I’m so happy I downloaded all my Kindle books when I still had a chance and then moved to the Kobo ecosystem, which albeit not perfect is much much better
I was kinda amazed to find out how hard it was to buy a kobo libra colour in .de -- apparently there's some kind of cartel thing going on where amazon somehow convince entire markets not to sell their competitors products. I had to order it from Hungary or something iirc.
Ah that makes a little more sense. Do they jut rebrand kobo devices to tolino? I see they also have a colour e-reader but i can’t really tell if it’s the same device or not…
It works well and I haven’t had any issue. It doesn’t get full marks because it’s not an open device itself but more a device that’s easy to hack.
For example, most books in the kobo store have DRM (to be fair I don’t think it’s entirely their choice), albeit an easy one to break.
You see people here recommending “get a Kobo and install koreader”. That works and there is a one-click install process but it’s still an hack.
Another common thing to do is to keep the stock reader but tweak a file to point the store API to a self-hosted Komga/Calibre Web Automated/Grimmmory instance to get your own books in the system. Again, it works well enough but it’s not like these are documented API.
The bottom line is: it works very well and you can very easily tweak it but the way you tweak it are hacks (reasonable clean ones) rather than officially supported features. Thats why it loses a few marks
Said that, if you are not in the business of self-hosting, you can easily load books via USB or and it even has Dropbox or Google Drive integrations that work out of the box if you prefer network synchronisation
No issues here. I liberated my kindle library and put it in Google Drive. The Kobo can download books from there out of the box. The Kobo store works fine too, although a lot of books barely have any reviews if you’re into that. I have the Kobo Libra Colour and it’s by far the best reader I’ve ever owned.