Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

I own a Kindle Paperwhite (last gen, relative to this new one) and a Kobo Clara BW (purchase in the last 6 months). IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers. That tied with a few other privacy issues over the years led me to also get a Kobo.

The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode (called "side-load mode" or something like that) and I can transfer my ebooks directly via USB. I use the Kobo most of the time now since most of my reading lately has been independently published ebooks, but I still use the Kindle for books I purchase via Amazon directly.

With all that said, I personally think the Kindle Paperwhite is already the perfect size. It fits snuggly in my back pocket and strikes the perfect balance between screen size being large, but not too large to hold for my average male hands. I'd be a bit concerned about the size increase for my personal use case, but Amazon does a great job with the Kindle in general so I'd like to see some reviews.

As for the new Colorsoft, I'd really like to see some reviews. The color Kobos that came out earlier this year got some mixed reviews for colors, but I'm not sure if that's just the nature of color e-ink or not.

> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.

You can sideload your books over USB too, using Calibre for instance.

I own a few Kindle models and a Kobo Forma as well. The Kindles do have some quirks and bugs (e.g., disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts…). But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.

So you got one bad battery and you decide to ditch their devices? Seems weird. Fwiw I have an 11-year old Kobo that's still going strong lol.

Opted for a pocketbook this time though. Physical buttons and small 6-inch form factor? And respect for your privacy? Count me the fuck in!

I decided to ditch their devices because of the support I got — or lack thereof. First they refused to talk to me, because, for privacy reasons, my device was unregistered. I ended up registering it, and even so they offered just a 10% discount on the purchase of a new device.

Sadly, Amazon’s support is not far behind, considering its inability to fix certain persistent Kindle bugs. But I’ve never seen the hardware itself fail.

If it makes any difference (although I fully agree it does not excuse past bad behavior), for the current gen devices, Kobo has partnered with iFixit to offer user serviceable parts and guides, including replacing batteries [0]. Although iFixit has had partnerships in the past that have fizzled, as long as user-repair is pretty easy, things like batteries are probably generic enough that they can be sourced even if Kobo doesn't end up sticking with it. If the screen fails though, then yeah, you'd better hope they have committed to maintaining stock of OEM parts, which, even with an iFixit partnership, is in no way guaranteed.

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Kobo