Came for the PDF support, stayed for freedom

At first, I begrudgingly used KOReader just to have better support for viewing PDFs. I found the learning curve to be steep due to the labyrinthine settings menu tree. Over time, while I worked my way through an extremely long PDF, I dialed in the (hundreds of) settings to my liking, and have emerged from the other side with an interface that is vastly superior to the native reader. Programmable gestures are especially powerful.

More importantly: I used to leave my e-reader exclusively in airplane mode to avoid Kobo's invasive telemetry. Eventually, I'll make a full write up about this, but in short, I poked around the filesystem and found tons of tracking garbage all over the place, and databases storing sensitive information about your reading habits to an uncalled for level of granularity. (Kindle is guilty of this as well, but this has been documented elsewhere already.)

Now, with KOReader, I can stay connected to WiFi and get books and RSS feeds over the air, while the native Nickel application doesn't know my router's WiFi password. I don't have to act like it's 2005 and side-load everything over USB anymore, all the while avoiding shipping every single interaction I have with books to some anonymous corporate conglomerate. This falls short of an FSF-certified level of freedom, but it sure is a big improvement compared to being trapped in the Kindle surveillance ecosystem.