[GTALUG] e-reader recommendations

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Trevor Woerner via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I should have clarified that I have lots and lots of tablets and phones and
| all those sorts of devices, but I've never had an e-reader and I'm curious
| enough to at least want to try one (mostly for battery life, eye strain,
| and general impressions). Ideally I could just buy one and it would be
| great, rather than having to try a bunch of them before finding one I like
| :-)

My impression is that Sony is no longer an ebook vendor.  The one
thing they did that intrigues me: they could reflow PDFs.  I don't
think that anyone else does that.

One tends to buy into an ecosystem, and then pick a model of reader:

- Amazon is a giant.  A greedy giant.  They have their own ebook
  format "mobi".  They have their own DRM.  You cannot read an epub
  book on their readers AFAIK.  I have no idea whether side-loading is
  supported.

- Kobo is big in a few places.  Mostly Canada.  They are
  Japanese-owned but the software (used to be?) developed in Toronto.
  They use "epub" format, an international standard.  The DRM comes
  from Adobe, I think.

  You can easily side-load epub files from various places (eg Project
  Gutenberg).  You can read ebooks borrowed from the Toronto Public
  Library on a Kobo.  That is surely true for some other Canadian
  libraries.

  With recent Kobos, you can actually initiate borrowing on the Kobo.

- whenever anyone complains about DRM, other point to Calibre.  The
  way people talk, it can remove DRM.  Since that violates our
  copyright law, I've never explored that.  It can also convert
  between mobi and epub.

Here's a list of current Kobo ereaders.  All our Kobos are older than
these.  I have no experience with these models.

<https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ereaders>

If you are going to read an ordinary book, i.e. one you read linearly
rather than jumping between sections or looking at figures, a small
and light one is a good choice.

If you have good eyes, you might appreciate the HD versions.  For
instance the Clara HD display is 

	6" HD 300 PPI E Ink touchscreen
	1072 x 1448 resolution

(A refurb version is available.  I'd probably pick that.)


Nia seems to be the same size but only half the pixels.

The Libra is larger and waterproof:

	7" HD 300 PPI E Ink touchscreen
	1680 x 1264 resolution

The Forma is the top of the line and expensive

	8.0” HD 300 PPI Mobius E Ink flush touchscreen 

	1440 × 1920 resolution


Old Kobos accepted SD cards, but I never needed that.  Their internal
storage was also an SD card so you could probably clone it and
experiment.  You could also replace it with a larger one.  I think
that that has changed.

Kijiji etc. have lots of Kobos. For example, a Kobo Mini for $20.
That's the model I like for carrying in a shirt pocket.