Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?

shkspr.mobi

159 pointsblenderob307 comments

$80-100 is incredibly cheap for any mainstream tech device when you factor in design, manufacturing, marketing, shipping, software, support. eReaders are already sold at or below cost because companies are hoping that you will buy books to make up the difference. Wanting one for the price of a paperback so you can throw it away once you are done is absurd.

I got a Kindle Paperwhite for ~$100 in 2016 and still use it almost every day. Easily the best value gadget I have ever owned.

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

To be pedantic, Amazon sells you a license to read the book but you don’t actually own the book like you would a real book. They can remove the book anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. They’ve already done it in the past, the book just vanished.

If you are really worried about this, you can pirate the book from the usual sites and side load it onto your kindle.

You can strip DRM in one click using Calibre. That way you can support the author and also own the book forever.

Yep. I don't mind paying authors and published for ebooks, but I draw the line at Amazon controlling my library. It seems like one solution might be to buy the ebook via whatever platform the author says is best for them, and then acquire a copy you control via other means.

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA.

Which/why did they remove the book?

The famous example is the removal of George Orwell's 1984. Note that Bezos called it all kinds of things, but did not revert the change according to the article [0]

[0] https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...

Here: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

The irony that it was Orwell’s 1984 that was secretly removed from purchasers’ kindles seem to have been totally lost on Amazon.

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.

Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!

Some books prices are ok.

Infuriates me when the paperback is $4-5 cheaper than the ebook, henchman’s exactly uncommon.

I replaced my Paperwhite in December 2024 for a new Paperwhite. I bought it in November 2014.

It's the best gadget I've ever bought.

Does the screen redraw faster on page turns? It’s the one thing that keeps me from using my old paperwhite very often. I would be willing to trade off considerable battery life for pages to turn instantly, which my iPad can do but I want e-ink.

How old is your paperwhite? I upgraded mine around the same time of the post you're replying to with roughly the same length inbetween. The difference in page turn between the two devices is night and day. The new ones are insanely fast. With that being said, it is noticeable and not nearly as quick as an iPad. Check out some demoes though to see if it is tolerable for you.

7th gen from 2016. Noticeable is ok but it was too noticeable.

Compared to the earlier generations of Kindles, yes, they are considerably faster, but you'll likely never get "instant" page turns on an e-ink display. For what it's worth, I've never found the page turning to interrupt my flow - except when I accidentally drop it on my face and it turns pages! :D

Some e-ink can be refreshed ~10fps I think. And old kindles had the ability to increase turn speed but it could leave artifacts on the screen, iirc

Yeah, that's the main reason why I replaced it. It started taking ages to turn pages. Plus the battery life was a bit degraded but that wasn't so bad tbh.

The new one is a lot faster.

I have a kindle 4 from 2011, still runs like a champ and holds multiple weeks of charge. I have had zero issues. I wish all gadgets were like this.

Sadly I seem to have kindles which suffer from increasing numbers of stuck pixels after 3-5 years.

I think I'm on my third now, and while I kinda begrudge buying new ones the paper-white I've got now, with backlight, is such a pleasure to use I can almost forgive it.

My son uses a Kindle DX. I had to replace the battery, it doesn't have WiFi, and they shut down the 3G network access years ago. It's perfect in that way. No distractions and no network access.

I removed the 3G modem when I replaced the battery to prevent it from being turned on and draining the battery as it constantly tries to connect. The microusb port is not in great condition and only works with the cable at certain angles. On the bright side, that's only an issue every few weeks when it gets charged and a new load of books.

My wife has the newest basic Kindle because she prizes light weight over any other aspect.

> when it gets charged and a new load of books.

Zeugma in the wild.

Totally agree. I was given a Kindle Paperwhite as a gift (great gift idea, by the way) and eventually bought a Kobo for some more flexibility. Both were about $120 retail. It brought so much reading into my life - I'm a full ebook convert at this point. Few pieces of tech could give me so much value.

What do you use the extra flexibility for? I have a Kobo because I don't give money to Amazon. I wouldn't know what to do with it other than buy books from kobo.com and read them.

I purchase a lot of independent ebooks that come as epub files. You can send them through amazons kindle service or convert them with Calibre, but I love being able to just drag and drop any file I want onto it. I've purchased books on the train and dragged and dropped them onto the Kobo mid ride.

It's mostly because I like owning a more portable file.

