I returned my Remarkable2
offbyone.us
offbyone.us
What? I'll give you that the two largest distributors, Amazon and Barnes and Nobles don't sell epub but pretty much everyone else who sells ebooks does including Google Books. Also, you can use Calibre to turn any other ebook format into an epub.
So no, unless you're going out of your way to use a workflow that's unsupported and of questionable legality (DRM stripping), you probably can't read ebooks you care about on this device.
As for the plugin's stability, I have yet to experience a problem after like 7-8 years of usage. I've upgraded from Calibre v4 to v5 before the plugin supported v5, but that's about it.
If bits and bytes enter my home I can do anything I want with them within that private property.
It was very frustrating, from a civics perspective, to have to choose between obeying democratically enacted laws or being a chump.
It looks like there's no way to watch DVDs legally with FOSS (still) in the US?
On the other hand the precedent for ebooks seem a bit better?
(I feel there’s still an opportunity to challenge DMCA 1201 in the US, and then there’s also the triennial review. It’s harder in places where the exemptions are hard-coded — but maybe you know of one that includes an exemption for this kind of DRM removal?).
I know that's not "drm free" or anything but I doubt 99% of ebook users actually care as long as their device can load it.
I still own a Kindle and buy books through it, but it's just false that this is the least hassle option.
Something like Spotify really makes it worth it then. Totally better than downloading and the convenience is easily worth the price.
I buy most of my ebooks as well as I like the sync between the Kindle app and the real Kindle. And most of them are well priced anyway.
For video the convenience argument worked well too with Netflix for a while but now that the landscape had fragmented so much the whole "paid content is more convenient" thing is under a lot of pressure. It's not even the price that's an issue as you can subscribe to most services by the month to see one thing. It's the hassle of signing up, cancelling and downloading all their separate apps. So there the downloaded content is becoming more convenient again.
I remember how upon Radiohead's release of 'In Rainbows' people would argue that the fact that people would still download an album from Kazaa that you can legally download for free from the artists website proves how rotten everyone is. No - it's just that the UX of doing it legally sucked so much more.
I’m on Kobo and I’m a nerd and I have “workflows” for content I already paid for but isn’t Pocket compatible (lookin at you, NYRB!) and I’ve never even heard of z-library.
Maybe the average Kindle user, ditto?
1. shop for a book right on your Kindle device
2. click "buy"
Whereas on the other:
1. go to your computer and search for a book on z-library
2. download the epub
3. convert the epub to a Kindle-compatible format
4. copy the book to your Kindle
Isn't the first workflow clearly "less hassle" than the second?
Option 1: Work 14 hours for money to buy kindle paper paperwhite and 10 9.99 ebooks. Proceed to click and buy as you desire.
Option 2: Work zero hours and click and download epubs and other formats on your phone which can accommodate multiple formats including the incredibly common on pirated sites epub format.
Also honestly it doesn't help much to list the steps out when both options take less than 90 seconds and you have already decided to invest 2-10 hours in reading the book. I will happily spend more than an hour reading descriptions and reviews of different books to decide what I would prefer to read next.
It's also probably wrong to list converting to a kindle compatible format and copying to your kindle as 2 separate operations when one in fact can perform them both by clicking one button or indeed avoid conversion altogether by downloading the appropriate format.
For your consideration.
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up your store app/website/device, navigate to the desired book, buy, and download it.
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it.
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it.
3. Import into calibre and either automatically convert on import or have it automatically converted when you click send to device
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it to a folder which is watched by calibre whereupon it will automatically import, convert, and email it to your kindle in the correct format.
This isn't twice as hard and it buys you a copy of your ebook on your computer and device which can be backed up with the rest of your files and which will never stop working because someone else says so. It's also trivial to share with anyone you like just as easily as you can add to your own device. You also get a great search experience on your computer and on your phone if you use calibre companion which incidentally you can use to wirelessly send to your non kindle device.
Yes one is often at the cost of the other...but they are different topics.
Especially because a lot of technical books are really hard too find in Europe in digital format. Very often I get the "not available in your region" message.
My wife isn't a tech nerd, she has a Kindle, she wants a book, she presses a couple of times on the screen and she has the book. Sure she might pay more than I would, but the time/convenience factor clearly outweighs that.
I think that is a great feature as most people know how to create an email with an attachment. And as a side effect you can send friends ebooks directly to their devices if they shared their @kindle aliases with you.
Under III.A.3, it appears presently legal to use tools such as this:
https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
as long as you are using it for a purpose listed in the exemption.
Wired did a nice write up on this: https://www.wired.com/story/ebooks-drm-blind-accessibility-d...
BTW I personally find it odd the OP wants to reads epubs on the remarkable. The remarkable is good for reading PDFs. The epub experience is rather meh.
I really like the look of the Remarkable though, I just wish it ran Android.
