Which E-Reader is worth it in 2026?

All right, today we are talking about e-readers. I'm gonna take you guys through pretty much every e-reader that I have used. There are seven different manufacturers or different like sort of types of e-readers, but then probably closer to like 20 different e-reader models and variants that you can pick just from this list and even more than that. So the goal today is going to be to make it a quick one, talk about why you might want a particular e-reader, what to look for in a particular e-reader. So with that, let's just dive right in. First and foremost, I think we got to start with the Kindle. This is the Kindle Basic. This is the like entry-level Kindle that came out I think about a year ago now, maybe two years as of recording this video. This was my go-to one device for most of the last couple of years. What makes the Basic Kindle so good is it has a backlight, it has a high DPI crisp e-ink screen. Battery life is incredible. You get access to Audible and to Kindle Unlimited. You have the Kindle store to grab books, and then you also have the Send a Kindle feature, which now supports EPUB. I made an entire video about this particular Kindle, and I'll link all my Kindle reviews down in the description below. But I do think if you're in the United States especially, you have the Amazon Bookstore, you already have like Amazon Prime, whatever, like this is the easiest thing to get that's just going to get you up and running reading the least amount of hassle. You can upgrade to the Paperwhite, which has that warm screen, sort of that like warmer amber light for nighttime reading. If say you don't have a reading light in bed, or if you want to primarily read in an environment where you just don't have good lighting, spend a little bit more money, get that. This is a larger device though, and I do think that harms it when it comes to portability. I much prefer the Basic Kindle. Recently though, Kindle's ColorSoft has gotten very good, and I've been using the ColorSoft when reading just around the house. I just like having that color screen. It just makes, it makes something about the books come alive, especially when you're in your library and you're switching between multiple books. I find that that has made it very exciting and enjoyable to look through my library where it's in the black and white. I just didn't do that as much. I just didn't spend as much time. I would like read a book on my Kindle, put it down, maybe go read a couple other books, and then come back to this. And now I find that with the color screen, I spend more time reading. And ultimately the reason why I'm into e-readers and these types of devices is I want to spend less time on my phone. I don't have social media when it comes to Instagram, TikTok. I just haven't used them in years. I want to be reading, and I want to be reading stuff that I want to read for myself, stuff for my kids. And the Kindle, I think, is the easiest way to do that, especially if you're in the US. Now, as a Mexican, I've spent a lot of time in Latin America. Obviously, there's just some things like region availability and things like this. If you're in Europe, if you're in Asia, you've already experienced this. I think if I was living full-time outside of the United States, or most of my time out of the United States, I'd probably end up going with the Books or the Books Go as my go-to e-reader. A little bit more expensive, but similar form factor to the Kindle, the basic Kindle. I really like this Go series, and Books also has another series called the Palmo series that is more shaped like a phone, but it's an XT-E Ink display. Books has also announced that they're going to do a smaller device similar to the XT-E Ink. I think they're going to call it the Books Pico. So I'd be on the lookout for that. I'll talk about the XT-E Ink and their lineup of devices here in a moment. But some of the drawbacks with the Books is that it runs Android, older version of Android, Android 11, which is no longer supported by Google. That does allow you to use things like the Kindle app, the Audible app. So you can have other stores, you know, you can even put things like I think Dropbox and Google Drive on here and just read PDFs like that if that's something you want to do. This is a very flexible and versatile device. I don't particularly enjoy fiddling with Android or just like the custom skin of Android on some of these devices. If I'm just trying to pick up an e-reader to read, this isn't the most simple device. It's not the thing that I would recommend to most people if you aren't willing to do a little bit of setup and fiddling. But once you dial it in, this can be your favorite device. In my opinion, I think that's one of the cool things about it. Just be aware of that. One of the strangest devices that has come across my path in the last year or so is this BigMe. I believe this is the B7 Color. This came with a stylus. I'm not going to dive into like the Kindle Scribe with the stylus. Obviously, Books has their Go 2 now, which also has stylus support. BigMe comes with stylus support. If that's something you guys are interested in, let me know down in the comments below. What I really liked about the BigMe though is it has this Kindle Oasis sort of form factor where it's more boxy. It has the physical buttons on the side for reading. So if you want to advance pages with a physical button, you can do that. I think this is an interesting combo of some of the positive things from the Books where you have that sort Android OS running on here. You have a lot of versatility. Again, you can use a stylus with it, but it also I think plays if you love the Kindle Oasis and you wish that you could just do a little bit more with it. I think this is really niche. It is a well-done device. At least I like it. The build quality