Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:53 on 3 July 2025

I have been toying with the idea of purchasing a Kobo ebook reader for some time now. But I keep coming ’round to it being a questionable value proposition.

This is mainly due to capitalist avarice, not the base technology itself (which, while not perfect, is actually pretty good by now).

Available ebook titles (at least those in open, non-proprietary formats) seem quite limited in comparison to traditional paper book ones, so for books I would have to purchase, an ebook would not be an option in many cases. To this can be added how ebooks do not tend to sell at much of a discount off traditional paper books, which makes it even harder to recoup my investment in a reader. Note that I have a limited time window to do that (probably in the 5–10 year range, while paper books last indefinitely) due to the rapid pace of technological obsolescence in the computer and electronic fields.

That paltry discount starts looking like a non-discount once one I realize how much fewer use rights I would have with ebooks. Given all that sleazy capitalist garbage, I would expect an ebook title to be sold for half or less of what a traditional paper book is. This is seldom the case.

In particular, that discount often vanishes entirely or becomes negative once the option of used paper books enters the picture. You can’t buy a used ebook, for the same reason you can’t sell one: ebooks don’t come with that right of ownership. On the subject of selling books, for paper books I no longer need, I can recoup yet more of my acquisition cost by selling them.

Given all the above, I doubt very much that ebooks in general offer any price advantage over paper books.

Kindle ebooks offer a far greater title selection than do open formats, but I don’t trust Amazon. No, scratch that. I do trust Amazon. I trust them to act in ways which are advantageous to their own bottom line and disadvantageous to mine. I am quite certain that Kindle (and the proprietary ebooks sold for the same) are not exactly what they seem. Maybe Kindle spies on the reader. Maybe its OS is programmed for obsolescence in a few years, so Amazon can force the user to replace a device which otherwise still works perfectly. Maybe its ebooks have particularly awful end user licensing agreements. Maybe more than one of the above. Maybe something else.

I don’t know for sure what it is, but I do know that it almost certainly is something. It’s Amazon. There has got to be a catch or three.

Unless some of the above changes, or I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don’t seem to make much sense to me.