This isn't a big problem for reading, but navigating through the general system UI and Android apps can be offputting.
Don't expect an iPad experience at all.
The reasons I use it are
- To get eye strain relief when reading ebooks, academic papers, or long PDF documents
- To be able to read those things in bright sunlight while outdoors
- Insanely good battery life compared to a traditional tablet, I only charge mine about once a week
- Screen continues to display while consuming zero power, after device goes to sleep, which is useful for practicing music, and for placing reference documents on the table while I work on e.g. electronics, or recipes while working in the kitchen. I don't have to keep smacking it every 2 minutes to wake it up, and it won't run out of battery displaying a single PDF page for several days
What disappointed me is the slowness of the refreshing. I guess it's because I hadn't used any e-reader before. I bought my Boox with the idea that I could also run other apps on it, since after all it ran on Android. Running other apps is possible but it's just really a pain, even web browsing is just too slow.
- Then don't do this.
Web browsing on e-ink is widely known to be barely usable, and not what e-readers are made to do. So usage of "even" word is hard to explain here really.
> The book is based on the Android 10.0 operating system, which allows third-party applications to be installed on the device and significantly expands the scope of its application
For me I don't spend much time in those other apps, but it's really nice to have the ability to install Google Drive, GMail, Slack, Notion, Dropbox, and stuff like that so I can easily open up documents that are sent to me through the normal channels I use and never have to worry about actually "transferring" anything to my tablet.
I also keep all my sheet music and academic papers to-read on Google Drive.
Has this guy ever heard of zlib?
* Never looks up how to do the basic gestures
* Complains about the size, when it's comically obvious what the size is from the constant advertising.
Look, the device isn't for most, but HN really deserves a less half-assed critique than this.
It’s the same with movie critics, knowing a movie with 84% on Rotten Tomatoes or something isn’t half as useful as the opinion of your twin flame critic.
The reMarkable was panned pretty hard by every major tech outlet as being useful for only one thing, and worse, not very good at that one thing.
yet my colleagues who loved the first one love this one to and keep recruiting new users so there is obviously a market for it.
Personally I returned mine because I couldn't justify both the iPad and the reMarkable at that time but the writing experience was fantastic.
Oh, well. I guess if nothing else it's a valuable refresher on the correct weighting to apply when evaluating early adopter opinions.
Is it too late to return your?
I'll find some worthwhile use for the thing, even if it takes a while. I'm just disappointed that that looks so much like not being the use for which I actually bought it.
* Gestures should be intuitive, and if they're not they should be prompted
* Size on paper != size in reality. The weight distribution alone can make two devices with seemingly identical dimensions feel very different in hand
This is a fair critique of device, your comment just feels like a kneejerk defense of something you like.
For the record I returned mine, I get it's meant to be a focused device but the value proposition is just not there, and it felt like a complete waste.
It sits in the awkward position of doing too much to be smaller and cheaper and doing too little to take advantage of its size and computing power.
No matter how much you value minimalism and paperfeel I'd easily recommend an iPad Mini over this. If you're a tinkerer making a distraction-free iPad is an evening's work. And if you're not a tinkerer the Remarkable is not that interesting
It profoundly changed how I organise my desk and work day.
I used to have a stack of papers which contained mostly random noted and work related diagrams. It was a mess to find anything and most notes were of "questionable" quality (strikethroughs and corrections galore)
Over the years I tried several methods to get better at organising myself (hi-tech and lo-tech aka pen and paper).
For some reason I can't explain, the remarkable stuck and helped me to get my shit together.
I suspect that it was mostly by chance that this specific model came to my attention at the right time with the right design. Most likely any one of several similar products(e-ink, "paperlike writing feeling", no app store or browser) would've done the trick.
It was quite expensive though and had they had their subscription service at the time, I probably wouldn't have bought it.
The trick is to get a spiral paper notebook. When full, run it through a sheet-fed scanner, and throw the notebook away.
You'll need a scanner anyway, for all those other random papers.
Also, a sheet-fed scanner is infinitely faster than a flatbed, and it'll do both sides at once.
Don't forget to back up your disk drive. If you drop it on the floor (like I did) it's gone.
Presumably other features in the future because VC love subscription.
I used to have stacks of notebooks which I had to dispose of regularly (shred or put into security paper bins). For me the most convenient and quickest way to make personal notes is by hand. Remarkable2 has a proper pen&paper-feel and it works for me. It is the killer feature for me and I'm happy.
But yes, OCR is bad and having accumulated 100+ pages of notes on certain subjects makes me really want to have a better search.
To me, it read like it just didn't work, not that he didn't try or look it up.
>* Complains about the size, when it's comically obvious what the size is from the constant advertising.
