Onyx BOOX Max Lumi here, 13'3 inches of 2200x1650 pixel, 220 dpi, 16 greyscale goodness. The device is quite frankly fantastic, despite a somewhat anemic (for my purposes) onboard storage of 64 GB (doubled in the follow-in Max Lumi 2). (I'm perennially well above 90% utilised, though a good chunk of that are podcasts.) I've written about that at length in other HN comments, search should turn those up for anyone interested. Yes, it's huge, but it means (almost) never having to pan-and-zoom within scientific or scanned-in magazine articles.
Smaller devices can work, though 8" is probably the smallest I'd consider for serious reading.
My experience with Onyx is that when used just for e-books the battery life is excellent. Once you start web surfing or playing podcasts, battery starts getting chewed pretty quickly, though a charge still lasts most of a day. My preferred web browser (Einkbro) easily consumes 10x the power of Neoreader (Onyx's ebook reader software).
I'm increasingly finding the Web just ... generally less interesting (though of course it is compelling to a painful degree), and have amassed a large library of books and articles mostly in PDF, ePub, DVJU, and a smattering of other formats. Organising those usefully is the 2nd 90% of my content-management frustration. Writing is the 3rd 90%. Oddly enough, Termux provides a number of tools there that I find useful, including a healthy chunk of the libpoppler PDF tools, though that really needs an external keyboard (which I have, it's still somewhat awkward to use).
What I really wish Pocket would do is:
- Render Web-based articles in a fixed-layout, paginated, comfortably-margined (sides AND top/bottom) layout, with e-book-reader style touch-based page turns. (Whatever your favourite ebook reader does, that's what I'm talking about, Neoreader is quite good, I've also used FBReader and Pocketbook, and looked at the Koboreader software a bit.)
- Let me tag, highlight, and annotate those to my heart's content.
- Let me SEARCH the damned archive, by metadata and full text.
- Let me edit metadata where automated tools (or poor original creation) have fouled things up.
- Let me export lists of references with relevant metadata: title, author, URL, dates, etc.
I've adopted a number of practices to make up for holes in Pocket's offerings.
- I started tagging items with a "filed: " tag a couple of years ago. I'd really like for that to be a built-in feature, and for search by time-period to be A Thing: past day / week / month / year, as well as spans. With my tags and an exported dataset I can at least build my own tools to do that.
- I've got a handful of projects that I'll tag a piece with if it pertains to that, so "project: " Given the 25-character tag limitation, "proj:" would probably be a better prefix.
- Similar concepts for "task: " and "error: ", where tasks are specific to-do type things (e.g., "hn" for "post to Hacker News"), or "print" for make a hardcopy printout. "share: " could also be reminders to ping somebody with an article.
- "BOTI" is "best of the interval", the notion being that this is an exceptionally good item. More recently I've been relying on Einkbro's "save as ePub" feature which enables saving multiple articles, over time, to a single document. So you can build up a book of articles. (One thing I've realised from doing that is just how much reading I put on my plate. A small sampling of articles from the current year already runs to ~400 pages as an ePub.)
- I've got a notation for indicating my assessed article quality, on a scale of 0 to (for now) 5, with higher being better. 0 indicates content that makes you dumber (usually archived as examples of bogosity or negative propaganda). 1 merely establishes a basic fact, 2 gives some detail, 3 is a high-quality article, 4 exemplary article or a good book, 5 effectively establishes a new field or is otherwise a definitive reference (say: Shannon's articles on information theory). I try very hard to not over-rate content, and one of my projects is downrating a bunch of stuff I'd initially ranked too high.