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Comment by tjbiddle | Hacker News Reader

Why is it 'dog shit' as an e-reader? I mean, how badly can you fuck that up? I feel like that should be a pretty simple feature.

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I'm not the OP but also have a reMarkable 2: the reMarkable 2 doesn't appear to mount as a standard USB external disc on MacOS (Kindles do, however). This makes it hard to manage a library via Calibre or a similar system. The reMarkalbe 2 really, really wants users to sign up for subscription services that manage the device through reMarkable's servers, which adds a bunch of unpleasant and difficult-to-manage steps, relative to the simple strategy of "plug in, send to device" that Calibre enables.

In addition, I often download articles from https://www.instapaper.com/u; the reMarkable 2 often malforms them, in ways other e-readers, including Kindles and iPads, don't.

I infer that reMarkable's scheme and hope is to sell monthly sync software, but this plan works poorly with my e-reader workflow and, I'd guess, others'.

Probably there are ways to get around these limitations (and, reading the thread, I see some people listing rsync and such), but they're so annoying out of the box that I wish I'd not bought mine.

I actually use my reMarkable 2 mainly for reading. I'm not big on note taking (I did use it to draw graphs for presentations occasionally, though). I picked it over other e-ink readers mainly because:

1. It's big enough for PDFs. 2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

I have my Calibre library store to Dropbox. Remarkable integrates with Dropbox so my library is always in sync!

Works pretty well.

It works well as an e-reader if you're loading it with PDFs. If you're loading it with ePubs, it converts these to PDF behind the scenes, but the internal converter is terrible (although it has improved). It also has a very peculiar/frustrating way of highlighting text; if you're trying to highlight a paragraph, usually at least one of the lines won't "snap" to the text and you'll have to hit undo and try again.

You can install koreader or plato on it, which turns it into more of a traditional ereader, with good ePub support. But occasionally you'll have to reinstall the launcher you use, because there is no officially supported launcher and the option to disable updates doesn't always work.

I wouldn't personally recommend an RM2 as an ereader; there are better options.

Awkward to hold, slow page turns, bad battery life. A kindle is a million times better for epub reading. For PDF e-reading it's no good either because it's slow, and you can't read charts on a low resolution grayscale display.

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