Best eReaders and Devices for Reading Books

Greetings, lainons. What is the best tab/ereader/device to read books on in .pdf and .epup formats? I love physical copies of books and I love libraries, but I do feel like both are old and outdated. I want to modernize to an ereader and store all my texts and books on one device instead of having them sitting on shelves. So guys, what's the best deal for a tab or ereader under $150? A cheap android tab could even suffice, to be honest. A Microsoft Surface tab or a Samsung tab is too overpriced and too advanced for what I need. I just want a cheap tab or the like for strictly reading. Any suggestions?

I do most of my reading on a surface tab s2 9.7". The screen size and resolution is perfect for technical books. Personally I love it. I have nearly 100gb of books, so having a microsd card is great. I use MoonReader+, which is useful because you can save reading positions to dropbox, highlight stuff, export highlights to a .txt/pdf file, and other things. Only downside is battery life, which I charge every other day. I would look into some cheaper Kobo readers OP.

>>1131 Samsung****. I also have a surface, but's too big to comfortably read on.

>>1131 I've never heard of Kobo before now, thank you. Is a Surface worth the money? I've seen the cheapest around $350 last I looked. The Surfaces are rich in features (and yes, I do like Windows 10 save all the bloatware and spyware).

>>1133 I bought a Kobo for like $90 (AUD, so it would be even cheaper in USD) a few years ago because I was travelling and didn't want to carry books around with me everywhere. It was really really light, battery lasted forever (esp. if you didn't use the backlight) and the e-ink doesn't strain your eyes at all as opposed to screens. I would definitely go for a Kobo rather than a tablet -- if you just want a reading device, why get a more expensive general computer? Kobo could read all .pdf, .epub, .mobi that I gave it, and you just click+drag your pirated books onto it like it's a USB stick. In my case, though, the touchscreen conked out after like 18 months of usage (warranty was for 12 months) so be warned that they might not be long-life tech. But I read something like 70 books off it by that point, so it worked out to a bit more than a dollar per book, which seems to me pretty good value for money.

>>1130 >A cheap android tab could even suffice, to be honest. I have a very cheap chinese tablet which I bought 30 months ago for around 90USD. Can confirm, using it is comfy and there is a lot of software to choose from.

get a kobo or just any device that isnt locked down to drm

Hi, i need to buy a new e-reader too and i need help. I already had two sony prs-t1 (pic related still works, but i don't trust it very much, it freezes every 3 seconds and i'm going to a place where i can't buy another one for 6 months ) and a cheap kobo (touch broke), but all three used to freeze a lot and generally had problems at working well. I want a e-ink (i don't like screens), well-working, cheap reader that maybe has a good browser (i read a lot of longform online), a decent battery lenght and maybe is not too easy to break. Everything in this order of importance, were e-ink is mandatory and not fragile is prefereable but not strictly necessary. Ah, and it obviously needs to read pirated epub/pdf books. I know i'm asking too much, so if some of the features i requested is not possible it's not a big deal, tell me your best match. Which eReader can you reccomend me, lainon?

>>1133 Depends on what you'll use it for. If you like to take a lot of handwritten notes, then it's awesome. The cheaper ones are good for this. I have one of the higher end surface pro 4s with an i7 and do a lot of software development and music production on it. The only drawback is the battery life (3-5 hours) and linux doesn't work too well on it.

>>1139 Perhaps something like this? https://www.amazon.com/inkBOOK-Prime-touchscreen-Built-Enhancements/dp/B01M6C3RRL It runs android so you can probably have a browser. I have no idea how well the performance would be.

I have a smart phone with a large screen, about 5.5 inches and 1080p. installed Cool Reader and ebooks a re perfectly readable. Unlike a tablet or e-reader, I already carry it with me in my pocket so I can carry an entire libraries worth of books in my telephone. Technology should have ushered in a golden age of literacy.

>>1145 >Technology should have ushered in a golden age of literacy. I couldn't agree more. It seems several people can't afford tech though.

>>1145 >>1165 >Technology should have ushered in a golden age of literacy. This is what I used my first smartphone for, only apps I had on it were e-reader and graphing calc apps... but it seems that technology is being market as "express yourself with new flashy gadgets and soykaf like its jewelry (tm)" in order to sell people stuff that they use to overcome their own lazy tendencies

Just buy a nook or read from your laptop. I rarely ever have to charge the nook, it's light-weight, thin, and I can fit all my .epubs on there.

