I've got a large collection of e-books, but I've always just read them on my phone. Finally broke down and bought a proper e-reader with the nice e-ink display. Why didn't I do this forever ago?
It's got a backlight, but using it under a lamp with reflected light is just so much easier on my eyes and feels more like a paper book. I also haven't read a book written on dead trees in a good minute, so sitting under a lamp just brings back a missing piece of the experience I didn't even know was gone.
I also just can't get over how "fake" the display looks. Fake is usually not used to describe something positively, but in this case, it's a huge praise. The text and book cover images just look like they're printed on a sheet of paper and slipped inside to make the device look functional...like a movie prop. Turning the backlight on diminishes this effect somewhat, though (which is another reason I prefer to leave it off).
I also love that I can just set it down and not worry about coming back to a dead battery, lol. The reader app on my phone is set to prevent it from going to sleep or turning off the screen, so sometimes I'll set it down to go take care of something else, forget, and come back to a nearly dead battery.
To everyone who has recommended these gizmos to me, I finally get it. I know I said reading books on my phone was good enough, but I was wrong.
I've had a Kindle Paperwhite for many years, and love it. I run a Calibre server at home (using https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web), which makes e-book management nice and easy.
I just wish Amazon didn't so thoroughly control the e-book reader and book market. I know there are other options, but there have been few in the past.
I got a Kobo based on prior recommendation and also run Calibre-Web, but I don't have (or haven't yet found) a way to connect the two. On my phone, I could browse Calibre via OPDS but haven't found a way to do that with the Kobo (yet?). It has a primitive web browser, but I couldn't get Calibre to load on it to try downloading books that way.
Ended up just downloading my books from Calibre-web to my laptop and shuffled them over USB. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Had considered a Kindle but read that they were a hassle to load your own books onto, so went with something less beholden to the manufacturer.
If/when I upgrade, probably looking at something like the Scribe (or the Kobo equivalent) to also use for note taking.
I don't know about your specific model of kobo, but my Clara hd has a rudimentary web browser built-in, in a "Beta Features" menu.
It does, but it wouldn't load Calibre web. At they very least, it choked when it redirected to Authelia for login.
Yes, you have to setup calibre to use LDAP (which I use with authentik). You lose the single sign on but its the only way to get non oAuth enabled clients to work (like ereaders).