Same here. €125 6 inch Kobo. Black and white screen with backlight and good resolution. USB-C. With WiFi off, battery lasts a month. Holds 1000's of books. Don't see why I'd need a new ereader for at least a decade to come.

I think you're making the author's point. They cost the same 10+ years ago. They should be cheaper. And $100 is not chump change - but depends on where you live. Three day's salary for me (grad student)

I think we've passed the era of most new electronic devices constantly coming down in price due to time passing. They were all already mass produced commodities with competition at each step of the chain 10 years ago.

On whether $100 is incredibly cheap/"chump change": It really is incredibly cheap, especially for a new electronic device you can use for thousands of hours over 9 years. That's not the same as a claim it's an easy expense for every person, if we become bound by that definition of cheap then there is no such price which everyone can easily afford and we lose the distinction. On that note, I often wonder if it's cheaper for libraries to just rent out ereaders than manage more physical book storage and exchange. I know my local library already does rentals but I'm not sure of the economics.

Companies gotta show increasing profit.

Once the market is saturated, you can't rely on selling more devices, even at lower prices. Companies have to turn to extracting more money from existing customers, like subscriptions and services.

That's not why. It's because Moore's Law died. Same reason we need 10x compute for each 2x performance increase from LLMs.

Where's GPT5 anyway? Isn't that supposed to be out by now? Sorry, that's not super relevant..

eBooks are expensive for libraries. Publishers are asshats and charge considerably more for eBook licences that expire after X uses or Y time, whichever comes first.

For many of us in the USA $100 is the price of a meal for 2, no alcohol, at a good but not expensive "fine dining" type restaurant. The e-reader seems like a total steal in that context. (which of course doesn't mean that the pricing of things isn't psychotic)

Can you give an example of a restaurant you have in mind? I thought I lived in a HCOL area, but your number seems off by nearly a factor of 2 to me. Plus, considering how infrequently many people eat out at all, I'm not so convinced that this specific argument is a good one.

"For many of us" != "for everyone". This is also an order of magnitude argument and I'd accept as perfectly valid within factors of 2.

Its ~50 to eat at any sit down restaurant for two adults in Central Louisiana; compare to 20 years ago where I was feeding a family of four for $40 in southern california.

The inflation is staggering.

Anyone else remember the $6 Burger from Carl's? It didn't cost $6 at first, it cost like $3, and was aimed at "expensive restaurant burgers" They discontinued the Burger when tbe Burger itself cost $6 a LA carte.

A $6 burger now is a steal

I'm thinking sit down waited upon dinner for two, "second/third tier cities" in Northeast USA mostly - In 2025 you might see $30/head "restaurant week prix fixe" but those places are usually closer to $50/head if there's anything additional to an entree

And yes, we have kind of a restaurant death spiral because it is expensive to eat out.

I bought a Kobo Glo HD for €129 in 2016. This would be €168 today.

A comparable entry-level model (Kobo Clara BW) today is €149 - 12% cheaper. It's also now waterproof and does bluetooth audio.

It's a niche product that doesn't really benefit much from economies of scale (think eInk displays of that size). I don't think anyone is getting ripped off here.

> I think you're making the author's point. They cost the same 10+ years ago. They should be cheaper.

What? They are cheaper. Costing the same now that they did 10 years ago is a price drop of 25%.

This is completely ignoring inflation

Inflation is calculated on a basket of consumer goods including electronic items. So, you can't just explain away prices by hand-waving "because inflation" when they define inflation themselves.

The price has stayed the same, the devices haven't. The screen on the reader you buy today is a mile better than the one 10 years ago.

This progress will likely slow, patents will expire and then maybe prices will fall. But $100 for a device that will last you years seems okay.

Hum... I haven't checked on the last 3 or so years. But last time I was out to buy one, I couldn't find anything with a screen as good as the one I brought 5 years earlier. And most had severe software constraints.

And I've never seen anything on the market that even competes with my first reader that I brought around 2010.

Those things seem to be getting constantly more expensive, with the "cheapest price" being maintained by launching smaller models. All while constantly getting lower contrasts and less oriented towards offline usage.

What 2010 reader did you have? The $140 6" Kobo Clara BW for example is far far better than original $150 6" Kobo of 2010. Screen is much sharper and higher contrast, supports touch, it's way faster, has WiFi, front light, software does more, 16 times the storage. Only thing it lost is SD card support and the shitty dpad and I guess Blackberry integration.

Kindle is a similar story, although some value the physical keyboard and 3G.