>>1657 plz how to hax nook, i cant get it to connect to my computer, it does not recognize it as a device. I have tried and tried and tried, but all i get is the infernal nook store with adverts

Kobo Glo HD. Perfect size, can open the back and throw in a 64gb SD.

I am a loser who bought Kindle Paperwhite 3 2 years ago. Do not ever buy this crap, there is nothing good about it except hi-res display. Waste of money, wish I'd buy Kobo or Sony.

May I present the undisputed champion of ereaders, the PRS-505. Featuring: >NO drm! >Displays PDFs fine (if a little slow & hard on the battery)! >Days of battery life! >E-ink display! (Don't read on a regular tablet screen. Seriously. E-ink or dead tree or don't bother. Tablet manufacturers will tell you you can read books on them. Tablet manufacturers lie.) >Cheap AF! <$20 on ebay. There's no reason to choose anything else.

>>1659 Use calibre

I use Calibre on my Thinkpad X200t. I really only bought it so it could be my ereader after my Kindle broke.

>>1865 Do you carry it with you when out of your house?

Any OSHW eink readers being made? I found the Booq Cervantes and some (old) Irex devices to be close to what I'm looking for, but none are actually fully-free.

>>1668 just ordered one. Do you know how long the battery lasts while listening to music? I'd like to use this for listening to music/reading during my daily commute instead of the android tablet botnet trash I currently use.

I used to read ePubs on a cheap Android tablet from 2012, but got myself a Kobo Aura Edition 2 in September and so far I'm happy. It's definitely miles ahead, you don't see it from videos but the screen is much more pleasant to look at. The one thing that is like kicking dead whales down the beach is that since it's an E-ink display, the refresh rate is abhorrent so scrolling or zooming is a nightmare, which means most PDFs should just be converted to a badly formatted ePub using Calibre. I read the first two Lainzines as PDFs on it though and it was legible, but the latter ones made the text a lot smaller so I just gave up. Also, when you import fonts from your computer you can't change font weight like you can with the default fonts, which means most imported glyphs are ridiculously thin to the point of being unreadable, however the device ships with Georgia and Amasis so it's not really a big issue for me. When I bought it I had no idea it comes with a really cool feature that allows you to send articles on the web directly to the device. You install an extension in your browser called Pocket, and every time you want to read it on your e-reader you just click the extension's button next to the address bar, and it syncs to the reader. It works around 90% of the time though, some websites don't format correctly or refuse to display at all but other than a few minor bad cases it's fine. By the way, I'm on official firmware but I've seen custom firmware that adds tons of functionality and features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2oSOeAnD10 (different model here but the software still works as far as I know) I'm amazed this only cost me 120€.

>>1668 are you able to not display the battery?

I use an older kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B007TKK5SG/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1524077011&sr=8-11&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=kindle It isn't hooked to an Amazon account and it is left in airplane mode all the time. I use calibre to convert PDFs/epubs to mobi files. Works beautfilly and the battery lasts for a month/month and a half easily and I read 30-60 minutes a night. It's a little slower than the latest devices admittedly and it doesn't have a backlight, but I love it.

There is an app called "Book Reader" in fdroid and it has features just as you would like and isnt bloatware

>>1957 I found one of these cleaning out the house to move and ive been using it ever since, the way you described actually. The next / back page buttons are so great. I've read dozens of books on it. My only complaint is that the screen is too low res to read manga, but I can't find a higher res ereader that also has page buttons

>>1957 I am also using on of these. I got a new one recently for almost nothing. It is one of those cheaper models that is supposed to show advertisements when the screen is locked, but since mine is also always on airplane mode, it never got the chance to download any ad. I couldn't find out a way to enable the clock without connecting it to amazon, but the last time I uploaded some books to it using calibre, the clock suddenly showed up. It is on UTC timezone but the time is correct, it somewhat synced when I connected it.

Kobo user here. Takes epubs, has a big screen, backlight, waterproof. Kinda slow, sometimes has bad responses to input-- but it's a book reader, so it doesn't really matter. You can get often them for decent prices on Ebay. I recommend it, it's not botnet like Amazon or Google, I can just load it up with stuff from libgen or marxists.org.

