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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

It says it focuses on e-ink screen integration. What are the unique challenges of e-ink screens for reading ebooks?

At least in the past, screen refresh was slower; the reflective, rather than luminescent screen changed contrast and color performance; resolution was well behind standard screens.

The first two seem easily solved; the third hard to mitigate beyond larger print and appropriate typefaces. What else?

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I think the eink focus is mainly in the UI as it avoids scrolling in favor of pages and tabs.

How long was it since you saw an e-ink screen the last time? Resolution has been excellent for a while now. Refresh is still slow, but that doesn't matter for reading books. Contrast is fine, but not comparable to other display types.

How high is resolution? The example screenshots look pretty low.

Depends on device, but retina quality I would say. You cannot see individual dots so text appears like high quality print. The example screenshots are high resolution, you have to click them.

I think you're right about the screenshot resolution.

Something is wrong with the layout that makes it awkward for me to read. The word spacing, at least, seems awful. Look at the lines "meaning behind printed words ..." (near top) and "widely believed that ..." (near bottom) compared to the lines above and below them.

Maybe it's the full justification adjustment - the text in the box is much better. Even the dictionary popover has word spacing problems.

That's a big deal for reading long-form.

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