It's still a valid criticism, no? The digital pen/e-ink combo gives you way less feedback, hence precision, hence density of writing in a given area. I'm not just speculating, I've tried out a Remarkable 2 my friend got, and that was my impression - nearly like paper, but I still had to focus more and write slightly bigger letters for it to be legible.
The writing surface has less friction which makes writing different. And easily to be very sloppy. So like learning to write with a marker or a different stencil you have to relearn how to write again.
I agree with some of the critiscims here (missing tags, bad typing experience, little integrability), but overall I am super happy with the tablet. I think it's just down to the usecase. It does what I most need it do to! (replace physical notebooks)
It also does some things that I didn't know I needed. It's just so amazing to have an undo for stuff you write on paper. The ability to select and move stuff around is also something I now do constantly.
I think it just comes down to what problem you're trying to solve. For me, replacing physical notebooks = solved problem.
Sometimes. When drawing, absolutely. When writing, absolutely not. Nothing else in my entire life has improved my handwriting so much as using a pen to do it, because without an eraser there are no options left but to get better or give up, and it's also amazing how much an eraser slows you down.
Like good headphones, it seems to be one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you know what you're missing.
And in general, I find a real benefit in facility of writing to facility of thought - not falsely is it said that we think a little differently when writing vs. typing, and each kind of thinking is both valuable and not precisely replicable in the other medium. Being able to write neatly, at a speed approximating that at which I think, has made it a lot easier to fix thoughts in a form that allows me to work with them.
As kids today begin typing more than writing, I think the perspective of writing facilitating thought might change.
The implications for this are interesting long-term, as humanity's methods of thought entry change. In the future we likely will one day revert to machine-assisted oral entry.
So when I picked up that first Metropolitan and Amazon Basics notebook in 2018, it was more for the sake of it than anything, and with no real expectation of persevering - indeed, having surprised myself with the discovery that the medium really does make a difference has no small amount to do with why I've kept up the practice to the tune of around 1500 diary pages and several A5 books filled with work notes.
(While I'm singing the praises of the old ways, I suppose I should mention that a good hand, with a good pen, also doesn't hurt to use. When it doesn't take any force to clearly mark the paper, you can write pages at a time with barely a pause and never feel it in your wrist. Granted I do also have a writer's bump now, but I'm not a hand model, so that's not really a drawback!)
Notes are the same way, but even more explicit. You largely aren’t writing notes to be consumed while the topic is still fresh in your head and you can remember what your cryptic scratches were meant to convey. You are writing for you in the future when you can remember what a particular acronym was or why you wrote “important!!! - check kobernets out”.
It takes a few minutes a day to maintain the index and keep it current, but only a few minutes, and that time is amply repaid by the benefits in utility.
Likewise, I'll sometimes spend the few minutes after a meeting expanding on my notes with context, thoughts for further action or research, etc. This stuff can be hugely useful both in the short term and especially in the long, when I'm revisiting or reconsidering a project and rebuilding the threads of context I had when it was last at the center of my focus.
On the whole, I think the general rule here is that taking notes is a good start, but what really makes them count is putting some thought and effort into taking that raw material and turning it into an accessible and useful mnemonic tool.
And that brings us back to the reMarkable's shortcomings, not least of which is that it offers no way to actually do that. It's all the more frustrating for how the platform clearly could support this capability, maybe in ways genuinely not seen in human history before now - but, as it currently is, it can't even provide the same utility you could get with a quill and hand-laid pages in the 1600s.
(I had never taken notes before.)
Concentration is hard when I want to write quickly "just for myself", but force myself to slow down to make sure what I mail is readable.
It's a fun process, far harder than typing, but very worthwhile.
As an example, I routinely use my tablet like a whiteboard for working out bits of math. The ability to bring back a value I'd previously erased to see exactly where I miscalculated is extremely useful. Similarly, I find this sort of thing to be really helpful when whiteboarding my way through a particularly thorny programming problem at work.
My Remarkable is filled with research papers and books.
As I read them I scrawl notes all over the margins just like I did with paper printouts during my undergrad.
I place a lot of value on paperfeel for writing though (I tried writing on pdfs with an ipad and...ugh). I've also really come to appreciate the distraction-free setting (I thought I could just be disciplined and not need a device specifically for this - I was wrong). I also use it for note taking in meetings where I want to be present and pay attention the whole time - game changer there as well.
I use a product called “paperlike” for my iPad and it has amazing paperfeel. I can write and it feels like I’m writing on a paper notebook. Okay, a very hard, flat, glass-backed notebook, but the pencil moving over the surface is great.
For me, the downside is that I’m writing on a mini computer that can do anything. So, it’s easy to get distracted from the primary job of taking notes.
I keep my Paperlike cover on all the time and it doesn't really bother me when watching videos/movies on my iPad at all.
(While we're making this sort of comparison, it's also interesting to note that, as with a graphite or Apple pencil, the reMarkable stylus tip is a wearing item, while fountain pen nibs are not.)
