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E-readers and e-ink · Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle 2nd gen

6owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
2/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for build quality and ease of use; criticized for performance and reliability.

What owners wrote

Likes it
The statement can be extended to almost any device indeed. To my dismay, Tolinos/Vivlios (or whatever your country calls the rebranded device) haven’t seen any improvements in forever and the local stores are hard to use. I’m still using my Kindle Oasis 2nd Gen, plugged off and jailbroken, side loading my old collection or public domain books. No one has made something remotely as nice to use as the Oasis, including Amazon themselves. Jailbreaking was quite easy. The only thing that will kill my Oasis is the battery being nearly impossible to change.
Likes it
I bought a Kindle Oasis 1st gen when it came out, got it replaced by Amazon with gen 2 and I liked it as long as I could sideload books and strip DRM off of my Kindle "license purchases" but I anticipated the recent moves by Amazon and looked for alternatives, knowing that I'd probably have to love with some compromises, especially in terms of build quality and feel. Looked at Kobo, Onyx, etc but none really convinced me, especially when I saw most of them being stuck on Android 11. When I heard of the Daylight Computer DC-1 something clicked. The smooth display, readability in daylight, none of the cons of rink (except being gray scale), the blue light free display, Android 13 with 16 being on the horizon. Downsides are the uneven display borders, higher battery usage when the display is powered on/no always on display and the rather flimsy feeling of the back cover. DPI is a bit below modern ereaders as well. I'm still happy I went with it. It's now my daily carry for writing in the cafe, scribbling down notes with the included pen and its the best device I ever used to read PDFs and scanned books from archive.org that aren't downloadable. Lots of cons still but no one is going to pull your ebooks from your device and it's still their 1st gen and only device they have. I just hope they ship export functionality for their custom app so that you can keep local copies of the documents you send to their backend. It's great this was mentioned in a podcast once which got me curio…
Doesn’t like it
What if you bought the device just because it had this option? I have an Echo Dot 2nd Gen which I used for around two months, until it once failed at a command of playing back a radio station but instead started to continuously stream my audio to Amazon, for hours until I noticed it (bandwidth monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana). Now none of my devices (phones and tablets) listen for hotwords, but at this point there's no guarantee that my Pixel phone isn't listening in all the time. That feature where your phone listens to water or an alarm is what I found too sketchy, as if they have been playing around with on-device constant sound recognition for too long and then come up with some silly reason to make you enable it.
Neutral
Yes completely. I have both an old Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Gen I think and a Kobo Clara. The kindle 'lives' in the car and the Kobo at home so I always have something to read. I use Calibre to sync to both. Rather than directly accessing Amazon from the Kindle I download bought books to my PC then strip the DRM - so I can read the same book on both the Clara and Kindle. See: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools I'd say that the initial awkwardness is from deliberately not connecting the Kobo or Kindle to the internet to stop them from 'phoning home' when you set them up. The Kindle is easy - just don't connect it, the Kobo seems to insist but there's a simple step-by-step to bypass the enforced sign up on the Clara I use. See: https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html - basically SQL commands. and you can get firmware updates for the Kobo devices via https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html and they are easy to apply - drag / drop. I don't get books from Kobo's site as it used to be hard if not impossible to strip the DRM from them - which meant I couldn't read them on my Kindle. Hope that helps.