>>2004 For the version with ads, if it does ever sync with amazon to download ads, the ads exist as regular file you can access over usb and delete. Then it goes back to saying "Please connect wirelessly to download the latest special offers" I remember there was a way to root it and get a terminal but I never saw the point.

I got a Tolino and I could not be happier. No DRM, nice screen and battery, e-ink and all the good stuff. Not sure if you can get them outside of Germany. But I'd recommend it to every German lainon here.

>>2009 german lainon here, what tolino did you get and how much did you pay?

>>1130 Since early 2015 I had a Samsung NotePro 12.3 which served its job quite nicely if you do not mind the awful update-policy of samsung. Screen was nice, processor powerful and space a plenty. I had over 5000 books on it and could have fitted probably 3 times as many on top of that (for large collection I recommend readera, librera and if you can handle the crappy UI, mantano/bookari). Sadly it died last week and now I am on a cheapo chinese tablet: chuwi 9 air, only 10 inches instead of 12 but the screen is great and it has 10 cores. What made me skip the e-ink devices aside from the DRM and vendor lock in was that most of my books have at least formulas and many have graphics, also the standard size for me is the DIN-A4 Page, anything smaller than that is at best a compromise. e-reader being tiny and the screen beingreally really slow for graphics meant I skipped them entirely. I guess I could have inquired about the business/industrial grade devices (sony has some) but I did not want to pay 2000 for a device thats 5 years od just because it has a DINA4 e-ink screen. I am thinking of getting a Surface Pro 5 since I could isntall Alpha Ebook Manager on it (which is THE soykaf for large ebook collections on a computer, blows calibre right out of the water). I have been compulsively hoarding pdfs of textbbok of all STEM-related fields since about 2009 so by now I have around 200000 books across a dozen external harddisks. (if you see someone dumping hundreds of pdfs in the volafile room, thats probably me). Because of this huge number scalability of any ebook manager is my number 1 concern. What do I care about pretty interfaces if there is no automatic scan&import function or if such a function slows down to 1 book every 10 second after the first 1000 books.

>>1145 >>1165 >>1297 How about smartphones that have an integrated e-ink screen? I have recently acquired pic related (Hisense S9) mainly for using with Anki, but also for reading books when I am not at home. I'm still awaiting it to arrive (bought it from China), but it should be here in about two weeks.

Do I have to reformat all my ebooks if I buy a Kobo? And does the Kobo recognise hierarchical table of contents?

>>2871 Absolutely no if you stick custom reader app such as koreader onto it.

>>2871 multi-level tocs work fine too

>>2819 The smartphone arrived and I have been using it for three days. So far I love it, I can read books or study with anki on the e-ink screen for hours without consuming much battery. I definitely recommend it if you want something very portable to read on the go or want to run android apps on e-ink screen. I managed to use 30% battery on a day of heavy use, quite impressive for a smartphone.

>>2874 Do you have a link to buy one? I couldn't find them yesterday tbqh

>>2875 Search for keyword "hisense a2" on aliexpress.com, this model is called a2 pro, s9 or a2t sometimes, so it's a bit confusing. The particular one I bought was this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/-/32907356405.html But the price was around 200 USD at the time, so I suggest you try other sellers.

So I am thinking of getting used nook simple touch. It's quite cheap, you can use it to ssh/vnc to your trusty gnu/linux distro (just imagine writting lisp code using emacs in evil mode on e-ink screen). The only drawback is screen resolution, slow cpu, and lack of backlighting. Also I am not sure whether I can trust firmware, maybe it has some backdoors that send books metadata back to Nook. What do you guys think?

+ Kobo :: just buy a used one off Kijiji for nothing more than $50 + google Koreader, and figure out how to flash it on, it's pretty simple to do.

>>2880 How about installing custom roms? I'd pick this up IF i could install lineage

>>3019 It's not a very popular model and it has very specific hardware so I don't count on custom roms ever being available. It comes with a chinese rom with gapps basically, so double botnet combo if that is a concern for you. System is stable enough but the task maneger is a bit aggressive on killing process for freeing memory. You can disable it for specific apps. E-ink applets are soykaf too, but I don't care much as long as I can read my books, and for that it's perfect.

>>3002 Eink refresh rates are measured in the hundreds of milliseconds, even on current screens. I doubt it would be comfortable for interactive use.

>>3026 I dare to disagree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ylbGzNyb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rkoHcJGo18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yi8CuRE0qM