With a fountain pen or (presumably) an iPad with no screen protector, you have no choice but to learn to control the tool without that excess force - force which will eventually destroy a pen nib, and in both cases will ruin your lines because there's no friction to damp it. Learning not to overcontrol does take a little while, but pays off both in work that's neater and more skillful, and in being able to work much longer before aches force a pause.
(With the reMarkable, too, there's a benefit in that your stylus tips will last longer, and you'll get more nuance out of the pressure sensitivity with tools that make use of it.)
The nice thing about android is that you can also get a kindle app. I know the parent is looking specifically for PDF support, but it’s nice to have solid kindle, PDF, and e-pub support on a single device.
I’m really tempted by the ReMarkable — decent PDF reader with good annotations, and replacing pen and paper in meetings, would be enough.
But I’m a pretty hardcore pen and paper user. I find iPad and Pencil great for art but laughably deficient for writing and brainstorming.
Is the Re that far ahead of Apple?
This makes the whole article seem un-serious to me. It seems like there was either a defect with the author's device, or they couldn't take the time to Google "turn page remarkable" and find this help page showing the (very intuitive) gestures listed, with videos: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000958211.... This is absolutely not something I had trouble with on my device.
It works like a charm, navigation/gestures are absolutely simple. It's a note-taking device, it never claimed to make crappy handwriting legible; that's not a fault of the device. After a handful of "I thought" and "I figured" the Remarkable should to this or that, with the comical part about "next page" being too hard......seriously? Please. It couldn't be easier.
I find it a joy to use for the things it was designed to do. Quit expecting it to solve all your edge cases you can think of, or fringe scenarios you developed and inherited from a different system.
For books get a Kindle. Everything else get a Tablet.
Not trying to defend the Remarkable (I have no interest in it) but this isn't true. You can purchase epub files in lots of places (usually on the publisher's website). You can download epubs for public domain books on Gutemberg. And you can remove drm from most Kindle files on Calibre, and then transform them to epubs.
- How about an infinite number of pages?
- Or the ability to undo/redo?
- Or the ability to resize?
- Or the ability to quickly send a document to a coworker?
- Or the ability to just be drastically more organized?
- Or the ability to not have to carry around 5 different notebooks everywhere you go?
- Or the ability password protect your documents?
There are lots of reasons a reMarkable is drastically better than pen/paper.
- I would read more
- I could use it for organizing work notes
For reading, almost none of my reading actually happens on remarkable. It's usually easier to just use my ultralight laptop (macbook air) instead of setting up a buggy sync to the remarkable, and having backlit screens is better than e-ink unless you have the perfect reading chair/nightstand light setup, which I don't.
For writing, I do get a lot of use out of it. I used to write a lot of paper notes and draw on scrap / computer paper, and then would gradually lose them and not be able to find things when I need them. Part of this is my own disorganization, but I also travel a lot so it sucks to have the notes in another place, and scanning requires intentional effort that seems like overkill for notes, that is until you remember them and want to look them up later.
The most useful remarkable feature, by far, though, is where you can stream your screen to a computer. Then i can write drawings and diagrams like on a whiteboard, but over Zoom for a remote team.
The problem is this feature is super duper buggy. It's currently broken for me. They "improved it" in the software but it's broken without a subscription, except I seem to have the subscription??? If anyone from remarkable is reading this, please fix that one feature, (used to be called LiveView), and then I will keep your product and write a good review.
Yes, a laptop with a pen or tablet would also serve the same purpose, I know. If I had an iPad, I would probably use it instead.
I enjoy "frontlit" e-ink screens like the Paperwhite and Kobo Glo/Aura quite a lot to be honest.
The basic problem with the Remarkable is that it's useless without the $8/month "cloud" plan because that's the only plan that enables its primary feature: handwriting recognition. That means that very rapidly it has a TCO approaching or exceeding, say, a used iPad and Pencil. A device that exceeds the capabilities of the reMarkable in every regard (even on the most basic level: an iPad doesn't require a network connection and cloud service to do handwriting recognition and drawing simplification), even before you get to the massive ecosystem of accessories and apps. This device is a one-trick pony that is expensive and requires its own special food.
They're also more than a little shady about their refund/return policies. If you don't buy the cloud "trial", you don't get the "free" trial/return policy. The cloud trial is a nonrefundable 3 month $24 fee.
They have no defined return/warranty policy if you don't buy the cloud service; it's literally "go look up what your rights are, we'll do that." This is buried several pages into their site away from the product page.
I've never seen a consumer electronic device company say that nor make it so hard to tell what the warranty and return policies are.
I've never seen a consumer electronic device company tie a return policy to a cloud service purchase.
In the last discussion about reMarkable I believe several HNers had return/warranty issues with them, too.
