Kobo, Boox, Kindle, aaaa help me choose

Here are my needs: Read books for fun Read academic books and annotate them (with stylus) Read pdfs (including two page scans of books and “free” textbooks) Annotating these is also a must It can’t be too big/heavy

Here are my “that’d be cool”: Colour (for possibly reading comics or viewing textbook images) Possibility of choice of Amazon or kobo books (as I have many Amazon purchased ones already)

Here is the situation: I’ve been a paperwhite user from 2018 till 2023, then I switched to a Kindle Scribe (right when it came out). And this scribe has helped me through a lot of schoolwork, but reading normal books has been awful. This is amazing if you’re sitting on a table, but smaller devices are just so much better for leisure reading for longer periods of time. I’ve been doing so much research these past weeks and I can’t seem to make up my mind. I know I don’t want to stick with Amazon for personal reasons, so I’ve mainly been looking at Boox and Kobo.

Here are some considerations I’ve made:

The Boox 10.3” Note Air 4 C seems amazing for my academic reading/pdf and textbook studying needs. Plus I could probably take better class notes on this than a smaller devices. And I absolutely fell in love with the idea of having a split screen notebook to add annotation to textbooks and pdfs. However, it’s still just as large as my scribe so… It’s also quite expensive so very scary to try out.

The Kobo Elipsa seems like an inferior Boox option (except for the reading settings), and would very much not solve my reading for Leaside issue since it’s essentially just my Kindle Scribe but Kobo. However it does seem to be lighter than both 10.3” ones in this list (by a very small margin but still)

The Kobo Libra Colour I’ve bought to trial, but I will say that the 7” screen is awful for pdfs and textbooks. This couldn’t be “the device” for me for that reason.

The Kobo Sage is 8” but will that inch make a difference in pdf reading? And I’ve heard awful things about its battery.

The Boox Tab Mini is 7.8” so same question from the Sage applies.

Other, non-e-reader tablet for reading things that require the larger screen as well as class note taking. But this isn’t ideal as I have eye strain issues so I really wanted a e-ink screen.

Can anyone help!?