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Comment by ztjio | Hacker News Reader

I adopted eBooks about 15 years ago because I preferred the tiny form factor and portability that offered. (I read purely free books from Project Gutenberg on a Nokia N-Gage, the second gen one, ah the memories.) That's why today I still prefer to do all of my entertainment reading (basically anything 100% reflowable) on my phone.

This feels like a decade late effort to compete poorly on the same basis.

That said, I'm convinced reading is vastly more enjoying in a visual form aligning with news columns vs. the large space in trade paperbacks and the like. So if you're a paper slave, I'd suggest giving the small form factor a try.

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I read several Dostoevsky novels from Project Gutenberg on my Nintendo DS Lite about ten years ago. The fact that I could actually hold it like a book was quaint at the time.

These days my primary eBook reader is a Nexus 7.

Reading off a DS screen Jesus I’m not sure if I should envy or pity your eyesight at this point.

I read a number of Project Gutenberg books on my Palm Pilot in the late 1990s. 160x160 monochrome.

To beat that you'd pretty much need to read a book off of one of these: https://www.newark.com/lumex/lcm-s01602dtr-a/dot-matrix-lcd-...

Now, I'm sure someone is either A: going to pop up to claim that they did or B: pop up to say they now have their next Arduino project. "E-Readers are so big and expensive, so I thought I'd roll my own with parts I just have lying around..."

Anyhow, when I see people talking about they can't possibly code with anything less than a 4K display, I still find myself chuckling a bit. Not that they're bad things by any means, but... well... it's a pretty big leap over where I started. I remember the excitement I had in college when I could get 800x600 and 1024x768 for the first times. So much text!

They used to give out these things: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/One-QuickPAD-word-processor-H45-T... to students when I was in school for word processing. If I remember right it could display 2 lines of text on the screen at a time.

10 years ago I used to read in class on a Cowon iAudio 7, tiny screen but perfect to hide in my sleeve.

Dear lord, how did your eyesight fare?

The homebrew app could switch the contrast to be white-on-black instead of black-on-white. That helped quite a bit with the glare.

A paper slave? Really?

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