I've used a kindle in the past and in terms of how much text you can see and how easy it is to hold it's really damn good, way better than a phone. Though I did have the problem that a lot of the time when adding books through Calibre, it'd break the formatting and made it much harder to read. I've been told that was me doing it wrong and that could very well be the case, just watch out for that.

anything that you can install koreader on is good enough
i installed it on my kindle and it handles pdf and cbz well

>>117513
hm for reading manga that seems really good since ebook readers are quite nice on the eyes, I just don't use them because I prefer audiobooks for most literature

Yeah, I saw those "ad-supported" things on Amazon before and they freak me out. My mom's smart TV randomly started showing ads on the starting screen last month despite the previous 4 years being clear. I have no idea how that happened, but I haven't really felt like investigating it since she doesn't care and it's only there for a second once in a while.
I have no idea how reading tablets work, but I'd try to get one as "open" as possible, so Android (or windows/linux?) instead of some Amazon or Google closed thing.

I think I will get a Kobo Sage soon

After thinking about it, I have decided these are too expensive and flawed in various ways and will not be buying one. I had seen a Kindle Paperwhite Signature on ebay for $99, but by the time I decided to stop waffling and buy it the listing had ended from someone purchasing it first. New ones go for like $190 before tax and that other one was after tax... That's just way too much money, and the entry model kindle I just don't like. Anything cheaper online are the old kuso models with micro USB. I don't care how many weeks of battery life it has or however infrequently I would have to plug it in. I will never use or tolerate anything with micro USB now that USB C exists.

The prices just don't make sense for how little storage they have and how limited they are in file formats and closed off ecosystems. The Android devices all seem even more expensive and/or have even worse tradeoffs like quite poor battery life (in comparison to weeks worth of battery), old versions of Android, or are large tablets. What brands are talked about as alternatives seem to have no presence in terms of the used market either. Not for the features that are make or break for me personally at least.

Honestly, they seem like worthless ewaste gimmicks for how locked down they are. With even a crappy Android phone, I at least know it will work for years to come. With something like a Kindle, will they all become paperweights if Amazon gets busted up in an antitrust or something? iPhone and flagship phones get away with not having micro SD card slots because they can upwards of 512GB of internal storage. And for god sake, at least you're able to control what you can and cannot store on the things. Even Apple has come around to allowing users access the filesystem, but these things you're telling me I need to create an Amazon account and upload each and every ebook I want to read through some online portal? These are policies that make more sense coming out of Sony in 2004 than they do in 2023. Heaven forbid, at least Sony would have peobably had the decency to include expandable storage even if it was just Memory Stick Duo. With these, it's like what's the point? Devices ahould be as frictionless as possible and buying one seems like the exact opposite of frictionless. Full of intentional compromises, lackluster performance, vendor lock-in, and unrealisitic pricing models.

To be completely honest, I think the slow refresh rate and occasional screen wipe transition would probably have turned me off using these, even if I was accepting of the other issues I have with these. More than anything, I'm just kind of upset and confused that what I want in a device doesn't exist.

>>117513
>koreader
The installation and supported devices documentation doesn't exactly leave me very impressed...

I've got more experience with people who shun the idea of reading off of a monitor, believing it's impossible to read manga off of a screen.

I've found reading off monitors to be more comfortable than reading books, but maybe it's a result of it being what my body has adapted to over decades.

>>117521
I have an Amazon Oasis. If you never connect it to the internet and put books on it through calibre it wont be e-waste.

>>117524
With average monitor brightness, black text on white background?

>>117521
Upon further reflection and some more searching: I was way too harsh. Mostly correct when complaining about Kindles, but Kobo has a lot of the things I want. Thinking about getting the Clara 2e maybe. I'll have to do some more looking. I like that it's way more open than the Kindles are and that it supports more formats natively. And it most notably isn't full of ads to make you buy more books.

I'm a bit torn though. I think I like the size of the current Kindle Paperwhite at 6.8" more than the Clara 2e's 6" screen. The Clara 2e is roughly the same height as my phone and a few centimers wider, but without an edge-to-edge screen it might feel a bit small? I checked with a measuring tape and it seems manga pages normally take up 5" on my phone screen so I'm not sure...

The Libra 2 has a 7" screen, but I don't know how I feel about the assymetry and page turn buttons. Maybe >>117527 with their Oasis could comment on that. From a few videos the Clara 2e seems faster than the Libra 2, but both are slower than the Kindle Paperwhite. Wish there was a Kobo in that niche! 7" screen without page turn buttons.

So... Maybe in a week or so I'll talk myself into buying some Kobo device. We'll see.

>>117587
There are no ads in an air-gapped kindle and Calibre does all the work of converting formats, the asymmetry with the bezels and page turn buttons is no big deal because there was an effort to make the screen page shaped.

