I've been using this e-reader to read papers last semester. In short, the screen is still a bit small to read A4 sized papers without zooming, but it is actually possible, while I didn't do so with the smaller Kobo's I had before (Aura HD/H2O).

I much prefer the e-reader over a laptop (14" Thinkpad), but there are some downsides. Taking notes on the e-reader is clunky (so I don't do that), and the battery life is less than that of the earlier models (still workable, though).

The color-adjustable backlight is quite nice. The only e-reader I've seen that's better for this kind of thing is the Sony DPTS1, but then you are talking about a completely different price class.

I did, no good. It doesn't display PDFs properly. The formatting is bad and it's slow. That's the most maddening aspect, the speed is rubbish. You should be able to flip around as fast as paper but the lag is terrible.

I use a laptop mostly, but yeh paper is best because freeform annotations.