As good as amazon is, I… just don’t like their ecosystem. I know it’s silly and stallman-esque but ‘does not support epub’ is a bit of a turn-off for me since that kinda just… I don’t like it.
I liked barns and noble’s tablets, but none of them are particularly sturdy. OK the nook HD technically works but proporitary cable meaning due to my lack of funds situation good frakking luck buying a replacement.
I’d go with a kobo, but… Yea. Most of my material is side-loaded I’ve collected over the years, stripped the DRM out of, and kept organized via calibre since calibre is awesome.
I have a Pandigital Novel that I like. The e-ink kind, not the color lcd kind. It was dirt-cheap ($20-40) a few years ago because they were clearing old stock to release a new full-color pseudotablet version (with the same name unfortunately).
It’s probably not the best, but it serves well as a book, has an incredible battery life, doesn’t try too hard to do things it shouldn’t (not a wannabe tablet, although it does have some useless features), and doesn’t have vendor lockin (nook/kindle) or phone-home-and-randomly-delete-your-stuff ‘features’.
This review refers to the one I got:
I also have one of the older e-ink kindles, high quality hardware, but … it’s a kindle.
Don’t know if there are any good new e-ink readers. With those two, I haven’t been looking lately.
You’re no doubt already aware, but Calibre can mass convert your epubs to mobi and load them to a Kindle. You could rock the hardware (which is quite good) without ever needing to buy ebooks from Amazon!
