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572 points bookofjoe | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.353s | source
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pfooti ◴[] No.41864842[source]
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_.

Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard to get my CBR/CBZ files on directly. The annotation / notetaking featureas are nice (I haven't leaned into them yet, but they work well even on the small screen size), plus all the regular stuff with normal book reading. Also, since it's kobo/rakuten, the libby integration is better (search and select library books right from the device).

The actual reading app is maybe 90% as good as reading on the kindle (or a more specialized reader like perfectviewer on android). There's some annoyingly fiddly features- font size is kind of weirdly variable, when going through CBR files there's no "read next in the folder" gesture nor is there a "this is read/unread" state in the google drive ui, so you always have to remember which book you are finishing when opening the next in the series.

I tried out one of those boox readers with the android apps, which would be even better software-wise, but the boox hardware seems like garbage (for an N=1 at least). My display came with several rows of stuck pixels, and apparently it's a good thing that I ordered from amazon instead of the boox store, because the reviews indicate getting an RMA from boox directly is a pain.

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Latty ◴[] No.41865144[source]
I've got a Boox Note 3 and love it for what it is (my hardware has been fine), but I'd find it very hard to recommend generally. Boox are dodgy at best (GPL violations, random connections to china, etc...), you start with an already old version of Android and if lucky you might get another major version, they aren't cheap, Android stuff is mostly not designed for black-and-white/low refresh rate and some apps have unreadable buttons, things like that.

But, with that all said... it's great for my specific uses. Android is just so much better if you want to run self-hosted stuff. When it dies or the software just gets that old I'll be really at a loss for what to get to replace it.

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1. misja111 ◴[] No.41866911[source]
My last e-reader was a Boox Note. It did its job but was slow and after a couple of years just didn't start up anymore.

Then I switched to Kindle Scribe, mainly for the large screen. It was amazing, it was so much faster and more responsive. I even started to use the scribe to make notes, though I didn't buy it for that purpose. With the Boox Note I never did that because of the slowness, it was just annoying.