A Tale of Three eReaders

Or, how I ended up with three perfectly fine eReaders.

My Kobo (aged 6) still going strong in 2020

I got my first eReader (a 2nd generation Kobo Glo) in January 2014, after much deliberation. Would I actually like to read from a screen? I don’t like to read much on my laptop/phone so I wasn’t sure if I would like it. But it did sound as if it could be very useful potentially, and sometimes I got eBooks which I had to read on my laptop and I didn’t like that. In my book club almost everyone had a Kobo, so I went and got one. I have to admit it took some getting used to. I think it took like a month to finish the fist book on it, but after that it became like reading a tree book very fast and the rest – as they say – is history.

And I would have been perfectly content to just stay with Kobo, were it not for Netgalley. You can read their books most of the time on an eReader of your choice, but certain publishers only provide kindle versions – which meant I still sometimes had to resort to reading on my laptop. At some point I went YOLO – I want a Kindle as well, and that’s why I bought my Paperwhite. It still makes perfect sense to me. Actually since Netgalley works much more easy with Kindle I will read almost all their books on the Kindle nowadays.

My Paperwhite – the second eReader – (aged 5) lovingly called Kindle-chan.

In 2017 I had a rather big scare! My Kindle was having issues and I was mainly using it so I wanted to make sure I would never be without a Kindle. So I ordered a new one (Paperwhite 2017), but by the time it arrived – you might have guessed – the problems with Kindle-chan had disappeared and it keeps working until this day. So I mainly use the other one as a backup or if I left my main one somewhere on accident.

All three together

What eReader should I get?

I’m probably not the best one to answer this question, since all my eReaders are terribly old for tech standards. But they are still going strong even after 5 or 6 years and I think that is a great plus. Yes, they have cost a 100 euros but it is an investment well made – in my opinion. I have never regretted buying one, not even the spare one.

All of them are rather low-end eReaders – they don’t have all the most fancy features but some of them are:

  • No buttons (I know some people like to have physical buttons to move through the book, but mine are all touchscreen, and I like that I can reverse the moves – so for example I can read with just my left hand)
  • A build in light (for many, this is very important. I don’t use it that often but when I do, I am glad this feature is here)
  • Good battery (by far the most important. I have used my eReaders way more than prescribed by the company and still they have a battery life of weeks – tell that to my last phone who couldn’t last a day).
  • My Kindle comes with a mail-address so even if you have mobi files that didn’t come from Amazon or Netgalley (for example the Tor.com eBook Club), you can transfer them wirelessly.

The biggest difference between Kobo and Kindle is the format of the books you need to feed it. Kobo uses .epub – which is all vendors except Amazon, and Kindle uses Amazon-only .mobi; this is something you might want to keep in mind – although I do think there is some crossover in newer models.

I really enjoy eReaders and could no longer do without them, but there is one thing that would never happen with tree books:

What is the story of your eReader(s)? Let me know in the comments!