Hey everyone! I’m looking for recommendations on e-readers or tablets that are great for reading Chinese, especially traditional characters like those used in Taiwan. If you’re currently using a device that works well for this, I’d love to hear about your experience. Any tips or tricks you’ve found helpful? I’m open to all suggestions—whether it’s for e-ink readers or tablets with good reading apps. Thanks in advance! 
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What I’ve used
I’ve used two so far: Kindle and the Pleco e-reader functionality.
The latter is really great if you already have a bunch of Pleco dictionaries. It allows you to tap on any character/word and get a pop-up dictionary that is really fast. The current version on iOS at least is buggy in that reading progress will sometimes be reset to the beginning of the chapter. There is a beta for the next major version of Pleco that presumably fixes this (along with many other massive changes), but I’ve not tried it. I’ve also tried it on Android and it works more or less the same.
For Kindle, the built-in dictionaries are not great for traditional characters. I’ve created a Chinese-Chinese dictionary that I use from the Taiwan Ministry of Education dictionary that works pretty well. It should be possible to create another dictionary using the CC-CEDICT data for a Chinese-English dictionary. I think someone has done this on Github already.
Main e-book stores and devices
However both of the above depend on having access to a DRM-free epub. If most of the ebooks you read have DRM (which will probably be the case), then you will be most likely limited to the app associated with the store you bought the book from.
The main stores in Taiwan at least are:
- Rakuten (Kobo)
- books.com.tw
- readmoo
- hyread
The prices and sometimes the availability between the four stores often are different. Rakuten, Readmoo, and Hyread all have their own associated e-reader devices that have integration with the store.
For the most turn-key experience, I think a Kobo device is probably the way to go. They are the highest-quality device, and their store seems to have most things. Kobo is big in the west too, so it can also serve as an English language e-reader too.
E-ink tablets
One thing that is increasingly popular are e-ink tablets that run Android. This allows one to access ebooks from any app since it all runs Android under the hood. The most popular brand for this is Boox, which has 7, 10, and 13 inch e-readers. If I buy another e-reader, it will probably be from them so that I can access content from any ebook store, which I cannot currently with my Kindle. However, that ‘freedom’ also makes the devices a bit more finicky, where a traditional device like a Kobo reader will instead be fairly obvious and streamlined.
Hope that helps a bit. I’ve looked into this a lot over the past couple weeks, so happy to answer any questions you have.
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I was curious so I looked into dictionary support for Kobo devices. It seems they don’t have any built in Chinese-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionary, which is unfortunate.
However, someone has made a MoEDict Kobo dictionary on Github.
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