Requirements:
- Able to pirate books and load them on
- Nice if it can integrate with my arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc)
- reasonably priced
- not locked down to anything
That’s it really just a simple e-reader that I can add what I want.
Edit: this is the first post where I got a lot of comments where I wasn’t too overwhelmed to reply to them all. Hard when you wake up to so many replies but trying to be better thanking people for their input.
I have a kobo Libra 2. Its the first ereader I’ve bought and it’s super nice. I use calibre to load my books. Looks like kobo only has refurbished units of it now, though.
Another Libra 2 owner here, it works great and it looks great too.
Kobo. Fuck Amazon.
Without question the Kobo Libre Colour. I have owned multiple e-readers and the Kobo Libra H2O was my previous one. It was so much better than anything I had used before that I have probably told a hundred people and will be passionately buying Kobo from here forward. Good luck and read East of Eden if you haven’t even if it doesn’t sound like your thing. 👍
I love my Kobo Clara. I’ve read more in the past few years of ownership than I did the 10 years before. Plus I have a calibre-web server that it syncs with so I don’t have to manually move things over.
I switched to Kavita. More modern and supports OPDS, so it connects to readers just like Caliber does. It was originally designed for comics, which is why it probably looks so good.
I have a Kobo Clara I’m super happy with. Way better than the buggy Kindle I had.
Thanks.
I had a feeling it would be the Kobo, I was a little taken aback by the price but I’ll likely take your advice and get one of these, when the time is right.
I also added the book to my reading list, an LLM said it’s like a modern retelling of Cane and Abel, which sounds interesting. It also said it’s the authors magnum opus, so really had to add it.
To be honest I wanted to get back into reading to read about the history of the Middle East, but with adhd reading is tough and the only time i remember being gripped was with The Millenium Trilogy by Steig Larsson so might find more thrillers to read to get back into it before hitting the hard history stuff.
If you are in Germany, the Thalia Tolinos are rebranded Kobos.
FWIW, the price is largely due to patent issues; The company that owns the patent to produce e-ink screens has started exorbitantly jacking up prices for device makers. Ironically, e-ink used to be much cheaper, before that e-ink company started messing with the supply.
FWIW I have the color and the non-color libra, and if you’re just interested in reading books where color isn’t a huge part of the experience I highly recommend the non-color version. The contrast ratio and legibility are simply far better.
Yeah, I read a lot of comics, so the Kobo Libra Color has been amazing. But there’s no doubting that the color screen compromises on clarity and contrast.
I like the Kobo options a lot, I have a device from them that was the Kobo Aura HD from Ebay that was $50 dollars in great condition. Kobo has better support for loading whatever you want on it without any annoying issues and it is running linux under the hood and has a lot of expand-ability because of it. These days I use a kindle paperwhite 4 and honestly, it just isn’t as well thought out. It is waterproof & has a higher resolution display but I found the Kobo OS was faster & the device with buttons had a much better design overall. So, I wish I had gone for an up to date Kobo alternative when I upgraded. So, go Kobo, don’t look back, & get second hand if you want to save some $$$.
Kobo was on my short-list not long ago. They seemed like the most polished non-amazon option to me. I haven’t switched for now because my old kindle 2 is still clinging to life and because of it being long out of support from amazon I just keep it disconnected from the internet and sideload whatever I want.
With that said though, now that some decent kindle jailbreaking options are available, an old second hand kindle from eBay might actually be a very good option.
On more vote for Kobo. I have currently a Clara Colour, works 100% offline with Calibre
I have a Kobo. My wife has kindle. Kindle is better if you want kindle unlimited. Kobo is better for everything else as far as I’m concerned. Especially if you want to sideload your own books via calibre or just dropping them onto the device when plugged into your computer. My kobo hooks up directly with overdrive/libby for borrowing books from the library and does everything i need it to.
I don’t have a specific model to recommend though. Mine is nearing 8-10 years old and still working
I’ve discovered I can still load books on my aged Kindle Keyboard via email. When you register a Kindle you get an email address for that purpose. More fiddly that just dropping files in its Document folder, but it does work. (I’m so bloody annoyed at Amazon for that change to Kindles.)