That doesn't even begin to get into the privacy concerns with them being what appears to be a principally Hong Kong based company. They may have some offices in the Netherlands, but everything on their homepage points to HK operations for some reason. Where are the cloud servers based?
Are you saying the key feature for the remarkable is handwriting recognition?
I have a remarkable 2 and I love it, but the whole appeal is to replace the endless paper notebooks and loose sheets that I use. It is great for that. Since I've bought it they've added a bunch of new stuff and the subscription stuff as well. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but then again I have no need for those features. It sounds like most people want a general purpose e-ink tablet whereas the remarkable is basically e-ink paper.
In defense of the RemarkAble2
Page flipping by swiping my thumb left or right seemed both intuitive and pretty flawless.
Granted, my handwriting is okay, I print rather than use cursive, but perhaps that makes it easier to recognize what I write?
As for e-pub's, everything from O'Reilly and NoStarch (a couple of places where I get reference books) work fine, I also had a number of text books scanned and their PDFs work well as do the 1000+ page PDFs that count as reference manuals for microprocessors these days.
Things I hope improve;
I do wish the PDF navigation was a bit better. In the ideal world an upswipe would bring up the 'bookmarks' for the PDF and allow one to select one, but using the menu to go to page view then picking the page you want hasn't proven to be too much of an issue.
Drawing notes is the best for me. Feels very good and works well. The one thing I would improve would be a zoom in/zoom out feature for adding detail.
And I'd love a screen that is both larger and higher resolution.
Reading e-pubs tends to be more miss than hit. Often e-pubs will fail to render things like code snippets, diagrams, occasionally whole pages, on the reMarkable. The same epubs work fine everywhere else.
The device works great for PDFs though. Fortunately the publishers I usually buy books from offer multiple formats, and a PDF is always an option. I gave up on wrestling with e-pubs on the device.
I agree that the page turning can be janky. The UI is mediocre, and navigation could be improved quite a bit. Syncing is also not great, but eventually works.
The battery life is excellent though, and the physical design is better than anything else I’ve encountered. It’s the software that sucks.
Overall, I wouldn’t consider purchasing it again. There are alternatives that offer similar capabilities, larger screen sizes, and more. I’d look at those first.
Having spent $1000 on e-Ink tablets, I have a lot of opinions on them, but the primary one is to not mistake what you are buying. I think 95% of the time, people would be better off with an iPad and Apple Pencil. That isn’t to dissuade people from getting a Remarkable, but it definitely isn’t what the marketing/zealous fans make it out to be. It’s primarily about capturing hand-written text. If you want something with more capabilities, Onyx is where it’s at.
I got the remarkable specifically because it did not have "other features", I have enough distractions and alerts from my phone, I do not need a tablet that get my email, twitter, etc etc. I specifically did not want an iPAD or a full featured Andriod Tablet with Slack, Teams, Email, etc etc etc
I needed something to replace the paper notebooks I carried with me everywhere, it does that job exactly as I wanted
My primary incentive for buying an Air 2 (I'm still on the fence) would be to use it as an e-book reader that I can use in the evening without having to worry about blue light interfering with my bio rythm. And from what I read - most e book readers are crap. (Kindle is out of the question for me as I hate Amazon and avoid it where I can - except for AWS which is 50% of my job).
I only ever used black pen. I am not talking about art or drawing. I used my paper notebooks to organize my thoughts, meetings, todo lists, etc. Some people use apps, and laptops, I used paper note books
Remarkable is good for this
>>My primary incentive for buying an Air 2 (I'm still on the fence) would be to use it as an e-book reader
I have no problems with the Remarkable 2 as a ebook reader either, but I do not buy or use DRM ebooks, I am mainly using it for Technical books I get off Humble Bundle, or stripped the drm from, or offical documentation. PDF works just fine for me, but I can see how some people hate it
For me the Subscription, and the inablity of the company to communicate with the community has soured me on the device, I likely would not buy one today for those reasons, but for the function I bought it for (note taking, and lite ebook reading) is works great for me
If I had to buy a device today to replace it I would look at the Supernote A5X
The eInk display and writing feel is top notch. Everything else has plenty of room for improvement. In particular, organizing and reorganizing notes is a real chore. This could be solved by either a brilliant UI on the tablet, or (much more achievably) by a good desktop app that complements the device. Instead the desktop app was just as useless as the native UI, and did not improve during the time I used it.
Eventually, my toddler ran off with the $100 stylus, and I never found it. I went back to pencil and paper, and that is when it hit me: the reMarkable offered me basically nothing. I do not intend to use it again.
I dunno, this whole article screams ‘user error’ to me.
"If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment."
And they had to lower the price to $299 already because of the volume they were selling at $399 simply wont make it.