feels solid. The software, again, it's scanned Android. Very interesting. I was never a huge fan of the Kindle Oasis. I like more of that basic Kindle size or even the XTE X4. But if you were a fan of that particular form factor and you want something that feels like an upgrade, this may be that thing. Now we're going to talk about the XTE Ink X4. Also the X3, which is a little bit smaller than this. So this is a four inch display vertically or horizontally, I should say. The X3 is about a three inch display horizontally. These devices are amazing. This is probably now my most used e-reader device. I would say I'm probably at a good 50-50 right now of reading books digitally. And then whenever I can, I do try to read physical books. The thing that this device has done for me, I made a whole video about this, the five ways I use my XTE Ink X4. I'll link it in the description. That's not reading books, right? So I have little books of poetry in here, essays, have a couple of devotionals in here. This is the ultimate don't use your phone device. I blew a tire or I blew a tube in one of my bike tires about a and yeah, I just had to sit on the beach, the lake and read this while I waited for someone to come pick me up and help me fix my tube. Cause I didn't have my kit on me, which was silly, but I ended up getting to read a little bit on here. Some of the drawbacks of the XTE Ink X4, and I've actually had people email me about this as they've had issues flashing cross point onto it. These like third-party firmware solutions because all that's in here is an ESP 32 board. If that already sounds like a lot, yeah, this is not a device that is going to be in my opinion, the device that I wanted to use out of the box. You do have to do a little bit of that fiddling, plug it into your computer, install some software on it or firmware on it. Once you get that going though, I've really been impressed with how easy this is to just pop out the SD card or the micro SD card, put it into my laptop, drop some EPUB files on it, and then put that card back in and put this thing back up. And I have everything I could want on it. There is a little web server too, that you can boot up on here and you could wirelessly transfer books from like your phone or your laptop. I didn't even care to deal with that. I have a SD card reader on my laptop and that was just the easiest path for me. One thing I should note is that XTE Ink is, or just announced I think this week, an X4 Pro. And I think they're coming out with an S4. They're coming out with two new devices. One that has a touch screen and a backlight, but it's not Android based. And then I think they're doing another one that is going to be Android based with more apps. So you can get things like Audible and the Kindle bookstore on here and things like that. I'm kind of worried what that will do to the price. This device here I think was like $70 US. The reason why it was so easy for me to purchase and check out was because it wasn't a few hundred dollars like some of these other e-readers. The Kindle basic I think does a good job at this of being like $100, around $100 e-reader. And I just don't think e-readers should be that expensive. And this device I think really proved that you can get a solid device that you can read books on for less than a hundred bucks. I think that's what this space needs. Obviously you can spend a lot more money. The Books Go and like the Palma series will easily run you about 200 bucks or more. Same with the Big Me. Obviously if you get something like the Kindle Colorsoft or even the Paperwhite, you're going to be pushing closer to $200, $300. But if you want to start small and you want to start with like the least impact to your pocket, get some free books off of Project Gutenberg, standard e-books. That's what a lot of my e-reading is, is getting these amazing classics for free because they're out of copyright. And then reading them on little devices like this. Books that are just, yeah, would be hard to come across. You know, books that I'm still searching for like a paper copy of. And if I found a paper copy, I would totally get it. Right now, Ben-Hur. I want to find an original pressing of Ben-Hur. If any of you come across Ben-Hurs like by Lou Wallace from like the 1800s, let me know. That would be so awesome to find. Anyway, that's a complete aside. There are two devices that I need to talk about that I don't have on the table right now. The first one is the Remarkable. And there's three different sort versions of the Remarkable. If you've seen the Remarkable, you know what it is. The Remarkable is like an e-ink tablet that has its own custom OS. It's based on Linux, not Android, which I really like. I have used the Pro. I haven't used the Move or the Pure yet. I would like to grab a Move and try it out. Those devices run about $500 though to $1,000 depending on what configurations you get. You can read books on them. You could throw an EPUB file on them or a PDF file on them. They're not really made for reading though. If you're interested in having like a notebook stylus e-ink device first and reading second or maybe a far away second, that may be an option for you. But I think with so many great options around that $100 price point for a dedicated e-reader, that's going to feel closer to that form factor of like having a small book in your hand or even something as small as the XD e-ink, which it's smaller than a Field Notes. This thing is just amazing in case you needed to see that right there. The Remarkable is more of like the size of an iPad, which I'm going to grab here. Before I get into the iPad though, there is one more device category that I need to mention, which is the Kobo Color. I think the Kobos are really interesting. Rakuten does those. They're great devices. I'm just not in the Rakuten ecosystem. I do have