That’s the biggest reason I haven’t suggested anything but a Kindle to my wife. She goes through books like candy and the amount of time to find them and load them are far outweighed by an Unlimited subscription.
Hi!
Just recently was setting up my whole family with ebooks. Ended up with Kobo Libra Colour for myself and Kindle Oasis (jailbreaked) for family.
I am quite happy with both readers. Kindle would be a bit better in quality, but Kobo is color and non-amazon. Both of them have physical side buttons, which were my main requirement.
I store all my books in calibre and uploading it via USB on my kobo reader. It makes it much easier to manage and confirm metadata. I didn’t bother with readarr, as I already has a decent collection that still need to finish.
For family - they were already familiar with Kindle, so I got them Oasises from ebay, jailbroke them to prevent Amazon from messing up with them and just send all necessary book to their readers wirelessly via Send to Kindle.
+1 to Kobo as well, although I’m admittedly unfamiliar with the pirate apps (arr).
no issues downloading books and adding/editing my library with calibre and you can connect it to your library card to rent ebooks if you’re feeling frisky.
or you can bypass the login steps and change out the firmware and add games and other utilities. it’s as customizable or not as you want.
lots of refurbished options through rakuten and ebay
Portability is key for me. Others here have recommended the Boox Palma, but for the price difference I’d have to go with Moann’s Inkpalm Plus.
Arr stack integration for e-readers is going to be Readarr linked to a Calibre instance, as described here.
Yeah, Readarr is unfortunately the black sheep of the Arr stack. Ebook torrents are notorious for failing/stalling, and the Readarr team has had some major issues with their metadata server in the past year or so, meaning adding new authors/books is often impossible.
It can be nice for tracking what you’re missing, but I end up using manual searches for most of my ebooks. Ebooks tend to work best with direct downloads, (Z-Library, Anna’s Archive, etc) so an Arr service reliant on torrents is spotty, at best. It isn’t even actively being developed, and the devs still attached to the project have even said that it will likely stagnate and fall into disrepair unless a serious dev is willing to take over the project.
boox makes good e-ink stuff, from what I’ve heard.
I personally have an actual tablet that I use for reading, the oukitel titan rt7. Don’t remember what I paid for it, but I think it was about 300usd. its a bit heavy, but I only have to charge it like one or twice a month, and has a big enough screen that I dont have any issues reading stuff on it.
I absolutely love my go color 7. Wish I could get the second version of it for stylus support, but it’s absolutely fantastic. Reading through One Piece manga at the moment in color and it’s awesome.
Battery life for an actual android device is incredible. I’ll buy another one the next time I am in the market for one.
in this things defense, of its ~1.2kg weight, 90% of it is battery. its got… iirc, a 3600mAh battery. stupid big.
it also doesn’t have a very bright screen, or a good antiglare coating so you won’t be able to read stuff outdoors, period.
I mean, this is outdoors in full Colorado sun. It’s pretty readable. Yeah if I point it directly at the sun it’s hard to read, but so is my phone. There’s way more angles where this is not an issue than where it is.
Also it weighs 6.9 ounces, not 1.2kg lol. Click into the picture to see it more clearly also.
I was referring to the tablet I own, btw
Oh my bad! I misread your reply
I see you’re coming from a .de domain so chances are you might have a Thalia (store) in your area. I’ve bought a Tolino Shine about 6 years back and I really like it. Sure, you can buy them online too, but I liked the option to try it out before I buy.
The new Tolinos are … not very good though
Might be the case, my experience is with the Shine 3. Giving them an hands on in the store is imho always better than reviews on the net.
I have a Kobo n437, I swaped the internal sd card with a 32gb one and installed InkBox/Quill OS.
You’ll need a bit of linux skills to use a bigger storage solution to its full potential. The project is currently on hiatus as they port the OS over to the pine64 e-reader.
Worth noting otherwise, currently pictures in epub formated books don’t load (at least on mine don’t know about other models) so youll want to convert them to pdf.
PocketBook also has nice readers and as far as I know they run an embedded Linux as OS.
I love my pocketbook colour three. The extra screensize is very much appreciated for comics
I bought my first e-reader a month ago, it’s the Boox Go 7 and I’m really pleased so far. The fact that it’s also an android tablet let’s me download apps for Mangas, music, etc.
