How's their store? I'm kind of ashamed at how often I'll finish a book and then instantly buy and start another, but I also love being able to do that.
I also love my Kobo. I've heard you can unlock it and flash a community supported OS, which might be another true benefit over Kindle depending on your needs.
I recommend Boox, I don’t know about their dedicated e-reader, but I have the Onyx Boox Air C it’s a little pricier, but it’s an E-Ink tablet so I take all my notes there. (The C versions are color)
As someone who takes a lot of notes during their work, I can’t recommend enough. Gone are the days I’ve bought paper notebooks.
Got a very old kindle for free, from someone getting rid of it. No touch, no backlight, most basic thing ever. I only got my account on it to download a dictionary.
I am never buying anything from Amazon to read on it, but I've been using it quite a bit, only on calibre converted stuff. It was not too hard to set up, and once it's done it's just drag n drop.
Until it decides to delete every single side loaded book you have on there, which they like to do from time to time. The only way to completely avoid it is to load all your content via email, which unfortunately only supports limited formats.
The type of person to rock Calibre would probably have airplane mode on constantly. Mine's been that way and I still have epubs sideloaded on my Kindle from when I first got mine all those years ago.
Second this. Airplane mode is on and books are sideloaded. However, if it hadn’t been a present, I‘d probably have gotten a Tolino (German/European e-reader brand that is identical with kobo) because they support epub directly (and yes I know the Kindle technically does that, too, now but wordwise n stuff only works if you convert them to kfx)
I mean, in general it’s pretty neat. When I was 12 or 13 I had a kindle touch with 3G and since I didn’t have a phone or computer I used the kindle touch to read a lot on wikipedia (it didn’t work for everything, I think. Just a handful of selected sites). Also, it generally costs extra when you buy it, just not monthly.
Did a quick google and the first review that came up shows that's not true at all, it's the exact same process on a kindle as it is a Kobo, though you and this review are both really over-selling it:
Getting ebooks from other stores onto the device is also a hassle. You have to plug the e-reader into your computer and drag and drop files (though Calibre, the ebook management app, does make it a scootch easier). But that problem isn’t unique to Kobo. Amazon and Barnes & Noble also insist you sideload books.
The real reason seems to be that the Kobo is cheaper, honestly, don't see why the kindle is that much more