I bought a Kindle Paperwhite a month or so ago to replace a basic Kobo.
It's almost ideal for my purposes:
- It has a backlight. This is where my old Kobo let me down. It's the main reason I chose to buy something else.
- It has a good battery life, which is important to me — I chose a dedicated e-reader because I'm stuck with doing a lot of long-distance travelling.
- It has a decent capacity.
- It's generally easy to use, though I do keep accidentally hitting the "next page" area when I'm trying to go back a page.
- It's a nice weight. I have weak joints, and this device is light enough that I can read for hours without it causing problems.
- It can cope with having thousands of books added in one go. This is an impressive contrast to the old Kobo, which seemed to get confused if I tried putting on more than around 25 at a time.
However, I do think it could be improved in some ways:
- Collections. Collections are a wonderful idea. Given that I have almost 2000 ebooks, having a way to organise them is definitely valuable, BUT... for every ebook I want to add to a collection, I have to page through every single book that comes before it (alphabetically by author, title or whatever). This seems utterly ridiculous to me, especially given that a simple alphabet strip at the top would speed the process up markedly. There is also no way to organise your collections on a PC unless you root the Kindle, according to my internet research. I have literally hundreds of pages of titles alone, and it takes longer to create each successive collection because of the inability to skip to a particular letter (or do a search while in collection-making mode).
- Colour scheme. I'm not talking about wanting non-greyscale options, here, but it would be really nice to have a light text/dark background option. I don't know if this is plausible and sensible with this technology, but the ability to read in a completely dark room without a white background would be good, especially for those of us with trouble sleeping. (I suspect a light text/dark background Kindle book would be much less confusing to one's body clock than either a dark text/light background ebook or a physical book with a lamp or torch.)
- There's no SD card slot. Yes, the internal memory *should* be enough for the vast majority of users, but the lack of one was what put me off buying one as my first e-reader. This was partially because I read a lot and like to have a lot of options available at all times, but also because it feels oddly controlling. This time I've chosen the backlight over the SD card slot, but if it had had said slot, it wouldn't have been much of a decision at all.
- Given that different vendors seem to approach metadata differently (for example, Project Gutenberg vs. Amazon), it would be useful to be able to choose whether to have book information displayed from metadata or from the file name. (I also use a couple of Android devices with an e-reader called FBReader. It has the option to look at the library in a sort of file manager format, which is occasionally really useful for when metadata fails. I think if the Paperwhite had this option it would fix half of my problems with it.)
In conclusion, it's a nice device. The size feels about right, the weight isn't a distraction, the general appearance is good; it just has a few problems that will mainly concern people who read when they should be sleeping, and people who read excessive numbers of books. :)