Thoughts on “E-Readers” (2009)

I still have and still use to this day my trusty Nook Color.

Except technically I turned it into an Android tablet. I rooted it and overwrote the firmware with CyanogenMod v 11-20140403-NIGHTLY-encore

Of course that's very heavily out of date now. But it does what I want it to do - that is, read books. I just get lots of epubs and feed them to Moon Reader and read away.

Boy it's slow though with an Armv7 CPU with 500MB of memory. But who needs fast when all I use it for is reading one static page of text at a time?

Frankly, I'm astounded it has lasted this long - I'm especially surprised at the battery not having given up the ghost yet. I can get enough reading time to last say 4 or 5 hours in one go, but usually get drowsy enough to get to sleep well before that.

I'm waiting for the battery to finally give in - then begins the search for a replacement battery. In fact, the battery has outlasted the Nook Color charging cable, which frayed at the interface between the cable and one end. So I use a normal USB cable to charge it - which means slow charging.

A while back I looked into perhaps trying to update the version of Android on it - but by now most if not all of the Nook Color hacking sites have gone the way of the Dodo :)

I stumbled across this while searching for something unrelated and was extremely impressed with the analysis and conclusion. Pretty much all of this turned out to be accurate with hindsight.

It's interesting to conceive of the iPad when working up from an e-reader model rather than down from a Tablet PC like the classic HP Pavilion tx1000.

> But MOST importantly the way the user interacts with the interface would re-create the ease of use rendered by our interaction with print media. This last part, about the user interface, is why I believe Apple is best positioned to tackle this problem.

> In one year's time we'll see. 2010 should be the year paper learns of it's destiny, the year we reach a tipping point on our way towards bits from the momentum of atoms.

This is of course a prescient prediction of the iPad. But what it also reminded me of is a device that had already been shown publicly at the time: The Microsoft Courier.

Microsoft was working on a dual-screen tablet that was essentially a notebook in computer form, complete with custom OS.[1] In the end it never happened.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

> Navigating to find content on the Kindle or Nook is poor, which would be ok if we would be happy with just having ebooks in our hands versus also having emagazines and enewspapers. Once you add the rest of the paper world of content navigation would become lackluster at best.

As a Kindle Paperwhite 3rd generation owner I am sad it is true. e-newspaper/e-magazine leave very bad experience, pushing me away to resign from using it (thank God I have been on trial). I also don't understand why magazines are displayed in such horrible way on Kindle. When I have given my Kindle to a person, who on daily basis purchase a paper version of a newspaper, she said me using it is completely no-go for her, while she has no problem to read typical ebooks on my device.

I wish e-readers will evolve - to be a device that would help me learning, making notes, be a calendar and todolist instead of just only having me entertained of reading an ebook. I am basically looking forward to Kindle being an handy org-mode-like replacement. I would like to have a planner, which could synchronize with some ical/caldav calendar. I would like to have a bit better specs of device, so responsiveness of e-ink keyboard will be instant - I usually have typos thanks to low latency of the display. I would love to make notes separately from ebooks/documents - think like diary, draft notes or just stupid shopping list. I would like to find some method/methodology, which will help me go back to my quotes and in-book notes to extract from them more meaningful way. I would like to have better web-browser or some converter for HN, which will reading (and annotating) articles and comments section on HN pleasant enough. Maybe I am silly, but I believe it is all possible to achieve that in a form of e-ink reader.

iPad can have all of those things right at the moment, but I don't see myself (yet) as a owner of tablet with a LCD screen. Perhaps, I will afford it, because I am already sold on how good VoiceOver on macOS is and I suppose Kindles will never deliver anything close to what Apple can bring in terms of accessibility features. However, I still keep fingers crossed for competitors like ReMarkable [0] or Supernote.

[0]: https://remarkable.com/

[1] https://supernote.com/

E-readers have dropped off in popularity a lot, so I guess the novelty was a big factor, and the iPad was good enough for many. But personally I still frequently use mine. If you're a frequent reader, and you're reading stuff fit for the format (i.e., it's not a PDF and you are mostly just reading sequentially, not flipping back and forth), it's just the best way to read. That was especially true when I had a train commute and didn't want to lug something heavy around, but even at home, I just don't want more books sitting around when I can read them without dealing with the physical objects.