Yeah, Kobo is more your speed though, things like KoReader supports the full Kobo line

>>117587
Page turn buttons just feel better ergonomically. The touch screens on these devices are not as responsive as a mobile phone.

I ordered a Kobo Libra 2. Hopefully I like it. Amazon has a 30-day return policy, but apparently they have become a lot more stingy about returns and their support was outsourced to India or something.

>>117499
Does anyone make a two-screen folding tablet like those high-end android phones? My father has a phone like that and it'd be perfect for reading manga if it were the size of a standard book. I mostly stick to paper still because tablets are heavy and the brightness of the screen keeps me awake if I read them in bed. Where a good old hardback/softback book lulls me to sleep as long as I'm not using LED lighting.

For digital stuff I'm been using a standard monitor in portrait mode. Trackball > touchscreen and I can casually read manga while I'm working that way. But I'd really like to have something away from my desk.

I got a laptop recently and it works okay for reading manga but the screen is landscaped and I have to use the touchpad to scroll around so it isn't that great.

>>117740
It arrived today! I'm seriously impressed. I wasn't expecting to like the asymmetrical design, but I actually like it a lot. I've used it for a few hours now, casually reading a novel and it's really nice. I like being able to adjust the color temperature to a nice yellow, like the color of an old book. Being able to finely adjust margins, font sizing, line spacing are also very nice features I really appreciate. Also! The resolution and visual quality astounds me! I suppose it's not called e-ink for nothing, but it genuinely looks nearly identical to a page out of a book. Some people online were saying that manga is better viewed on an 8" screen, so I was a bit worried that there might be a resolution limitation, but nope! It looks fantastic. Must just be old farts with bad eyesight saying such things...

I've been using the same Kindle for 10 years now and it still works fine but I wonder if I'm missing out on any fancy bells and whistles with the newer models.

>>117835
Hm, that looks readable enough as an image, but how's it look at a normal reading distance from the kindle? I kinda have poor eyesight myself so the small size may be an issue for me if I don't have it right up against my face, though aside from that the image quality and texture really does look amazing. Also, unlike the kindle is the libra more capable of installing other software onto it, or are you still restricted to the amazon library?

>>117877
Text readability is very good. If you're reading e-books that are formatted as plaintext (like EPUB, or TXT), you can adjust the font size, line spacing, and page margins. As far as manga and PDFs go, those essentially have baked-in text so no changing font size. I found reading manga just as easy as reading physical manga. If you need to zoom in that is pretty sluggish though. Not painfully so, but it is fairly slow. My eyesight is adequate so I haven't needed to zoom in at all while holding it a comfortable distance away.

>is the libra more capable of installing other software onto it
Apparently you can install koreader onto it, but I haven't found any reason to want to install it. It's handled .kepub (Kobo EPUB, converted with Calibre), .pdf, and .cbz fine. This seems more important with Kindle which seems more locked down with sideloading books.

>are you still restricted to the amazon library?
As far as bookstores go, it's Rakuten instead of Amazon. They're Japan-based so they've apparently got loads of manga and have a book store that is second to Amazon in terms of total books they have for sale.

Kobo also supports "Overdrive" which allows you to link to your library and check out ebooks for free with that; you don't have to visit your local library to check out ebooks, it's all through the ereader. I'm still on vacation so I haven't had a chance to set that up, but it seems a lot more convenient than needing to scour the internet for books. To my knowledge, Kindles don't support this. I think they support Libby, which does the same thing, but you need to use an app on your phone and thwn transfer the book to your Kindle instead of just doing everything on the ereader itself.

>>117881
>It's handled .kepub (Kobo EPUB, converted with Calibre), .pdf, and .cbz fine.
Was bothered by how .cbz files have no metadata and found out that there a program called Kindle Comic Converter that will convert .cbz to .epub. Despite the name, it has device presets for Kobo as well. I previously used Calibre to see how it did, but the pages would not fill the entire screen. KCC handled that fine, and had additional options for splitting page spreads, compressing images, converting to grayscale, and setting the epub to "manga mode" so that pages go from right to left. Worked out really well, and was able to compress down a lot of the manga I intend on reading; ~21GB to ~6GB. Page turning also improved significantly, presumably because each page was less filesize. That said, I did have to be careful when importing the books from KCC to not reconvert them using Calibre; KCC produced kepubs for my Kobo, but Calibre recognizes them as normal epubs, and if you convert them to kepub with Calibre, the pages will end up being cropped in with whitespace surrounding them, the same as converting .cbz to .epub. Calibre seems happy to edit metadata without conversion though so that's good.

