Do they use pdf format, or do you have to convert/download a special file type?
Can you browse webpages on them and it renders in digital ink?
I want to read more of the great, freely available content online but I struggle to read on phone or PC (bad screen). Do e-readers help address this?
E-readers are great for a mid-point between phones/laptops and printed word but it comes with caveats:
Some devices are walled gardens, avoid those where possible (jailbreaking is possible depending on the device)
Some devices don't sync well across platforms/other devices
Text editing (e.g. copy-paste, highlighting, annotation) is not necessarily easy or as feature rich as it should be by this stage
They work well with epubs and similar formats (e.g. mobi) but they don't handle PDFs and comic book formats well, if at all
If you want an experience that is very book-like, ereaders are pretty great especially if you are aware of their limitations and you're okay with that.
I'm not sure about reading websites on an ereader but I'm sure that it's possible with certain services like Pocket or something similar. You would be able to convert websites to an epub format but I'm not sure if there's a simple, user-friendly means to do this or if it would take a lot of fiddling around to achieve.
It's a real pain converting PDFs to epub format, although I can be lured into the multiple hour-long process of doing this for a PDF with words of encouragement, especially if the book is of particular importance to a broader purpose.
If you want to get better text editing and annotation options then go for a tablet or laptop. Same goes for reading PDFs and comic books.
I'd recommend LibGen and Anna's Archive for pirating ebooks. I'm also pretty handy at tracking down pirated books that aren't readily available on the mainstream piracy websites like LG/AA and similar sites so if there's a book that you are trying to get your hands on but you haven't had any luck then let me know the full title(s) and author(s) and I can go digging in the dark corners of the internet. I can also rip from the internet archive but the majority of their books are in PDF format so it's probably not as useful to you, although they do have a lot of rare books that are otherwise unavailable.
Wow thanks for the breakdown.
I'm learning now that this isn't as easy as I thought it would be. I downloaded a stack of PDFs during uni, including prescribed reading (possibly even from LG), and read them on my mum's old iPad and it was tough. I liked that it was an offline, portable device, but lengthy reading on the screen felt unnatural and tiring. I'd like to go back and read all those papers and publications, and the ones I didn't get to, without the pressure of writing my own thesis afterwards.
I'm not worried too much about annotations at this stage now I've completed the degree. After that, I'm expecting I'll mostly reading for pleasure/self-learning, and will probably read 50/50 fiction/non-fiction.
That's fine, reading (mostly text based) websites is definitely a secondary consideration to reading natively-rendered epubs. I make do reading on my phone, but some of the longer treatises on marxists.org and redsails, for example, warrant a bit more focus. Since joining hexbear my theory intake has definitely increased...
I'm going to go to a big-box store this weekend and check out a Kobo, see if it's in line with what I'm expecting. A refurb may be an option too (y)
If they are works published through mainstream book publishing houses then there's a very good chance that they are available in epub format as well. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of epubs (kinda, but in truth not really) PDF is the format de jure when it comes to academic publications and epubs are virtually unheard of in this end of publishing, so keep this in mind.
With regards to converting PDFs to epubs, generally the embedded "virtual" text in a PDF is very sub-par. I'm sure you've tried to search a PDF for a key term only for the search to return empty although you know that the PDF contains that word - that's due to the embedded text being shoddy. Most simple PDF converter tools just extract the embedded text, which is commonly a first pass OCR attempt by an outdated tool so you end up with text like:
It's really unwieldy and most of the time it's so scrappy that you're better off starting from scratch without it.
I've just had a poke around and it's quite doable to turn a webpage into epub format using the dotepub tool. I'll try to remember to upload an example of what it produced using zero effort when Catbox.moe comes back online but anyway the epub turned out really well tbh. Edit: Here's the example file, can be viewed with any ebook reader app. I think with Marxists.org works that span multiple pages using different hyperlinks, it's going to be a bit messier.
Cool!
See what you can find. We're near an inflection point in the ereader market, with colour ereaders just recently becoming commercially available and with (relatively) high refresh rates starting to become available. I'm not sure how well the two are integrated but I'd guess pretty poorly right now. I'd hazard a guess that an ereader with a serviceable refresh rate that would make phone-style navigation practical should be only a few years off - at a conservative estimate, 5 years, and at an optimistic estimate under 2. With that in mind opt for something that meets your needs but aim for the cheaper or refurbished end of the market as it would be a bit silly to drop hundreds of dollars on a cutting-edge device that is going to end up deprecated fairly soon imo.
Final tip: personally I prefer ereaders that have physical buttons to turn pages so that way your screen stays nice and clean.