I just got a Kobo color (don't recommend the color feature; no book is ever going to use it except the red-letter Bible and House of Leaves) and gifted the old Kindle to a friend. I e-reader is an awesome gift actually because for a lot of people it's something they would never evenly in years take a chance on, but that they would love it if they tried.
To be quite honest I never allowed my Kindle or my Kobo to go online and the experience is not that different. The build quality on the Kindle is a bit better superior and I might well go back. Calibre is the real hero of the story IMO.
There’s a script, which I can’t remember now, that can optimise the pages by removing any margins etc so that there is no useless wasted space and every bit of display is used for content.
If your model accepts a custom OS, some of them make decent e-ink displays for weather, family photos, etc. Things look good in the black and white ones especially.