And what smaller models? Most eReaders have been 6" since the days of the Sony Librie. Recently we have had explosion of larger readers too.

Now granted, the color models don't have the best contrast, but I'm pretty sure a modern Carta 1300 BW reader will be superior to your what 8 year old Carta HD reader, even with extra layers.

I had an Irex. The company went out of business a few years later. It had an 11" screen, very high contrast, supported note-taking over any kind of content, and had a nice modules API.

> Most eReaders have been 6" since the days of the Sony Librie.

7" readers were common when I brought my current one, but nowadays there are only 6" ones out there. A bit before I brought mine, there existed 8" ones, and Amazon launched an interesting A4 sized one.

That's very much bigger than a book, so I think that's probably why it's harder to replace.

There are still large format paper devices. Kobo Elipsa 2E for $350, Remarkable 2 for a touch more, etc etc. They're not sold as ebook readers, but you can read books on them fine.

You had a very niche device at the time that was far from the typical reader of 2010.

7 and 8" inch devices very much still exist. Kobo has the 7" Libra Colour and the 8" Sage. Amazon also moved the popular Paperwhite line from a 6" device to 7". Pocketbook has 7 and 8" readers. 7" only got MORE common if anything. Six inches was the most common eInk size for a long time.

You can still get big format devices with notetaking. Now the big brands like Amazon and Kobo have them in addition to smaller players like Boox or Meebook.

That's just not true. The screens on average have gotten better but not by that much.

Still to this day, people will say that the Kindle Voyage still has the best screen of an e-ink device and well it came out just over 10 years ago.

> They should be cheaper.

I'm curious how much you think an e-reader should cost?

Let's say the BOM for a bargain-bin e-reader is ~$65: e-ink display (~$25), mainboard (~$15), touchscreen and/or buttons (~$7), radios (~$3), battery (~$3), case (~$3), assembly (~$6), packaging (~$3). Forget about a charging cable. Then you've got to iron out the drivers and software, provide support, handle returns (which will be higher if you cheap out on materials) and turn a profit (assuming you're not Amazon). Let's say you charge ~1.5x BOM, now your product is ~$98.

Maybe you "borrow" your software and hardware designs from a competitor. Maybe you're willing to continuously change your company name so you can purchase low-quality parts without having to accept returns. Maybe you ask suppliers for a discount because you just know you're going to have enormous economies of scale and you're somehow more convincing than every other company (that isn't Amazon) asking for the same discount.

You do all of the above so you can sell your new e-reader for the insanely low price of $80. Will you move enough units for all that to be worth it? Are there really that many customers who would buy your $80 no-name e-reader instead of a second-hand Kindle?

that just pushes the question back a step - why is the BOM not decreasing (in real terms) over time as the components get easier and more efficient to produce?

Well the pricest component is the screen, and that's under patent.

I think rising consumer expectations soak up a lot of that -- you could make the main board and other components a third the price if you're satisfied with mid-2000s specs e.g. 200MB storage, slow page turns, bundled radios, no touchscreen, no PDF support, etc.

At some point the raw materials cost (which generally aren't getting much cheaper) becomes a major factor and that's harder to cut without a new approach.

Eink screen aside, it may be that we're just nearing the limits with current manufacturing approaches and that the next leap requires a wildly different approach.

The Rpi Zero has better CPU than the Kindle Paper White. The original sale price was $5. No way Kindle chip BOM is much more than that.

Most of the rest of your calculations mostly make sense.

Fair. I was bundling ports, memory, and connectors in the mainboard cost, but it's probably still on the high end.

6 inch color eink 24$ on alibaba, esp32 c3 cpu 3$ (incl wifi, ble, usbc) case 1$ probably. Assembly in china 3$ (done that), packaging temu style, transport temu style, touch layer I don't know.

BOM for a color eink about 35$ all together for a mass produced quantity of one, delivered anywhere (until tariffs).

Assumed quantity of customers, millions? Its so cheap that governments could give it out to schools, one eink ebook per child, cheaper than one year's worth of school books anyway.

If you can sell a functional 6" e-reader with a total BOM of $35 (i.e. retails in the ~$50 range) it seems like that would sell very well.

Assuming it's that simple, do you have an alternate theory as to why e-readers in this range are not more common?

Giving E-ink Corporation most of the profit via that 25$ screen is too much risk to make back on users who actually sign up to your store and buy books vs ones that put the gift in the closet, clearance models, losing to a more popular store, etc.

