Growing up, I was much more into Call of Duty than reading which I’ve heard is equally valid and useful to you later in life so shut up. Luckily for me, at some point Call of Duty began to suck and I started a masters degree that forced me to read. Naturally, as a 22/23 year old who was vaguely into tech and productivity, when prompted with the query “how read book tech?” the wisdom of the youtube algorithm delivered unto me an Ali Abdaal video on Amazon’s Kindle.

Gone was my fear of musty old books! Paper? You mean out of trees? Not for me baby! Bezos and I struck a pact. I would read books from his online store and he would make it easy.

In a turn of events as shocking as lawn mowers on Saturday mornings, I broke that pact the instant I saw the exorbitant prices of textbooks on the amazon store. I was, and am, a broke a** grad student.

It’s been 3 years or so since that fateful day. I’ve come to love reading both on my ereader and in paper. And as that love for reading has grown, so too has my firy hatred for a bald man named Jeff and the pact I struck with him in the EULA of the Kindle paperwhite.

That pact, in fact, is why the Kobo rocks - it doesn’t f*ckin have one!

The Kobo and all its awesomeness

It’s pretty simple. Imagine, in 2024, a digital device that fulfills its intended purpose without:

1. an internet connection
2. locking you into a bloodpact to use some shitty online store that legally has the right to remove books from your library at any time
3. a 10 dollar monthly fee to some service you’ll never use and big tech has promised they will not raise the prices of but are secretly plotting to release a “lite” version of with slightly fewer ads than the free tier and price bump this one.
4. an internet connection

This is why the Kobo rocks. I can just read my God Damn books without some sh*itty service pestering me! Why is that so hard?

An internet connection

Sure, you can use a Kindle without an internet connection but what if you want to read a book you don’t have on that device yet?
I’m fairly certain your options are:

1. connect to the internet so you can use their online store
2. connect to the internet so you can subscribe to Amazon’s equivalent to a library but make it 20 bucks a month or something
3. connect to the internet so you can find your super secret amazon kindle email address which you can send epubs to and sometimes it might work.

In contrast, on the Kobo I use a usb-c cable and plug that sucker into my laptop and transfer the file onto my kobo. That’s it. …
It is a modern first world tragedy that being able to use a computer (because that’s what an ereader is!) as a computer is a novel feature.
It’s just files all the way down, dog! Why the hell are we so shook??

The Bloodpact of the Amazon online store

Have you looked at the price of sh*t on the Amazon store lately? No? Me neither. Screw that. It was high last time and it’s probably higher now.
But hey, authors gotta get paid (not satire. Please, authors have to get paid. They’re people. Except when they’re replaced by LLMs. Wtf is happening?? Anyone know?) and Amazon has to take whatever land tax sized cut off the top it takes for letting you rent its digital land use its e-commerce platform.

Okay, so we’re in agreement that paying authors is good and a little land tax e-commerce service charge is one of those necessary evils.
What’s, like, Orwellian or whatever, is that Amazon reserves the right to remove books you’ve paid for from your library if it somehow loses the rights or realizes it never had the rights in the first place, to sell you that book. Seriously, go watch this guy, who’s way smarter than me, talk about it Jared Henderson’s coherent eloquent Amazon BS explanation

The Kobo, on the other hand, has an online store you can use .. but you can also serve your own calibre instance, if you’re homelabby like that, and point the Kobo’s store to that. You can host your own store!

Why is that useful? I present three scenarios:

1. if you lose your kobo and it was the only place you had your books stored, that would suck. With a calibre instance your books are backed up elsewhere.
2. if you have more books than your kobo has storage (that’s a weird flex but I’m kinda diggin it), just download what you’re reading at the time.
3. if you have a family of readers and you want to manage all their digital libraries from one place.

It’ rocks. Okay? Also self-hosting things is fun if you’re a giant nerd like me.

No stupid fee

Okay, so Kobo does have a service you CAN use. You don’t have to though. And it doesn’t shove this service down your God Damn throat every time you open the device!
I don’t know if it’s just me, but Kindle and Amazone KEEP trying to get me to use their stupid service. Do I look like a man who reads enough books for 9.99 a month for books to be worth it? I read sh*tty productivity books man. They’re cheap both price-wise and conceptually.

Wrapping up

Look, the kobo rocks because it lets you use the it the way you want to and doesn’t lock you out of obvious ways any lil compute should work.
Want to slam some files onto it like it’s an MP3 player from 2004? Go right ahead buddy.
Want to manage your own digital library of epubs? Cool man.
Want to actually own something in 2024? Me too.
It seems like, for now at least, Kobo is down to let you do that. At least, more so than Kindle is. And I’ll take that little win.
Also … just … f*ck Jeff Bezos.

Cheers,
Nathan Laundry