Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

What is the use-case, exactly? The only real-life experience I have with wanting to turn ebook pages remotely is during the winter, when my hands are cold and even touchscreen-compatible gloves/mittens don't work well with the touchscreen sensor.

But if I ever truly got that desperate, there are several lines of Kobo and Kindle devices with physical touch buttons that would solve the problem.

View on HN

For me, I'd love to use my e-reader to handle sheet music while playing my piano or cello, but the screen size means that I have to turn pages far more often than with physical sheets, and ends up being impractical in real life. I love playing around with a lot of different sheets and trying things out before deciding if I want to really spend time on it, and I hate how much I have to print to do so, and using screens for the purpose ends up being also impractical (and I much prefer how sheet music looks on e-ink vs a backlit LCD). If I could tap a button on the floor with my feet to turn pages, it would make this quite reasonable.

My partner has the foot pedals and a tablet for her violin playing. One community orchestra she plays in most people are using tablets, the other one its paper sheet music. For the tablet its just a pdf reader on the tablet and page up /page down for the foot pedals.

The tablet works, but its smaller, and there is always a question of making sure the batteries are charged up. (though with paper music it the little sheet music light needed to be charged too). Paper is pretty robust though, survives drops...

I'd imagine any ereader that can connect to a bluetooth keyboard can work. They have those bluetooth page turning pedals that's pretty much just a PageDown button.

Boox sells a foot pedal for use with 10" or 13" eInk tablets for exactly that purpose. Ain't cheap though.

I've already gone into it in a sibling comment, but basically because I can rest my arms and hands wherever I want, especially when reading a book for hours on end.

If you ever watch long-ish video content on your tablet or phone, do you keep holding the device? Or do you put it down someplace where you can see the screen? Same thing, really. Maybe it's not for you. But I've seen enough people in public precariously balance their phones on their knees while watching Youtube that I know I'm not totally alone.

It could be for me in theory, I suppose. My ebook reader does have a "stand" option built into the case. But the screen size is only 6", and so I suppose I never found a situation where I'd want to prop the device a foot or more away from me, because then I'd be unable to read the text. And if I could read the text, the font size would have to be so large that I probably couldn't fit more than a paragraph on the screen before having to turn the page!

Personally, I find that the tap or swipe to turn pages functionality is insanely difficult when I have highlighted the whole page of text. I miss the world of tactile buttons for many things - get off my lawn!

Then, again, the "premium" versions of the e-reader lines like the Kindle Oasis or the Kobo Forma should scratch that itch for you, right?

https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-forma?utm_source=Kobo...

The biggest downside, of course, being that they're each about double the price of the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Clara HD models, respectively. Both of those devices are perfectly serviceable to me, so I'm not yet so old or rich that I'll pay an extra $100 for physical buttons.

I got a refurb Kindle off Woot for like $40 that has forward/backward buttons on both sides of the frame - outside of the screen itself - that have tactile feedback. I think they marketed it so you can use it one-handed.

A lot of musicians these days keep their sheet music in digital formats; hands-off page turning is handy when playing. I'm sure there are many other use cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com