> too much risk to make back on users who actually sign up to your store and buy books vs ones that put the gift in the closet, clearance models, losing to a more popular store

I definitely agree that selling hardware at cost (or at a loss) in the hopes of turning a profit off of content sales is an extremely risky strategy. Many companies try that approach, few succeed.

But if you price it like a typical consumer product and sell it for ~1.5 * BOM (i.e. ~$50 retail price on $35 BOM) then you don't need anyone to buy books because you can survive off the profit from the hardware alone. And because I believe that a $50 ereader would sell well, I don't know why they are not more common if it really is possible to build and assemble a mass-market ereader with a $35 BOM as the prior poster claimed.

During that 10 years, inflation happened. Covid supply chain issues happened. Now, tariff uncertainty is happening. At the same time, the screen resolution of these devices has increased, the refresh rates have gotten faster, etc. Yes, even a "plain black and white" e-ink screen has slowly had tech improvements. So really, the price staying the same or going up a little is pretty expected. Most also have more other features now than 10 years ago.

10+ years ago, $100 was worth significantly more. The price has gone down.

I see this both ways; and the answer is obviously supply and demand, but it's not hard to think that the tech shouldn't be like 5 bucks a pop; e.g. if it became more popular to also use these as displays etc, in much the same way that big screen tvs are used to do menus at fast food places, etc.

I just got a R36s retro handheld console for 31€ (US$35) including a 64GB microSD and shipping from Aliexpress. Apparently sometimes you can get it for as low as $25. It has a IPS instead of a eINK screen, but the CPU, RAM, Storage, battery etc. are as good or better as any ereader, so it is possible to get a tech device for way less than $80-100. But I guess it won't count as mainstream and nobody should expect support. It relies on open-source software (ArkOS) and ships pirated roms of abandoned game consoles, so there is no option for the manufacturer (unknown) to earn more after the sale.

>$80-100 is incredibly cheap for any mainstream tech device when you factor in design, manufacturing, marketing, shipping, software, support.

Not to mention that you can just buy an old generation, or used/refurbished, if you want cheaper than that.

The Kindle is still amazing value for money at any price - especially when compared to others with a smaller ecosystem. And being able to sideload DRM-free books I get on other stores (while I can) is just icing on the cake since I want to actually own my books and read them in future devices.

That said, I am very happy with my Supernote Nomad as an e-reader as well (it is a note taking device, but runs the Kindle Android app) even if it is completely out of the price range the OP discusses.

I would argue that e-readers are cheap. My Kindle has been the single most value-per-dollar device purchase in my life.

Nine years ago, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite 3 for $259.49. It still works. It still does just one job—and does it really well. Unlike many other devices, I'm not tempted (or pushed) to get a new one every few years.

Apart from reading books, I send longer articles (using https://www.pushtokindle.com/) to read on eink, in a distraction-free, eye-friendly mode.

However, what does bother me is that eink displays are expensive in general. I had considered getting a few for my home, for dashboards (e.g., my quantified self health stats) and my favorite web strips. But these are really expensive. And, in this scenario, I'd ideally want to have more than just one display.

How much data collection do Kindles perform?

I can't answer that question exhaustively, but they do have a USB drive mode* and airplane mode, if that's something you care about.

Though the models with ads (basically all of them) do track impressions of all the ad placements around the device, which includes the lockscreen (the display shows ads when it's in sleep mode, both before and after you press the power button), and a banner on the home page.

* - Amazon removed the ability to download books from them to put on your Kindle, but the new ones do still have a USB drive mode

I switched to Kobo when the cable to my Kindle failed and I found out it was proprietary.

I also wanted to switch to epub format.

Worth noting that only the first Kindle, released in 2007, used a proprietary charger, and plenty of devices used proprietary chargers at the time. All of them since have had USB charging.

I don't think that's true, I had several kindles and it was a paper white that looked like it was micro USB, and charged fine on an alternate cable, but would not do direct USB connection on anything but the kindles own cable.

I'm pretty sure that that's incorrect. I worked at Amazon, on Kindles, and we used retail units with whatever random USB cables we could scrounge up, on all of the various Kindles (fire and eink). I also can't find anything on google mentioning it, and just tested with my own (non-Amazon) cable on my own retail paperwhite from 2015.

You may have just had a cable without functioning data lines.

AFAIK Amazon tracks every single metric they can as a policy. For kindles it’s books you’ve read, how much, when, words you’ve looked up in the dictionary, where you’ve connected from…

What types of data is available to collect from a Kindle, assuming of course the device is used for nothing but reading ebooks?