This just shows the bar of today's consumers. If they had sold at least a million unit a year they could easily have further lower the price by another $100 while working on a much improved R3 with better processor ( not that I am aware of there is one... all the NXP SoC Solution are quite under powered ).
Last time I checked they were at least profitable. So I hope they keep working on it.
Consumer Electronics are hard. Very Hard.
It does high-light the fact that the best users for RM don't have a need for a Microsoft Onenote level experience and/or are more technically astute and can figure out their own workarounds.
- an iOS share sheet shortcut to save a webpage as PDF to the tablet
- a script that bundles my long form RSS feeds into a daily newspaper
- a yearly/weekly/daily planner PDF (with clickable links)
- a short manual process for de-drm’ing kindle books
I got the idea from someone else but unfortunately forgotten who so can’t credit it.
You can write a lot smaller than you think you can when you first start. My first few pages were comically full of huge writing. Now I use the "small lined" template and fit my writing to that, and it's fine. Roughly equivalent to A4 (rather than the OP's A5).
I read technical books on it, and it works. It's not the same experience as my e-reader that I read novels at night on, but I find the Remarkable experience better for technical and workshop books (and recipes).
The pen eraser is a little rough, but the eraser option from the menu is more precise. Depends on what I'm erasing as to what I use.
Advantages over paper:
- I can move whole chunks of text around the page (or copy-paste between documents). I use this a lot
- I have ~500 pages of notes on my Remarkable. I cannot carry that much paper easily.
- I create lots of notebooks, with meaningful titles (a lot of those notebooks are 1-2 pages long, which is fine), so finding stuff is a breeze. I don't use the OCR because I don't need it. I can't find stuff in paper notebooks nearly as easily.
I have a (homemade) paper journal that I enjoy writing in for journaling - there's something about making marks on paper, and about making journals, that I enjoy. For everything else, I use my Remarkable, and it's been great.
When I got an iPad Pro in early 2018, I was of course taking all of my notes with it - from meetings, to ideas, to task lists. At some point I went back to paper and the iPad was relegated to ideation. Exporting is not great, in an ideal world there'd be a fast export of PDFs, but I found myself emailing them or Slacking them to myself to share ideas.
The iPad's screen is glossy and gets finger grease onto it, the 1st gen pencil isn't the most natural in the hand. I know you can get matt screen protectors, but I like to use the iPad as a tablet. There's no substitute for paper, but I do find indexing and going back to ideas more challenging.
Legally. If you're willing to break the law you can essentially get every book ever written in a few minutes via torrent. Truly vast archives are available at surprisingly small file sizes.
I use mine primarily as a reading device. I enjoy writing on it, but don't find myself taking notes or doing other hand written or drawn things on it very often.
But I love reading on it. I have a few daily articles and newsletters set to forward to my remarkable. I have some scripts that convert those docs to epub (epub is just a subset of html), and then use the remarkable sync API to push them to my device.
Everyday I get a little bit of joy from turning on my remarkable and having the new daily articles pop up ready to read. I imagine its similar to the (lost) pleasure of reading the morning paper with a cup of coffee. A big plus for me is the lack of distractions when using the device compared to a general purpose computing device.
I also have an email address setup where I can forward emails or urls to and it auto converts the email/page to epub and pushes it to my remarkable. For long form articles it really hard to beat the remarkable reading experience.
I thought I would use it quite a bit for reading academic papers (pdfs). In practice, I find reading pdfs to be a bit annoying on the device. For papers in standard latex 2 column format, I find I have to zoom to get to a comfortable reading size, and then scrolling on a single page is quite annoying. I would much rather read epub files on the remarkable rather than pdfs.
On the plus side, when I do read papers having the ability to annotate the doc with my own notes is really nice.
If you have an issue with organization, OCR, and interface, it seems these issues would be 10x worse if you’re digitizing your hand written notes.
Just the process of digitizing them with a camera is cumbersome. The quality of the image isn’t really great. Tearing up your notebook and feeding it into a scanner is worse.
So the author compares the cost of the writing on a notebook and phone to the remarkable but not the convenience.
My only complaint is that the Apple Notes app doesn’t seem to OCR content added to notes; hopefully in the future it might, I submitted a feature request.
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-monterey-the-macsto...
The whole experience is sluggish, the UX terribly bad, the hardware feels cheap and subpar and the software is really not well adapted to e-ink.
It's a cool A4 sized PDF e-ink reader without many equivalents and okay to decent digital notebook with digital syncing. Everything else still sucks badly.
I was hoping we'd get more competition in this space.
Either the author or their device has a big problem, because it's the ubiquitous “swipe to the side” gesture.
Now I understand that the R2 is not necessarily the best thing since sliced bread and that it does not fit well in all workflows, but the author criticism is rather low quality.
Not only that, but there is no supported way at all of getting the MAC address of the device, which makes it incredibly irritating when users want to use one in an enterprise/academic network.
