I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?
I have a Kindle 3, and I only use 3rd party content, i.e. none of the 100ish books on my kindle were bought from Amazon. None have DRM. I can read them fine.
So far my first generation Nook likes my side-loaded ePub files real well. I don't put PDFs on it. I also don't buy through B&N as I have an allergic reaction to DRM. :-)
I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)
As far as I can tell, the Nook is perfectly fine with non-DRM'd 3rd-party EPUB's and PDF's (the only limitation being the amount of internal storage on the device allotted for 3rd-party stuff).
I have no idea if it works with DRM'd 3rd-party content, though.
I've had a Kobo Touch for about 8 months now, absolutely love it. I have one DRM book downloaded through the Kobo book store and the rest of them were side loaded through Calibre. No problems, nice and smooth.
The device doesn't require Calibre for side-loading either as you can just drag the epub to the mounted device. Loading and using your own fonts is also a nice feature.
As for PDFs, if they are smaller page sizes it's pretty good, but the zooming and panning functions are kind of a pain--mainly because of e-ink, but partially due to UI.
I've only had one issue with the Kobo Touch when I had to reload my books, as for some reason the database became corrupted.
I have the original no-wifi cheap kobo, it only has free content on it.
I connected it the PC and and simply copied epub and pdf to it using calibre. It comes with 100 free books that you can erase, none of the memory is reserved (except for the OS)
ePub works perfectly.
pdf is a little limited in range of zoom, for technical books I convert to epub with calibre and download that.
The only downside of the Kobo - it takes a long time to boot up if it has fully shutdown. Then once it has started it takes a long time to open books.
I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?