Another commenter lists a few options, but even the most basic of data - what a person chooses to read - is personal and private enough to warrant caring about.

Is this not already available from your shopping data?

Assuming you buy all your books from Amazon, sure.

IP address and location as you move from place to place (LTE/wifi).

Reading habits and library

Political leanings

Other associated metadata that may do more to link that device to your overall advertising profile and help deanonymize you for other data brokers.

For this and other reasons, I have never connected my Kindle to the internet [1]. So it can collect away. It will never be able to transmit the data.

[1] after the very first time when setting up the account

> My Kindle has been the single most value-per-dollar device purchase in my life.

I had an old Kindle with a keyboard, which I got with the official jacket-and-booklight accessory.

It was great. One day years later I let it update and it got a lot worse.

I also got a Kindle Oasis. There is no booklight option. You're supposed to use the built-in frontlighting, which is so bad that I never use the device at all.

I find it amusing that after all these years we’re still supposed to believe it’s economics of scale, low demand, or costly manufacturing behind the reason a 2 inch epaper module costs $25 CAD even on aliexpress. Meanwhile physical retailers are installing them by the tens of millions on store shelves complete with microcontrollers and OTA updates for unit costs in the $4-6 range, meaning the actual eink module cost with profit margin for the manufacturer is a fraction of that. It was believable 15 years ago.

Aren't the supermarket labels controlled by subscription software?

I'd bet Amazon would be pretty willing to give away kindles that only work with a prime subscription.

They're under $3 on Alibaba.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SAEF-2-13-Inch-High-R...

This is a relatively recent price drop though, right? There was a patent that ran out recently or something?

That's in the sizes used for price tags, and it's just the panel without the drive circuit, let alone a battery optimized one.

Exactly. Even OLED displays around the same size come to half the price with the driver board and a i2c interface.

A price tag that has to redraw every couple of days is a bit of a different target.

You've never seen one? They flip screens every few seconds, the whole aisle will gently flicker as the screens redraw. Sometimes. I've seen static ones, too.

Store shelf screens are extremely tiny. If a 1 inch by 2 inch screen costs a dollar to manufacture. Then a 7 inch x 6 inch screen by linear scaling should cost 21 dollars to manufacture. But I think manufacturing costs are more than linear since the control electronics become more complicated and yields become lower (more pixels, more screens have dud pixels that need to be thrown away).

> Unless you're prepared to get technical, you can only read Amazon books on your Amazon Kindle paid for with your Amazon wallet.

That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached. E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.

> Other than Kobo and Amazon, no book retailer

… in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.

Tolino is a rebranded Kobo with modified firmware, I think.

The other way around, it’s different hardware that nowadays uses the Kobo software. Kobo also only started developing them in 2017.

Thanks!

See sibling discussion, turned out I was wrong

I don't think it was ever true. Even way back you could always plug in your kindle via USB and drag and drop whatever books you wanted on it. As long as they were .mobi format they would read perfectly fine.

Yeah, but I’d have been willing to count that as "technical" for extremely untechnical people ;)

You can also jailbreak most kindles. I picked up my first one a couple of weeks ago here in the UK and intentionally bought it from Argos (high street shop) rather than Amazon so that I'd stand more of a chance of the installed firmware being slighly older as the jailbreak currently available was patched in the latest version (apparently it happens a lot, someone just finds a new way around it).

Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.

If you're going that route then perhaps pocketbook or kobo would be a better option.

For the UK the Kindle's still the cheapest option at the moment.

Mine was £94 here: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/4079659

Searching around for the pocketbook it's not sold in the UK but on their German store the cheapest model looks to be the 'Basic Lux 4 Ink Black' for €109 so seems the most price comparable.

The Kobo is more expensive though, the cheapest model is the Clara black & white edition and costs £129.99, at which point you may as well get a Kindle Paperwhite kids* as those are only £10 more.

*All kindle kids editions are the same as the non-kid versions, but come with a case, charger and extended warranty, there are no hardware or firmware differences.

The article links to https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/pocketbook-basic-lux-4-ink-b... for pocketbooks in the UK

ah completely missed that, thats a pretty decent price then! I wonder if they're just getting rid of stock as Pocketbook did pull out of the UK market a while back.

Shout out to my Winter Break family. :)

https://kindlemodding.org

Should really do this on my and my wife's Kindles, we just have them in airplane mode all the time, using Calibre + USB to copy books over.