I want two things: (1) take notes (including sketches), never lose them, and be able to search for them (2) read downloaded scientific paper PDFs, read them and highlight them, and make marginal notes.
At 10.3 in diagonal screen size, the reMarkable wont let me page flip through scientific articles in their natural size, you need 13.9 in for that. Scientific articles have graphs and diagrams in color, and the color is key to making sense of them. None of the 13.9 in paper substitutes had color.
So still waiting for the basic specs to be available.
Who knows what app I should get?
Procreate and Fresco are what I’ve tried.
I was thinking about the Remarkable 2 but now I don’t know. Seems like a bad idea if all I want is a sketching tool that I can quickly take notes on.
This sync issue is just a nightmare. I don’t want to pay big bucks just to post to my own Google Drive. It isn’t the money, it’s that I won’t get it because I know it costs money and then I won’t use it and then I’ll use the device less as a result. At least on an iPad I can just airdrop it.
Goodnotes is insanely great. I loved Notability but they started doing some nonsense and moving to a subscription plan so I hesitate to recommend that anymore (though it is like $12/yr).
It’s just a pity that the sync is rubbish. It’s unfortunate that this happens so frequently. Like between Miro, Procreate, and Goodnotes I have the functionality but no one does everything neatly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/comments/qpo3kf/icloud_sy...
Paper by WeTransfer is probably the best pure notebook app - really refined and easy to use. I have years of work notes in this.
Vectornator is good for vector work along with the Affinity apps. My favourite vector app is still Graphic, but it was sadly bought by Autodesk and basically abandoned.
Algorithmic support will kill journals. How do you rank these apps, if one wants some degree of algorithmic sophistication?
User can install Kindle app, so I can read all e book. The annotation feature while reading the book is good.
I have pretty much zero complaints about my A5X (only "nice to have" ideas I'd appreciate). I never used RM2 (or RM1) but the mandatory subscription alone is enough for me to never touch it.
Supposedly RM2 has better writing latency than Supernote, but the current Supernote beta firmware improved that latency significantly (I signed up for beta). It may have been a bit slow on the firmware 1.0 but on the current one (2.0.4) it's pretty much as good as it gets for me. Sure actual pen on paper is faster, but for me the latency is low enough that I sometimes reach to turn the page when reading / annotating some PDF. That's probably the best attestation I can give to a device that tries to simulate the paper
For pure reading you can prob get a regular ebook for 1/3 the price.
However if you want to annotate PDFs or even epubs, I can’t really complain about anything. There are small glitches here and there (nothing persistent enough), but overall it’s been one of my personal slam-dunks in terms of consumer device experiences.
Also you can sync it via Dropbox, and it’s quite seamless for me.
Can also connect BT keyboard or wired keyboard and use it as typewriter. The one issue now is they don’t have some feature like shift+arrows to select but that’s going to come with future updates
It has kindle app and can read epubs natively.
I need color for the majority of stuff that I read/study/work on, which was certainly one point against remarkable. Additionally, I couldn't really justify getting a tablet to replace paper. Paper is ubiquitous. It is thin. It goes everywhere. I can fold it. And there's something fun about writing with a good pen (I mainly use fountain pens nowadays).
Eventually, my workplace just gave us all iPads, so I use that for annotating PDFs, otherwise I'm still just using trusty pen and paper for jotting things down. Can always scan them if needed.
There is soooooooooooo much content available in PDF
Yeah, tough to beat. I keep on looking at iPad/Remarkable/etc. and keep coming back to fountain pens and paper.
More often than not I’m just working through a problem and the distilled version ends up in code; for documentation I dictate with text-to-speech. When I need to, I’ve got a scanner with ADF.
The real estate is as big as whatever surface I’m working on. No lag. No distractions. Minimal cost. I can color code with different inks. Slightly annoying to travel with but as long as I fill up my pens (100% with no air bubbles before flying), it works fine.
Most tech publishers that sell directly, IME, sell multi format bundles, and one of the formats is usually ePub (and usually DRM-free).
The writing aspect of it would be more of a bonus to me. I do like the idea of potentially writing/doodling in the margins, highlighting with a pen, etc - but it sounds like it just ends up saving that out as as a modified PDF, which isn't as convenient perhaps.
Good things first: The writing and drawing experience is excellent. It's enough like paper and pencil that I've occasionally found myself trying to shade with my fingertip, as I would when drawing with graphite. The medium fineliner tool is perfect for notetaking, and the calligraphy pen tool does a solid enough job of feeling like a flex-nibbed pen that it's taught me some things about how to use one of those which I previously hadn't grasped. Battery life is ample, and palm rejection is if imperfect then at least tolerably okay.