While I was doing that, I also found out that you can strip ebook DRM fairly easily with DeDRM. Thank you library (>>>/win/2549). These are my books now.

>>117513
I didn't knew you could install homebrew on a Kindle. I'll have to look into that.

Kobo Libra Colour will be available April 30. It features a 7" E Ink Kaleido™ 3 display. A Clara Colour will also release the same day. I will wait and see if this one is worth grabbing. It would be nice to see the LN art pages in full color.

>>122904
I'm guessing it probably won't be worth it. Kaleido uses an LCD layer on top of a traditional black and white e ink display. Unless there's been improvements I haven't heard about, pretty much every Kaleido display looks muddy and desaturated with poor color rendering.

https://youtu.be/NW6WUOjACC0?t=313

>>122905
You're probably right as usual.

>>122906
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, I'm just not optimistic (｡•́︿•̀｡)
That said, if it's anything like other Kaleido displays, you can probably turn off the LCD layer and view it like a normal black and white e ink display. At the very least, I'd imagine they'd include a feature like that for power saving. If there aren't already reviews, I'd definitely keep my eyes open to see what the consensus is on it. If it's actually decent, I might get one but I'll feel a little remorseful having just gotten my Kobo Libra 2 so recently...

When is this entering "just get a tablet" territory if they're now aiming at color? Power consumption? Weight?

>>122909
There's been color e ink displays for several years, and there's been more than a few that run android, but they all still have the downsides of using e ink. Namely, the slow refresh rates, which makes any sort of usage with apps and web browsing very unpleasant and stuttery. I think the very best e ink displays can do like 20-30 FPS, but most are more like 10-15. True color e ink, using the Gallery display, is basically impossible to do quickly because you essentially have CYMK + white, for a total of 5 ink molecules within each capsules that you have to manage to render colors, which takes at least a second or two to refresh. Which is part of the reason why Kaleido exists, since although the colors are generally worse, the refresh rate can at least be somewhat bearable since it's just a typical black and white e ink display with a color LCD layer on top.

>>117835
>>117881
How do you feel about your Korbo Libra 2 now?

>>123185
I've talked about it quite a bit before, and my thoughts haven't really changed; I still like it a lot!

If I have but one complaint, it's a minor one: I haven't timed it, but it seems to take about a minute for the device to fully power on. For something you might use for a hour or two, it's not really that big of a deal, and my phone seems to take longer. Unlike my phone, however, this has a power-saving feature to turn off after a certain amount of time, so I regularly find myself having to wait that minute every time I come back to wanting to read something.

>>123194
To be clear, that power-saving feature is just that. A feature. You can set it so that it never automatically powers off if you want to.

>>123194
Thank you for the response. Is it able to display manga from right to left?

Yes, but there's a little bit of work you'll need to do. If your manga are in .CBZ files, you'll need to convert them to .EPUB. I personally use Kindle Comic Converter. You can technically load .CBZ files if you want, but they'll have no metadata other than the title, and page turning will typically be very slow. Converting to .EPUB let's you import those converted .CBZs into Calibre and add metadata to the files. You can technically just use Calibre to convert to .EPUB, but IIRC it's just not as granular as Kindle Comic Converter.

I should also add that for whatever reason if you add .KEPUB, before the .EPUB file extension, things will load faster and for normal text EPUBs you'll get access to things like changing the font. For regular ebooks it's fine to use Calibre to convert to .KEPUB, but you'll need to download a plug-in inside of Calibre to do that.

>>122907
Well, it has come out. It looks fairly okay all things considered, but it would appear to make any use of the color feature you really need to be using the glow light, which may negate some of the benefits of using e ink (namely the long battery life). Without the glow light it certainly looks muddy and poorly saturated as Kaleido tends to look. It's a bit darker than normal a normal e ink display without the glow light to compensate, as you can see here: https://youtu.be/UEGPFIpJz98?t=421 (Jump to 7:05, for reference). In a few reviews I noticed that you can see some diagonal lines in some of the up-close shots of the devices. After some thinking, I'm pretty sure this is because of the LCD layer being fairly low resolution... A cheap trick they use is marketing the resolution by stating the PPI. For color, that's 150 PPI, and for black and white it's 300 PPI. As the device has a black and white resolution of 1264 x 1680, that means the color resolution is a quarter of that at 683 x 840. I'm not sure how big of a deal that really is, not having seen the deivce myself in person to tell, but the lower resolution of the color layer doesn't appear to result in any weird aliasing in any reviews, so it's probably not an issue in reality.

Is there any ebook way to do OCR drag and select for looking up individual kanji, words, and sentences for reading Japanese manga?
I might be tempted to buy one if there is something like that since there'd be a lot less distractions available.

I should have bought the Libra 2 before it went out of stock.