> E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.

I believe that stopped many years ago: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/baen-books-can-no-l...

Its not difficult but I think a lot of non-technical users will have trouble with it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email/

Oh wow. The last few times I used it, it was promotional books, so I didn't realize it stopped being allowed for paid books.

That does suck indeed.

Yes - that's what is meant by technical. As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.

Amazon isn't winning because it's the least expensive, it's winning because it's the easiest. They have a huge selection and one click to buy a book that shows up on all your devices without having to do anything more is where the bar is. If you ask people to manage their own books or expect them to understand what an epub or pdf or azw is (never mind encryption!) you are limiting your market to a pretty small slice.

> As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.

Attaching documents to an email is the one thing most people can actually do because without it you're unable to deal with your insurance, doctor, tax guy or what have you. In addition to web browsing it's the only thing my boomer parents with very few computer skills have figured out. You basically bureaucratically die otherwise in the modern world

The biggest issue is that most people probably don't know that Amazon even offers that feature, they I assume intentionally don't really advertise it much.

The average person: "Fine, then I'm just going to be unable to deal with my insurance, doctor, and tax guy."

I think it's more that people don't know that you can get ebooks as files from other stores to begin with. But then also you need ones that don't do DRM, which complicates things further.

But, yes, Amazon is also deliberately vague regarding those emails. Most of their documentation presents it as a way to "keep your documents in your Kindle"; the fact that books are a subset of those documents is not exactly highlighted.

> Yes - that's what is meant by technical. As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.

I believe you, and I'm sad about this. I had hoped as the Internet grew in importance, the proportion of people with basic computer skills would increase.

I used to think this too.

I think electricity offers a useful analog. Today is ubiquitous and relied upon by almost everyone in the world. Yet I would bet that the percentage of people who have a good understanding of amps, volts, etc. is roughly the same as it was 200 years ago.

I do think the average person should know too many amps starts a fire and wrong voltage means devices don't work (sometimes with damage). They should probably know how many amps a typical household breaker is rated for where they live, and that thin extension cords might not be safe with an appliance that has a large motor or heating element.

The list of things they should know about computers is quite a bit longer because computers are more complex. A rudimentary understanding of files, directories and email attachments would make my list.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I think the way I'd put it is for things that are an important element of someone's daily life, their understanding should be one level deeper than they usually need.

The average person who drives a car, for example does not need to know that the stoichiometric ratio of air to gasoline is about 14.7:1, but they do need to know that their car will run worse if the air filter is clogged. They should probably also be able to change a tire, and have practiced it in the past decade.

Understanding computer fundamentals shouldn't be a specialty field when nearly everyone uses computers (smartphones included) every day in a way that would yield better results if they had some idea what they were doing.

They need to, but that doesn't mean they usually know. It's astonishing the quantity of people that rarely (or never) do oil changes on their cars. And I don't mean by themselves, but just bringing it to a workshop. And that's the easiest and most effective way to keep your car running longer in most of the world.

But I guess lots of people treat their devices (in general: cars, computers, fridges...) just as black box appliances until they break. Probably I'm doing it with something I haven't noticed yet.

Cars are getting a bit more discoverable in this regard with many new cars displaying a prominent notice when it's time for an oil change. Some understanding is still a significant advantage though; it's fine to wait a week for the oil change, but the low tire pressure warning ought to be addressed immediately.

Ah! We sometimes have to choose wisely between the important and the urgent ;)

> It's astonishing the quantity of people that rarely (or never) do oil changes on their cars. And I don't mean by themselves, but just bringing it to a workshop. And that's the easiest and most effective way to keep your car running longer in most of the world.

Case in point: several years ago my wife's car died while we were on a trip (fortunately we were close enough to home that we could get a ride back from family and have the car towed). When I took the car to the shop to fix, they informed me that the engine had seized, and that the most likely cause was that the oil hadn't been changed for too long. When I asked my wife when the last time was that she had changed the oil in her car, she said "I'm not sure but I think it was before we got married". That meant it had been at least 5 years since the oil was changed in that car!

I have always changed the oil in my car reasonably regularly (every 3000 miles, or whatever the oil is rated for). I never knew why, that was just what I was taught about how to maintain a car. My wife obviously didn't get that lesson from her parents (or didn't listen), and unfortunately the neglect of maintenance killed her car.

