My journey into ereaders

Recently I have really gotten into reading. Most of my life I have been a person who prefers tv, movies, games. Recently all of that just seems to be getting worse and worse. Low quality across all the different platforms. I said fuck it let’s just start reading everything else sucks lol.

I went with ereaders because I have no desire for actual books or space to start collecting books.

The first one I tried was the kindle paper white. I went with this first because I felt it was the easiest way to dive in with access to a lot of books. When you get a kindle you get a free trial of kindle unlimited. It is a pretty low risk solution to check it out. The device is very nice but the kindle ui is pretty bad and just feels like one giant ad with a tiny section for you books. I wasn’t wanting to deal with the Amazon lock in so I knew I wasn’t gonna keep it.

The next one I tried was the viwoods ai paper reader. The hardware design is stellar in my opinion. It looks and feels great and is easy to take with you anywhere. The downside is how bright the screen is on the lowest setting. The setting for quality on the screen creates a ton of ghosting in dark mode. The ui gesture to refresh interferes with reader apps own gestures. The software is just bad, don’t think because it’s android 16 you will get an android experience. You don’t, you get an ereader that happens to run on android 16. You shouldn’t need to tweak the entire software setup to get a comfortable reading experience 🤷

The third one which I am keeping is the kobo clara color. I went with the color because it was the same price as the bw. From what I have read the color eink displays are muted/not as bright. I do most of my reading at night so that’s a selling point. The Clara just feels like it follows the KISS principle. Kobo doesn’t have access to all the books I want but the integrated Libby/overdrive fixes that problem.

I have been tempted to try a pocketbook ereader but the clara color checks all the boxes. If viwoods dials in their software experience and fixes the screen brightness I may consider getting another one again.