But a lot of e-Readers tend to be quite expensive.

Have I missed something? If you are ok with a basic e-reader (not high end) you can easily get one for 100 to 150€. Only the cheapest smartphones cost in this range. So they are NOT expensive in relation to smartphones. Especially, when you consider all the people having iPhones or other expensive phones, ranging from like 500€ to over 1000€.

The tolino shine color is 150€. I don’t know about jailbraking it, though it works perfectly fine offline with placing ebooks via USB, without any changes.

Primarily the reasons you gave in your closing. Battery and easier on the eyes.

But I also like that it’s dedicated to just books, without the myriad of other distractions that a phone brings.

I chose an e-ink ebook reader.

Specifically because I wanted the ability to turn backlighting off, and use a soft warm book light to read by.

And also the fact that it uses an extremely low amount of power is great. I still forget where the charging port is after a year and a half with it because I don’t need to charge it very often, even with the amount of reading I do. The biggest power drain is the lighting.

Plus I like being able to toss my phone away and not have notifications while reading my digital collection.

1. Easy to read in sunlight
2. No eyestrain
3. No distractions
4. Long battery life, and you preserve the battery of your phone
5. Doesn’t get warm in your hand like a smartphone

This is why I only use ereaders with true eInk screen (no LCD) and without Android

Kobo.

Eink is easier on the eyes, over long reading sessions.

Plenty of reasons.

An e-reader is essentially what a book was 20 years ago, except it’s an entire library.

Using it doesn’t deplete your phone’s battery, and a good e-reader can stay powered for a week or more with constant usage. Your phone, given all the background services etc., would die within 8-10 hours.

Then there’s the display. Better aspect ratio for reading, better approach for readability (eink), better optimised for reading (cold-warm frontlight), the list goes on.

I prefer reading on an ereader. I find them easier on the eyes, especially in the evening and you can bring them into bright sunlight - they will work even better.

Another topic is: an ereader is for reading. Not checking mail, discord or signal. Not for browsing Lemmy. Not to quickly check up on something. It’s for sitting down, relaxing and reading. That is worth the investment for me.

Also, they keep. I can still use my first gen keyboard kindle after 15+ years.

I since then upgraded to a pocketbook for reading and a onyx air 5c for ttrpg sourcebooks and I could not be happier.

E ink displays are damn good in natural lighting. I’ve used them outdoors to read maps. Also larger screens are easier to read.

Backlit screens are often impossible to read in direct sunlight.

E-paper dominates on the beach or by the pool.

I liked that my e-reader has a special screen, so you can easily read even in direct bright sunlight

For me:

Better aspect ratio for large amounts of text. I just can’t imagine reading an entire novel on my phone.

No distractions. No notifications, no other apps I could be using instead.

Related to the previous point - e-readers are for reading. I’m much more likely to read a lot if I can compartmentalise “other stuff” to my phone. Not to mention other features like the ability to look up word meanings and change text size - all stuff in service of e-readers being “for reading”. (There might exist phone apps that can do this sort of thing, but my point is that on an e-reader it’s built-in).

Page-turn buttons instead of a touch screen (depends on the e-reader). This is a minor thing, but it lessens fingerprints, which makes the screen nicer to use.

Lack of distraction, easier on the eyes, larger screen, much easier to read if it’s sunny out.

I like to use it as an extra screen for when I’m taking notes on a pdf/ebook on my laptop, so I don’t need to dedicate half my laptop screen to the book. And like I said, it’s a bigger screen than my smartphone.

I will answer to some things

• they’re expensive, but they also outlast most modern laptops. A first gen Sony still fulfills its purpose of reading epubs. So in the end it isn’t as expensive. Secondhand it is also a lot cheaper and again, they don’t age that much
• most readers are waterproof
• e-readers have little storage, but a book is a few MB’s. So even with 16gb, you probably never fill it
• color is fun, but I’d recommend steering away if your end goal is reading books. You need to push the backlight way earlier than on a bw ereader. If you do read comics, it looks like an old newspaper in terms of picture quality. The colors are far from accurate, but you only notice this side by side with the actual comic/phone
• I would steer away from kindles. They’re known to just update and kill your setup. There are plenty of devices in which you can play around without this issue. Kobo and pocketbook are in my opinion the most viable options. Long battery life, supports many formats, supports koreader if you want. Boox is also fun, but due to android the battery life is a lot less. With the boox you’re able to run Android apps though, so you could more easily use it like a notepad with your familiar apps

Three reasons:

The passive reflective epaper display is better for reading.

The display only needs power when turning over the page, I.e. while you read the page, the device can be in deep standby/power safe, allowing for way longer battery life.

The display is usually way larger than a phone. The size of a page in a book is the result of a very, very long optimisation process, weighing font size and amount of text for readability. An eBook reader tries to emulate exactly that.

I will pick up my phone to look at the time, use it for 15 minutes, put it down and still not know what the time is. With ebook readers this is not the case