The Three-Reader Loadout
The honest answer to "what's the best e-reader?" is that it depends on what you're reading.
For years I tried to make one device do everything. I read novels on the Boox Leaf3, then failed to read graphic-heavy PDFs on it, then failed to read comics on it, then grudgingly pulled out a phone or a tablet for the non-text stuff, then felt guilty about the phone. The problem wasn't the Leaf3. The problem was that "reading" is several different activities that happen to share a verb.
Here is the loadout I've landed on, and the job each device does.
Boox Palma 2 Pro - pocket text
The Palma 2 Pro is a pocket-sized e-ink Android reader. I use it for one thing: long-form text. Novels, essays, slow non-fiction, the occasional English technical book that reads end-to-end rather than as reference.
Pocket-sized is the feature that matters. The Leaf3 was small enough to hold in one hand but too large to keep in a pocket without planning the outfit around it. The Palma fits in the same pocket as a phone. That changes the question of "should I bring the reader today?" into a non-question. It's always there. It replaces the phone in queues, on the subway, during the five-minute gaps where I would otherwise open Twitter.
The trade-off is that six inches of e-ink is not a great home for anything with figures, footnotes that the publisher set in a sidebar, or pages that assume you can see the layout. It is a great home for a wall of paragraphs.
I wrote about setting it up here, and about debloating it here.
Boox Leaf3 - the one that got me here
The Leaf3 was my daily reader for several years before the Palma arrived. I've already written the full story in the post about the original cleaner tool. It is on the retired shelf now - slowed by a firmware update, cracked by a small human foot - but it earned its place on this page by being the device that actually made me a reader again. A loadout post without it would be dishonest.
The lesson it taught me was about form factor: six inches is the upper edge of what a pocket carries, and anything larger turns "always with me" into "sometimes with me."
Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4 - color, motion, and PDFs
The Y700 Gen 4 is not an e-reader. It's an 8.8-inch Android gaming tablet with a high-refresh LCD. I bought it to be the opposite of the e-ink devices: fast, colorful, full of motion, good at everything that e-ink punishes you for attempting.
That covers more reading than you'd think. Comics. Manga. Any PDF with diagrams, tables, or syntax-highlighted code. Art books. Technical references where you want to scrub between pages instead of turning them. Magazines. Anything with a map in it.
The eye-strain problem I use e-ink to avoid is still there on LCD, so the Y700 isn't where I spend evenings. It's where I spend twenty minutes reading a comic chapter or pulling up a scanned PDF to check one page. Short bursts of color, then back to the Palma for the long haul.
Why three and not one
Every year or two I re-check whether some new device is going to collapse this loadout into a single unit. The Kobo Libra Colour. The larger color Boox models. iPads with OLED. The pattern so far is that the color e-ink screens are still too slow and too washed out for comics, the bright tablets still hurt my eyes for long reading, and the single-purpose e-ink readers still can't cope with figures.
So the loadout holds. Text goes to the Palma. Color goes to the Y700. And the Leaf3 sits on the shelf as a reminder that a reading device that works is worth keeping around even after it stops being the daily one.
The cheapest, most reliable upgrade I ever made to my reading life was not buying a better device. It was letting go of the idea that there should only be one.