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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Copyright infringement aside, I always tell people that the Kindle ecosystem (from their crappy who-cares approach to their store catalog, to the crappy software in their Kindle products) is a complete disaster. Shoddy formatting is the norm and is only encouraged by the Kindle's shoddy renderer and file format.

Amazon may have kickstarted the ereading device boom, but Kindles surely don't deserve to be as popular as they are any more, especially with a tech-savvy crowd like HN. Other alternatives exist that are much, much better. Anyone who cares about books at all should purchase a device that has native epub support and a good epub renderer. (I.e., not Adobe Digital Editions.) Kobo is a very good option that ticks those boxes, though other alternatives exist. The native iOS Books app on iPad is probably the top tier of native epub renderers though that's obviously not an eink option.

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Can second Kobo being good & much better than Kindle. One issue I have with them though is that their recent e-reader models have ~8 GB internal storage and no way to expand that, while older models had a normal micro SD slot.

Might not be a big problem for text only books, but for picture heavy content and complex PDFs its not a lot of space at all. I guess it's to push people to use their store more as they can easily re-download stuff from there.

Is it possible to satisfy these criteria with non-Kindle ebook options?

* Good book selection, including more obscure and older books.

* Highlighting and notes automatically get backed up somewhere off-device.

* Paperwhite-sized backlit e-ink device.

I would really love to move off Kindle but AFAIK nothing else can satisfy these yet.

Kobo. I have a Kobo Aura One from several years ago that does all of that. Book selection in their store is subjective but you can side-load any epub file very easily.

The Kobo Aura One seems discontinued. They have a Kobo Nia, but it looks seems terrible (just like the entry-level Kindle). The Kobo Clara is $120 [0], so that's the one going up against the Paperwhite.

I'm ashamed to admit I've never considered using a Kobo, but looking into it, damn. The Kobo's lighting color is adjustable, so no more of that garish blue light. And it supports ePUB files natively. The bezel seems a lot thinner. The only feature it's lacking is it isn't waterproof.

Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra H2O is $170, and is waterproof, has page-turn buttons, and a larger screen.

Since I usually strip DRM (getting harder to do), and even sometimes edit eBooks to strip out the shite publishers add to it (like reading samples for other books, I mean WTF), the ePUB support would be extremely useful.

[0] https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-...

Any other alternatives you'd recommend?

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