Modern synthetic oils run in circles around the ones my dad used, and can easily get 7-10K miles. But it will also depend on the temperature of your engine (higher temp, less life). And also contaminants. If some humidity or coolant filters to your oil because of a bad gasket or because of bad combustion, after some time the oil can become a sludge and seize your engine.

So it's a good to change oil every so often even if you don't do a lot of mileage. A year and a half or two might be OK (unless you're doing tens of thousands of miles a year), but five years... over the top, I think.

I just expend 150 a year on the yearly maintenance (oil and filter change, air filter, some other stuff...) and forget about it.

(Mind my English, not my first language and I might be butchering the car terminology)

> I do think the average person should know too many amps starts a fire and wrong voltage means devices don't work (sometimes with damage).

"Should"?

Almost every device I have, there's a bit that goes in the wall, and a bit that goes in the device. If it fits in the wall, it's meant to cope with the voltage in the wall. If it fits in the device, it's meant to supply the voltage the device can cope with.

That the bit in the middle for most of my devices is a modern miracle of semiconductors which contains a CPU more powerful than my first four or so home computers and games consoles to automatically negotiate* voltage and current, is cool, but not what I'd call a "should know".

> and that thin extension cords might not be safe with an appliance that has a large motor or heating element.

I didn't even think about that and I do know what amps and volts are — reason being, I assume that anything I buy in a store for general use is suitable for general use unless specified otherwise.

* e.g. but not only: https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surp...

> I assume that anything I buy in a store for general use is suitable for general use unless specified otherwise.

That's not a safe thing to assume, or at least, the way it's specified otherwise is with a current rating.

I had to work at it a bit to find one on Amazon; a search for "lamp extension cord" led me to the sort of thing I'm talking about[0]. These do show up in retail stores, especially low-cost stores (e.g. dollar stores, but I wouldn't be shocked to find one at a Walmart). This cord is rated for 5A. A standard American household breaker is rated for 15A (and it's possible to encounter 20A). Plugging in a hair dryer, toaster oven, or space heater with this cord is a fire hazard.

I note the plug shown in a photo says 10A while the description says 5A. I don't know which is true.

So yes, should, because you can walk out of a retail store with a combination of electrical devices that will burn your house down when used in a way that would appear safe without that knowledge.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5C88B1M

I live in Europe, and we have (usually) sensible consumer safety rules for everything.

So, here's my equivalent: https://www.action.com/de-de/p/2520398/pro-max-verlangerungs...

Germany's mains is 230 volts, so the 3680 watt limit implies 16 amps.

Other than hard-wired things like the oven and heat pump, I'm not sure my house has even one single item that draws 3.7 kW…

That's not equivalent because German household breakers are typically 13A, which is less than the 16A that extension cord is rated for. A 2.5A rated Europlug cord[0] is the closest equivalent, but safety standards help there too. Higher-current devices use Schuko, which will not readily plug in to Europlug.

I found an easy way to create an unsafe combination on German Amazon: a Europlug to IEC C8 cord into a C8 to C13 adapter. That's much harder to do by accident than the American version.

[0] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07Y1TT5CH

> Almost every device I have, there's a bit that goes in the wall, and a bit that goes in the device. If it fits in the wall, it's meant to cope with the voltage in the wall. If it fits in the device, it's meant to supply the voltage the device can cope with.

I have some concerns in this area related to outlet adapters, though.

It did increase for a while, and then when Chromebooks came out, schools started using those instead of real computers, because it saved a ton of money. So, the students have only been taught to use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. for years now, and no actual computer literacy. Some can write code, but can't find their own homework file. It's crazy, but we stopped teaching them this stuff, so most don't know it.

I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on Chromebooks. Had they not been developed, or even if schools had never went all in on devices, the future would surely look different but I doubt it would significantly change the average persons’s interest in learning anything about how computers work. Perhaps, for a time, they would be forced to retain awareness of the concept of a file, but eventually someone would realize that most of them really don’t want to, and will happily pay for a sealed black box.

Again, I would compare it to electricity. There’s all sorts of possible futures from its invention, but in each one, I think the pattern would be the same – an initial rise in understanding and awareness as people learn about the new thing, and cope with early limitations, followed by a decline back to near zero as it becomes infrastructure.

To be clear, this saddens me too. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, only that I think it’s inevitable. When I was younger, I was so certain that computers would change the world, and that this change would involve more people discovering the beauty that I had discovered within the machine. Several decades on, I believe that I was mistaken. There is still beauty in there for those who are interested, but most are not, and never will be. It’s just a tool, it’s just infrastructure, that either works or doesn’t.

