formats. So the marketplace and ecosystem offerings are generally strictly worse, but not by a whole lot. About 80%-90% of books that have an ebook version, in my experience, are available on the Kobo store too. But more than a few times I’ve seen Kindle-only versions.
But the devices themselves are fine. Comparable to Kindle, and not noticeably better or worse in my experience (after having owned like five Kindles and three Kobos and a few other e-ink devices).
I have a Kobo, and i like it a lot. As mentioned above, it’s waterproof (or at least, water resistant), has physical buttons to turn the pages, the interface is more intuitive than the Kindle’s, physically it’s very nice (even lighting, crisp letters, etc.) and it’s easy to side-load my extensive DRM-free library onto it. Oh, and it works okay with the library, although, honestly, Libby sending books to the Kindle works better.
That being said, if you have an extensive DRM-locked library of Amazon books, it’s going to be difficult (and possibly illegal) to move those books to a Kobo. This is why I’ve avoided buying ebooks from Amazon.
If that’s your situation, and you want to keep the Kindle books on your e-reader, i suggest an e-ink tablet. There are several on the market, and i think Boox is the market leader, but I’m not on top of it, and it’s worth shopping. That allows you to download the Kindle app, the Kobo app, Libby, and heck, a generic browser so you can read the SDMB, if you leave it on Wi-Fi. I assume that all those apps also function without WiFi, but you should make sure of that before you buy, if that matters to you.
Basically, e-ink has come of age, and of you interact a lot with relatively static material, like text, you can get all kinds of e-ink gadgets to do that.