I used few ebooks and Kindle is the only one that actually works as expected. Some ebooks I used drained battery in few days, not delivering promise of long life. Some ebooks were just crap and broke after few months. Kindle works few weeks from one charge for my use (1-2 hours of reading per day), it's water-proof so I can read my books while taking a bath (priceless). I never had any particular issues with it.
Its UI seems oriented to promote Amazon Store and I never used it, sending books over e-mail and deleting after read, that's OK with me. I'd prefer for its library to have folders and I'd prefer for it to work as USB stick like other ebooks do, so I can connect it to PC and organize things inside as I want, but those are not necessary.
So may be Kindle is bad, but rest are worse, I don't know a single ebook brand of Amazon scale. They all seem to be Chinese no-names which come and go without investments to quality and reputation.
I agree with all of this, and I've noticed as much with the other readers. Some users promote Kobo reader as a quality alternative, but I haven't tried it.
Kobo works quite well: you can set it up without an account (needs a bit of manual fiddling) if you really want, and either way after that you can just plug it in and drag-and-drop epubs to the device. Battery life, responsiveness, etc. are all fine to me (the older devices actually did a bit better IMO and it mostly only gets bogged down for comics, regular books are fine)
I'm not sure from your post if you're aware of the collections feature of a Kindle library. It can be accessed under the menu on the library view. Chose the collections view and add books to collections you create and it works a bit like folders.
After registration, I have never connected my Kindle to the internet - 6-7 years now. This has prevented updates that degrade performance, and Amazon getting my usage data. I just copy over ebooks using usb, optionally after converting to mobi using Calibre.
I like tools that do one thing well. The Kindle has hit that spot for a long time. There were incremental improvements (faster processor, 3G/4G, front light, higher DPI / contrast, etc), but it's surprising how similar a 2010 kindle is to a 2024 one.
Its UI seems oriented to promote Amazon Store and I never used it, sending books over e-mail and deleting after read, that's OK with me. I'd prefer for its library to have folders and I'd prefer for it to work as USB stick like other ebooks do, so I can connect it to PC and organize things inside as I want, but those are not necessary.
So may be Kindle is bad, but rest are worse, I don't know a single ebook brand of Amazon scale. They all seem to be Chinese no-names which come and go without investments to quality and reputation.