this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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There are so many alternative ereaders that are better than the kindle, that I don't get why people buy it.
I once borrowed one from a friend and it didn't even let me organize media in directories from a pc. The directory structure got all messed up and it was a pain to follow my study sequence. Any cheap Chinese ereader would allow that.
The Paperwhite was magnitudes cheaper than a Kobo. I wanted a Kobo but just didn't have the funds at the time. I use the Paperwhite and have never connected it to wifi, thank God for them not tanking usb downloads. Yet.
Kindles are cheap. That's pretty much it. I don't think it's a great mystery. Amazon subsidizes their hardware to get you into their ecosystem even more.
They also consistently put their ebooks on sale. I've gone cold turkey on buying from them and have noticed they often have the best prices on books. They want people to build a library and be locked in.
Maybe my different experience comes from living in the global south. All of the are expensive in here, so kindle has no price advantage
Prime Day and other sales push those prices down pretty regularly to the point I think most people are like "ah fuck it why not" and just grab one
Kindle Unlimited is the big thing that keeps my wife on her Kindle. She goes through books like candy and it’s made it seriously economical without the trouble of loading it via her computer.
Which ones do you recommend?
Not OP, but i am happy with my Pocketbook Verse pro.
My kobos have been excellent, I've had a few over the years. MUCH sharper screens than the kindle by and large, and they support loading epubs, pdfs, cbz, all sorts of things.
I'm pretty happy with Kobo. I've had the same model for about ten years and it's still working great. They had color temperature changing for the backlight before it was cool. The syncing to Pocket was neat before stupid Mozilla killed it, and now they've pivoted to Instapaper. Plus I can install KOreader to also read stuff on my own ebook server, though I find the Kobo firmware is quite nice so I often just stick on that.
I mentioned some in this other comment: https://lemmy.zip/post/49532624/21704502
I rock a Kobo and used an Onyx for almost a year and they are indeed great (Onyx especially if you want to still use Kindle and don't mind a free 5G Modem).
The issue is the ecosystem. Kindle Unlimited is, even with the current Amazon bullshit, a SPECTACULAR resource for self-published authors. And it restricts what authors can sell in terms of ebooks.
There are-ish ways around it (drying up every day as per the article). But if you are buying an ereader it is generally because you like to read a lot. And the Amazon ecosystem is still nigh unbeatable.