like a few Audible e-books. I have a few books that I purchased on the Amazon bookstore over the last 20 years that I've had an Amazon account, begrudgingly. So yeah, I'm just not in the Kobo ecosystem, just like I wasn't in the Nook ecosystem with Barnes & Noble. And there was nothing really in those devices that compelled me to purchase them, especially now where I just don't really purchase any books from even the Kindle store. If there's like a creator that I want to support and they've listed that book on Amazon, that's the only way or the only good way that I can get a hold of it. I'll do that. If you guys have been following the channel for a while, you know that I release my books DRM free. You can purchase them on Gumroad. I'll link those down in the description. It's really helpful when you guys do purchase those that help support the channel. But yeah, the Kobo, it's its own thing. Very similar to the Kindle. If you want something that is as easy to use like a Kindle, but not made by Amazon, I think that could be a good choice for you. But with that, I want to finally address the like, why don't I just get an iPad question, which I get a lot more than I thought I would still. I made an iPad mini review about four years ago now, three, four years ago now. So much has changed when it has come to the iPad mini for me. I used to really like having this device around the house. I sort of had it like tuned to just be like my at home device where I'd maybe watch some YouTube videos and, you know, read a little bit. The one positive of the iPad is it has a really good Substack app. And someone who writes on Substack, that is really helpful, especially if I wanted to like listen to a podcast or watch a podcast. I usually do that on YouTube. Now, the fact that I could get Spotify on there was nice. And I do have a couple Apple Books and audio books from the Apple Books store that are on this device, or I guess in my account from ages ago when the first iPad came out, I had a copy of C.S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms, I think that I, for whatever reason, that was like the first book that I bought for my first iPad 15, 16 years ago. So I don't have a lot there, but it was cool to go back and read that. If you're in the Apple ecosystem and you want something that can do a lot more than reading, I still think the iPad mini is a great device. It's a bummer that the screen isn't as good as the Pros or even the iPad Air. I think that's like a big whiff with the iPad mini. You can also find these pretty affordably if you buy a previous gen iPad mini, and it will do pretty much everything that you would want it to do. I just haven't been using the iPad mini because it's not an ink display. And if I try to use this before bed, I get the like blue light glow, even like turning on night shift, even using my blue light blockers. I just, it doesn't help me fall asleep in the same way that a Kindle does or really any of my eating devices do. Whereas like I can read for maybe 20, 30 minutes and get tired and fall asleep with the iPad. It's just like the screen just wires me too much and it doesn't, it doesn't do what I want it to do, which is help me spend less time on screens. Yeah. E Ink is just a way different technology. So when it comes to the iPad, right? Like you can get a stylus for this. You can get the Apple pencil. I have the Apple pencil for this thing. Uh, I rarely use it. I think if you've never had a dedicated e-reader before, this is not the place to start. I think I would start with the Kindle, start with the Kobo or the books or the XT ink. If you already have an iPad, you could try that out and try sort of like locking it down, using it as just a dedicated e-reader. Personally, for me, I don't think this is a required, I would not start with an iPad. And one of the reasons why I think a lot people ask me about the iPad is because they want to have things like audio books. Maybe they want to be doing more reading of, uh, things on say sub stack, or if you have like an RSS reader or a read it later service, um, this can be good for that. I do wish that the Kindle had some better native support for say RSS readers or, uh, even like a sub stack app. That's not there. I still feel that's kind of a gap actually in this e-read whole e-reader space is there is a lot of content that I want to read from people that I enjoy following on the internet, especially sub stack, uh, where those it's hard to get those essays or those writings into, uh, my e-readers. If I boot that up natively in the sub stack app on my iPad, all of a sudden I'm not having this, I'm not having this like reading experience anymore and having like a content consumption experience. And that's just defeats the purpose of, I think what we're trying to do with being devices, but let me know down in the comments below, uh, which one of these devices are you most excited about? Do you own or looking to purchase? If you have any questions, let us all know down in the comments below as well. I try to answer those comments. It's gotten to a point where I check my comments once a day. I try to read everything. If I can respond, I do the reality just is, is like, it's I'll do my best, but I do love seeing everyone in the comment section, at least talking about, uh, what they're doing, what they're using that helps inspire. I think everyone in this community and also inspires me to, um, keep making videos and finding different perspectives that, um, I'm just not going to have by myself recording here in my studio. So that I just want to say thank you to everyone who's subscribed to the channel. If you haven't yet, please do. So it really does help me out and be kind to both in life in the comments below, like this video to send good vibes across the internet. We'll do it again not this thing, this thing later.