I’ve got a large collection of e-books, but I’ve always just read them on my phone. Finally broke down and bought a proper e-reader with the nice e-ink display. Why didn’t I do this forever ago?
It’s got a backlight, but using it under a lamp with reflected light is just so much easier on my eyes and feels more like a paper book. I also haven’t read a book written on dead trees in a good minute, so sitting under a lamp just brings back a missing piece of the experience I didn’t even know was gone.
I also just can’t get over how “fake” the display looks. Fake is usually not used to describe something positively, but in this case, it’s a huge praise. The text and book cover images just look like they’re printed on a sheet of paper and slipped inside to make the device look functional…like a movie prop. Turning the backlight on diminishes this effect somewhat, though (which is another reason I prefer to leave it off).
I also love that I can just set it down and not worry about coming back to a dead battery, lol. The reader app on my phone is set to prevent it from going to sleep or turning off the screen, so sometimes I’ll set it down to go take care of something else, forget, and come back to a nearly dead battery.
To everyone who has recommended these gizmos to me, I finally get it. I know I said reading books on my phone was good enough, but I was wrong.
What kind did you get?
I love mine, too. It’s nothing fancy, and is pretty old at this point. Maybe I should consider an upgrade.
Of course I can’t mention it to anyone in person without them telling me how much they prefer reading “real books”. It’s no joke happened 100% of the time. I don’t know why people feel required to reply that way.
I’ve bought ebooks almost exclusively for the better part of the last decade, so I’m with you. I like being able to bring an entire wing of a library with me that takes up no physical space and practically no digital space (in the grand scheme of a 256 GB SD card, anyway).
To each their own, and yeah, dunno why some people feel the need to gatekeep.
I’m one who definitely prefers reading books. But, you’d have to pry my e-book reader from my cold dead hands. It’s so much more convenient to read everywhere without having to haul around the weight of paper, it fits neatly in a backpack and I always have a full library of stuff to read. It multiplied my reading 10 fold.
I would definitely love to start a book collection once I have a home of my own. But right now I can still read to my heart’s content without having to worry about storage space or costs when moving places. It’s almost perfection. Planning to upgrade to a kobo soon.
What I really miss is the browsing. There’s no similar experience to just wandering a section of a big library/bookstore and seeing what looks interesting.
I definitely prefer custom fonts and the ability to use a size that fits more than 3 paragraphs on a page though. And having whatever book I want on hand immediately.
it’s the smell and while I agree with the sentiment I’m team e-reader all the way.
Haha, I am one of those people. Never thought about like that. Though I go with “physical” not “real”.
I understand the appeal of physical books. And in some ways, they are a better experience. It’s just mildly annoying how predictable it is. I pretty much avoid talking about my e-reader at this point. I’d rather talk about titles and authors with my friends who read anyway.
I got myself an eReader from Kobo mostly for the Pocket integration.
It’s nice just scanning for potentially interesting articles and submit them to my Pocket account while I’m on the computer, and settle down to read the articles cleared from distraction and junk on a paper-like display before going to bed, or while riding the bus to work since it’s all synced up for offline use.
That’s what ended up buying, a Kobo. I’ve never really messed with Pocket (usually turning it off is one of the first things I do when setting up a fresh FF install lol). However, this may be a good use for it since it would be easier to do that than print to PDF, copy that over, and then read.
Check out annas-archive.org to get digital backups of books you already own that may be otherwise protected by drm. Definitely don’t use it to pirate books. Piracy is bad.
Edit:
Also you can use calibre to manage your book library outside of various large book providers.
My ethics on piracy are it depends on who’s profiting. If the original writer is dead and the estate is profiting like Tolkien, fuck em. If the book is good but the author sucks like Orson Scott Card, fuck em. A living writer who you want to keep writing books, go out and buy that shit or at least get it from Libby.
Also humble bundle is a great source for building a large legal library. Though sometimes they tie bundles to kobo which sucks. They didn’t used to do that.
They are just amazing aren’t they? I got one with a colour E ink screen to read comics and it’s just incredible
I will pay through the nose and be thrilled about it when Boox is able to get a 13" color reader out.
I love the pocketable 7" color go with page buttons, but I really want one the size of my max.
I don’t need a color e-reader, as I only use it for reading books. I just want Kobo to make their 10.3" tablet 300 ppi so I can buy it. For the life of me, I’ll never understand why they made their Elipsa E2 227 ppi. It’s a big screen and it needs the highest ppi possible. :/
I primarily use it for books, but not all fiction. Color highlighting, diagrams and graphics, and syntax highlighting of code all add a lot. Visualization of data is also enhanced a lot by color. And while I’m not a huge comic book reader, some of them look really good in nice lighting on the go color.
I think PPI is a big part of the reason there aren’t good 13" color options yet. Color is half resolution and 100 isn’t worth it.
Color page on boox ultra tab c. They (and basically all manufacturers with kaleido3) do post processing on marketing images that make things look more vibrant. It’s fine for manga and I like it but it’s definitely underwhelming and washed out.
Additionally the color filter lowers the contrast of the display and makes the image overall dimmer. Like op I think it looks best with no front light but this one is so dim i often have it on unless I’m under intense light (reading outside for example). I can’t upload a second image with my app but it looks good, just dim
The color also increases ghosting. This is remedied by refreshing the screen fully on page turns but this eats up battery. Heavy reading (like 10+ hours a day) gets me 2 days at most. If I read more typically, like 2-3 hours a day, I get 4-5 days. The huge battery makes it heavy
Also fwiw boox is a mixed bag. The device itself is nice but their customer service is dogshit. I broke the panel, which is very easy. Mine broke from a roughly 1 foot drop onto carpet. The panels are much more fragile. Getting it fixed was expensive, over 50% of the cost of the device. That’s not their fault, of course, but then on top of that I had to pay shipping to them. Again, smaller company, but also a $600 tablet. Then the repair literally took 8 weeks and they gave me replacement panel with 5 dead pixels and 3 pixels “stuck on” that are super distracting, but they only define dead pixels as a problem if it’s in a small box that is the dead center. They don’t have enough panels, which is why the repair took so long, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are okaying shit panels because they are scarce. They also broke the fingerprint reader during the repair. They did offer to fix what they broke for free but I still had to pay to ship to them again (its like $30) and wouldn’t have the device for god knows how long again. I just use it without a fingerprint to unlock but typing the passcode (or anything) is a pain because of the latency for the screen to update.
On the other hand their software team is great. The software has some rough edges but it runs mihon fine and when the software has issues I report them and often get an update on how to fix and occasionally have gotten feature suggestions implemented even.
My go color doesn’t look like that.
You need sufficient light to get appropriate color saturation, but in daylight I think it looks pretty damn good. In darker settings you need to kick the front light up more than you would for black/white.
This is inside, but with the front light up