Speaking of which, my 3rd gen Kindle just died. Any suggestions on a replacement? As best I can tell, the trade-offs (staying in the Kindle ecosystem) are to have no physical buttons, or to have an oddly asymmetric bezel (and no USB-C). Seems like an unnecessary and unfortunate trade-off.

I love the convenience of eReaders but still find them overpriced. I'm eying Amazon's new Kindle with wireless charging. Hopefully Black Friday will bring some decent price drops.

(2009)

Any newer articles on these since then?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29299593

I recently discovered Hisense A5, an android phone with an eink screen + attractive price. Just ordered one and waiting for the delivery.

Thinking through the capabilities and limitations of tablets recently, I reached a few conclusions:

- There's no one thing that an emissive-display tablet does which some other device does not do better.

- For virtually all productivity roles, a laptop with a keyboard, even a low-end one, is superior.

- For specific capture and communications roles, I'd prefer disconnected / wired-only or specifically dedicated device: camera, audio recorder, dumbphone. These are small enough and capabilities sufficiently high that in most cases the additional-device concern isn't significant. The improved security and privacy situation is also a major concern.

There's one exception: in portrait mode, a tablet is far better for reading texts than the landscape display of all laptops and most desktops. (A sufficiently large, high-resolution desktop display becomes useful for either 1-up or 2-up reading.) But, even here, the emissive display typically has a lower resolution and higher battery consumption than an e-ink display would.

Since February of this year I've been using an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, a 13.3" Android-based ebook-reader / tablet. For reading it is in fact delicious. As a tablet ... it's actually somewhat better than I'd prefer (the distractiosn are too close at hand). It's also quiet good for podcasts (large flat surface gives good speaker response).

In particular, Onxy don't run their own bookstore, there's no "ecosystem" (a/k/a captive market) the company is trying to corral users into. Virtually all content is sideloaded or downloaded. The bookreader is quite good (with some limitations), as is the notetaking app (handwritten notes), not something I'd through I'd make much use of, but that I have.

I'd considered a number of other devices, and emphasized:

- Not being captured by a specific market (eliminates Amazon, Nook, Kobo).

- Not being tracked (eliminates Amazon, Nook, Kobo, most Android and iOS devices).

- Sufficient storage (eliminates reMarkable).

- Multiple format support.

- Large display size.

- High-quality display.

My main issues are:

- Organising content is tedious. That's pretty much par for the course with such devices and apps. If you're planning on managing a large library (100s to 1,000s or more items), the onboard tools and all available apps I've found to date are sorely wanting. I'd really like a bibliographic + worfklow management suite. I don't have one.

- Some interactions are cumbersome. As with any touch-based device, distinguishing actions (clicks, drags, actually writing on or selecting content, etc.) are ambiguous, and the software often confuses these. Again, par for the course in my experience.

- Android itself imposes severe limitations. I'm not a fan of the OS, but it's the best of a bunch of bad choices. I'm looking at the upcoming Linux tablets, though those will face a long uphill UI/UX slog to produce useable and intuitive tools.

- Ebook formats themselves still have much shaking out to do. I actually strongly prefer PDFs (or DJVU), that is, explicitly-laid-out formats, to reflowable ones (ePub, .mobi, HTML), and in most cases PDFs are reasonably readable. Response reading scanned documents (rather than rendered ones) can be slow. And in cases, publishers and typesetters make bone-headed decisions about layout and formatting. (Less is more, stick to standards.)

- Colour might occasionally be nice. There are colour e-ink devices available (as with virtually all aspects of displays, this is entirely at the control and whim of the patent holder), though the effect is muted. Price premium is fairly modest, but only 8" displays seem supported (good for comics and narrative text, less so for textbooks and journal articles).

- My one post-purchase regret is that the subsequent rev of the device has doubled onboard storage to 128 GB. In all seriousness, I could use the extra storage, and the Max Lumi's 64 GB was a massive advantage over the extremely pinched 16 GB offered by the reMarkable, an utterly inexcusable limitation. That said, 64 GB has been sufficient so far.