Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

There aren't many companies for whom I have love like Remarkable. All I've ever wanted is hardware that isn't needlessly closed or locked down, that is hacker friendly. Remarkable mostly delivered that.

But it feels like they've been increasingly moving away from that, especially where the openness now competes with their cloud subscription.

Given the amount of love the open source community has shown Remarkable, I think they could let the community build some amazing software for them. This would be doubly beneficial because the software is the weak point currently for the Remarkable. If they were to open source the existing software, even with a CLA copyright assignment, I bet there'd be a huge influx of people contributing.

I hope with this new Paper Pro that they are moving in the direction of openness/hackability and not more closed like they did with the Remarkable 2. Would love to hear from people who have tried the Paper Pro about how that is.

Side note: If you haven't gotten the RCU utility application, you definitely should! It's a great tool[1]

[1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

Pretty classic enshittification. I expect one response might end up being 'contract' developers who sign a contract of 3 years to develop an application and then after three years they go out and find a new contract.

I reason to this because software in hardware produces revenue only during hardware sales which typically fall off after the initial wave. Without continual revenue your business model goes upside down when you have developers for whom you don't have any work. So we get bullshit work and eventually we get 'RMR' or recurring monthly revenue because well we need to pay these folks.

Of course building an enterprise like that would require retooling your process with massive emphasis on sustainable build tools that are 'done' and similarly libraries. We massive documentation on taking the product firmware out of the archive and re-createing the entire build / test workflow with new developers.

A company like that might have 500 developers during initial product development and first shipments, that then reduces down to 10 or fewer for maintenance needs.

The surprising thing is that a lot of open source is actually kind of like this, a new 'thing' is out there and the number of people making contributions grows, and then it is 'shipped' or 'done' and the number of contributors reduces down to a handful, sometime zero, developers. Growing again when a zero day or CVE needs to be fixed and then back to zero. Because its OSS nobody is paying them, or maybe they are being paid by another company that uses the package and needs a fix, but the whole software development model is going to be completely changed over the next 10 - 20 years.

I think that's an interesting insight. Another model like this is game development, most games are built with an explicit intention to not maintain that code forever, to stop development as soon as possible.

... and a lot of games rely on fans for fixing the remaining (often critical) issues. Not exactly something that should even remotely be acceptable for productivity software.

I have a remarkable 2 but don't use it much anymore, mainly because it doesn't have a backlight.

Oh, and page turning swipes were hit or miss. that was annoying.

I bought it for the same reasons you allude to - open, not locked down, cannot enshittify something you don't have to update. I didn't really buy it for the pen.

I tried a 6" kobo klara 2E for a while. You can mount it as a USB device, but you have to hack it somewhat to get "sideloading" of books to work. Nice device, but 6" was a little smaller than I wanted.

But then I found the Pocketbook Inkpad Lite.

It is my primary reader now. 9.7" screen with backlight.

No account, no subscription, no hacking to get it to work.

Out of the box, just hook to usb, transfer yoru files, start reading.

Also, it will read most file formats directly - so if you want to use .mobi instead of .epub, that works. It also says .azw, but I haven't tried it.

note it doesn't do handwriting. But it is $185.

What did you find hard about sideloading on the Kobo? I've had a Clara and now a Libra, sideloading books is as easy as plugging in a USB cable and clicking and dragging files onto it like it's a usb stick.

It's optional, but you can use Calibre with an extension to convert epub to kepub as well.

I believe I had to edit "Kobo eReader.conf" and add "SideloadedMode=true"

Otherwise you had to create an account and log in and blah blah.

Or use https://send.djazz.se, I use it a lot It has kepub conversion built in

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