The OCR is surprisingly good, if your handwriting doesn't suck. Mine doesn't, by dint of having spent a few years using fountain pens - we missed a trick dropping those in childhood instruction here in the US; they're a tool you just can't use long-term and not improve your hand. For fun yesterday I hand-wrote a trivial shell script, without really trying to write more neatly than usual, and fed it to the reMarkable's OCR to find it fell only two characters short of perfect accuracy. Especially given that, I can't really accept the claim that the OCR is bad - if you can't write clearly enough for humans to read, is it fair to expect a machine to do better?
Now the bad, of which there is regrettably quite a lot: The first-party software ecosystem is basically nonexistent, and the on-device capabilities are weirdly rudimentary. In paper notes I index by topic and page number, which is probably the simplest possible system of organization to maintain over such a corpus, and I expected thoughtfully built software on the reMarkable to do at least as well. But there isn't anything, so I'm faced with the need not only to come up with a new system that withstands freely rearrangeable pages whose numbers no longer can be relied upon, but also in so doing to work around the slowness and lack of tactility of the reMarkable as compared to paper. The page turning gestures are indeed not that reliable, and slow when they do work. Worse, the absence of even a basic bookmarking system forecloses any kind of rapid access to a specific page anywhere.
Even the few features that exist tend not to be completely implemented. For example, layers exist but aren't opaque; if you draw in white on a layer below lines in gray or black, the white appears on top. It's hard to even come up with a mental model for how this is implemented, and it violates the expectation created by every other graphical program that provides layers. They're still useful for protecting some content on a page from accidental erasure, but they're only useful for that. The lack of a "save as template" feature means that, to use eg the custom layout I've drawn up for a sleep diary, I have to either keep it as a blank page which I laboriously duplicate and move for each new page I need, or go through a convoluted flow of exporting, saving as PNG, and reuploading via the onboard SSH server. Too, if I want straight lines for that layout, I need a physical ruler to create them - which is fun for a little while, but would be preferably replaced by a straight line tool in the actual UI.
The hackability of the device is clearly excellent, and the community ecosystem quite rich. I can see where the folks at reMarkable could imagine this was enough, but it isn't. The device sells as being "like paper but better" right out of the box, but that's only true for people who have no idea how to get the most out of paper. But I do know how, and the device has at every turn frustrated my efforts to apply that knowledge to its use.
I have to say that I've found the reMarkable on balance mostly disappointing. I don't know whether they got so excited about the tech for itself that they forgot to put thought into making it pleasant to use, or if the tech cost so much to productize that they can't afford to build the software it deserves, but either way it comes to the same in my view.
I haven't yet decided to return it, but I also haven't decided not to. Maybe I can hack it into being the tool it really should have been out of the box, or turn it into a "newspaper" annotable RSS reader, or something.
In any case I expect before long I'll be back to taking regular notes with pen and paper, because the reMarkable has a very long way to go before it can provide a comparable level of utility.
I have a career of scanned math research notes, in felt-tip color on 32 lb laser printer paper. Teaching through the pandemic forced me on to an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. I quickly tired of the primitive Notability interface, and moved to Concepts. One rejects many art apps by testing whether handwriting is rendered naturally (or better), then most of the rest if one wants scalable vector art rather than bit maps. Concepts has the most advanced algorithmic support of those left, as far as I can tell. I certainly have complaints, but in some ways their layers are smarter than Adobe Illustrator layers. For instance one can group art without moving it all to one layer. This is as big a deal as lexical scope in programming languages.
I yearn for the calm of a separate device just for pencil notes, but I fear this is like buying a wind surfing board. A week after learning to balance on this board, I'll want a trickier board.
Algorithmic drawing is still at the Dartmouth BASIC stage, and the future is exciting. One imagines future drawing platforms with the self-referential power of Lisp. One doesn't imagine moving backwards.
Edit: according to A4/5 standards and Remarkable promotional content, it should be very close to A4.5.
i've been eyeing the onyx boox series, but they weren't gpl compliant at the time i was looking into them and perhaps more seriously, i didn't want to introduce any android devices into my life that didn't clearly have a rigorous security update program behind them.
Why is handwriting recognition so bad? One would think that if we can build a machine to recognize cat pictures, recognizing a handwritten "A" ought to be trivial.
You clearly haven't seen my handwriting :)
OneNote is the best software I've used from MS I think, VS Code made me wonder if I needed to reassess MS, but OneNote is super-effective. I moved 2 years ago to a paper-free work process (by choice when I started a new job) and OneNote has been central to that. It has flaws a-plenty (not too many bugs that affect me), but it just really fits for me.
Short version, MS's OCR is getting there. However, it's not 'recognise "A"' that's the issue, I'm a word-based handwriter, it's the general shape of the word I record in my writing when it's at its worst; that A might be more like a capital lambda with a floating platform in the general vicinity.
The eraser function alone makes it an upgrade (!) to pen and paper workflow