As time has gone on, my wife and I have felt a stronger and stronger pull to distance ourselves from Amazon. There is a huge list of troubling things about their company (how they treat their employees and vendors, how they steal ideas, various political concerns, etc). They make things very easy to buy, making them hard to completely separate from, but we’re giving it a shot.
Not buying products from Amazon is easy enough. It’s a bit more work, but buying local has many advantages and we enjoy helping out local businesses. The trickier one is the Kindle; I’ve been using one for about 15 years (most recently with the Kindle Scribe), and my wife has one a few years longer than that.
Boox, Kobo, Nook, Supernote, reMarkable…
While leaving Kindle may be tough, there is no shortage of options on the market today. You have dedicated readers from Kobo and Nook, and other e-ink devices from Boox, Supernote, reMarkable and many others. Which to choose?
We were able to narrow it down quite quickly. The reMarkable is great for notes, but not for reading. Kobo and Nook have great devices, but they’re tied to their individual stores. That essentially left the Supernote and Boox devices, as they allow you load multiple apps on them, and Boox seems to have a better focus on reading.
The Boox tablets run a version of Android, so you can load various apps on the tablet. I’ll likely be purchasing most of my books going forward from Kobo, but the fact that I can also run the Nook app (as well as Libby, BookShop, and many others) is fantastic. Plus, I can load the Kindle app on there to still have access to all of the books I’ve purchased over the years.
Which Boox tablet?
Once we decided on Boox, we had to choose the devices that we wanted most. They have a lot of options! I knew I wanted a large tablet with a pen and a backlight, and my wife wanted one similar to her smaller Kindle Paperwhite. I ultimately went with Note Air4 C the and my wife with the Go 6.
There are a lot of videos to walk through the Note Air4 C, but this one is a fairly short (yet comprehensive) overview:
After a few weeks of use, my hunches on the good and the bad (when compared to the Kindle Scribe) were pretty accurate.
- The Boox has a lot of great apps to choose from. I’ve loaded up the Kindle, Kobo and Nook apps, as well as apps like Readwise, Shortform, and Blinkist. It really is the ultimate reading device!
- Perhaps too many apps? I need to be careful not to load distractions on there (like social media), because I certainly can.
- It’s a bit trickier to use. The Kindle just reads books, and now I need to deal with apps and settings and such.
- The reading experience in the Kindle app on the Boox is about 90% as good as on an actual Kindle device. I knew it wouldn’t be 100%, but I’m quite pleased with how well it works.
- The battery life is not nearly as good. With heavy use, the Boox will last a few days whereas a Kindle would last weeks. This is a consequence of a more robust operating system.
All in all it’s been a good move! We can support smaller book publishers and now I’m using a more capable device.
If you use an e-ink tablet other than a Kindle, what are you using?
The convenience with Amazon is high, but I think even that is waning. I encounter more and more instances where I have ordered from Amazon based on a stated delivery date, only to have that date immediately changed after the order is processed. No longer convenient at that point. And I have discovered that with a little bi of research, I can usually find the item I was ordering on Amazon locally and often times cheaper. Amazon is still useful, but I find it less and less so over time.
And to answer your actual question, I have never gotten into the e-readers like Kindle. I prefer a good old fashioned book. I find that I am more likely to actually refer back to the content in a physical book over a Kindle or similar tool.
Good thoughts. On the physical book, I agree and disagree.
I agree in that if I’m going to go back to something, a physical book is much preferred. However, a digital book makes it easier to get content out of to put into other systems, which makes it more likely for me to revisit that content more often, though not “in” the book.
Both have their place, and I go between physical and digital quite a lot.