Books

We have a Kobo Clara and a Pocketbook Touch Lux 5 in our house. Neither are color so I can’t speak to that, but both are usable offline with wired file transfer support, which was our main requirement. And decent privacy. Though I can’t speak to Boox, I will be considering another Kobo if the Pocketbook ever dies.

I am a kobo user (libra 2). IMO you should get one with more ram (likely boox). My kobo side loaded with koreader software will sometimes crash reset due to out of memory errors especially with high res PDF/cbz graphic novels. Also Kobo lacks proper web browser what it has is super barebones webkit browser(sometimes reading text based webpages on eink is nice)

From what I understand boox is android based so theres less headache installing what you want.

Not familiar with Boox but Kobo on a normal-sized screen is miserable. Too much information, tablet-designed, making misclicks far more likely, besides the visual noise/pollution.

I have some gripes with the Boox tablet I have and I have never owned a kobo reader (though I do hear very good things about them).

My main complaint at this point is that I don't like that it requires so many proprietary apps that need to connect to the internet. You used to be able to remove pretty much all of them. But now you are forced to keep some or the device won't boot.

I did find that it's pretty much impossible to brick the thing because it just reloads the firmware if it errors out.

And yeah I suppose you could just go and block those apps from the internet on your router so they can't send or receive information.

But for an android device running an outdated android version I'm not sure it's worth it to spend the $400 or so on a device that lacks such control when Kindles exist and can be jail broken.

I can't say (having owned one) that I would ever buy another one.

I liked my Boox, but I only had it for about a month before the screen shattered. No idea how it happened. I just picked it up one day, and it was unusable. Apparently their screens are pretty fragile, and they cost basically the price of the device over again to replace them. My plan now is to wait a bit, and get a reMarkable when I have the extra money available

There are ways of mitigating the blue light issue on tablets as well. My Samsung tablet has a thing called "Eye Comfort Shield" which applies kind of a tea-stained / sepia tone to everything.

Of course book reader apps have all their own font/color choices too.

I'm actually looking at replacing my current tablet, this one has caught my eye:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/tablets/android-tablets/idea-tab-series/lenovo-idea-tab-plus/len103l0033