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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2506 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

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Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?

It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.

I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.

Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.

You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.

As others have said I only read pirated books now. I don't trust publishers as license holders/DRM so being able to easily side load is key.

I've never used a Kindle, the Nook is my first and only e-reader and jail breaking it was the first order of business. If I couldn't sideload pirated files and had to view (spits) ads I'd have stuck to acoustic books.

Those features are so essential that I take them for granted and so forgot to include them in the OP. Is there a reason you haven't jail broken it? I only did a quick search but it seems doable.

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