I think we were on that trajectory until smartphones happened.

That might be true, but Windows, Mac OS, and even Linux desktops required far less technical skill to operate successfully in 2009 than in 1999.

If you tried to play games online in 1999 using Windows 98, it would break, and you would learn to fix it or you wouldn't play games anymore. Using Windows 7 in 2009, you'd probably have to know what compatibility mode is but it usually wouldn't break beyond that.

It is definitely smartphones. Any kid playing games on a PC would be forced to understand at least what programs are, what files and folders are, how to download games off the internet or install them from a CD, etc.

iPad kids just know "tap the square with the tiktok icon and swipe to make it go".

You don't need to know anything about files and folders to install and use Steam, which represents most of PC gaming and have done so for a very long time now.

People still learn those things to manually install mods and cheats, but it represents a fairly small subset of the overall gamer crowd. And if you look at the kinds of questions people ask on Steam forums that are related to that, it's clear that many users today have no concept of file system at all.

Lot's of kids still learn a lot from playing Minecraft Java-edition! There's a lot of skill involved in learning to setup a server, install mods, and it can't be installed through Steam, etc.

So its not entirely black-and-white, but I agree that for a large portion of people they do indeed never need to care.

Smartphones work very hard to obfuscate that files even exist, probably to push people to use cloud services. Hard to learn how they work if you can't even see them.

I needed to edit a file on an iPad. It took me a long time to find a text editor that could edit local files and wasn't a paid app.

I needed to edit something for a tether, IIRC.

I think it's a good place for a reminder that people who know nothing about math, physics, technology, anything really are born every minute. The more complicated things are, the more tedious the "tutorial" for newly spawned. In the grand scheme, no single thing is obvious.

I think the biggest problem is that the next generation is growing up without computers. They have closed ecosystems like phones, tablets and Chromebooks.

Combine this with the fact that corporations are locking down what you can do on work computers, and forcing everyone to save files in the cloud (Office365 / Sharepoint / etc).

And you end up with a world where owning a computer is a niche thing, and most people only use it in a limited way for work or gaming.

Again, e-book platforms that want to support kindle can do so without having to download a file.

Also for me, Amazon is winning both because the paperwhite has incredible value, and (that’s the sadder part) because of KDP Select which gives a higher share in exchange for 100% exclusivity, so those books (which includes some authors I read; > 99% of the releases are very badly written trash, though) are not available elsewhere.

"It's not anticompetitive behaviour, it's just innovation!"

"Value-add"

On so many levels and for so many reasons I hate how true your second sentence is.

For what its worth, we really should figure out how to e.g. bring the idea of "files" BACK.

Thats what the "File-first" and "Local-first" movements are about!

> … in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.

Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.

Which admittedly has made some of us regular Kobo users a bit envious, because Tolino devices somehow support sideloaded cloud syncing, while standard Kobo does not. So Kobo clearly knows how to do it, they just choose not to. :(

> Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.

I only read the German Wikipedia entry [0], but the way that sounds is that they are different hardware, but now using an adapted Kobo OS (with ways to switch between the normal Kobo mode and Tolino). But that’s just my impression, I have no further clue :D

edit: This [1] says you are right

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolino

[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-kobo-cla...

Could be. My own frame of reference is the following:

https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/tolino-epos-3-e-reader-...

> The Epos 3 hardware is based on the Kobo Sage. Kobo took over manufacturing and product design for the Tolino Alliance a number of years ago, when they bought a controlling interest from Deutsche Telekom.

I read that sentence the other way around. That a book licensed on Amazon can only be read on a Kindle/Kindle App without difficulty.

Oh, good point, didn't realize that could be read differently

> That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached.

Was it ever true?

It's even easier to just load the book over a USB cable, assuming you have it in mobipocket. It's a "technical" process in the same sense that using a USB key is a "technical" process - one that everyone is already familiar with.

Though I do remember that the packaging for my Zen Stone specifically indicated that it would only work with a Windows computer. That wasn't true; it showed up as a USB device and you could transfer files just fine regardless of your operating system. There wasn't even an alternative proprietary method to use on Windows. The manual carefully covered the meaning of the directory structure on the device. I'm not quite sure why they claimed to require Windows.

Having to own a desktop would be somewhat technical already. And you need the right format.

Nowadays, they support epub and you have the email thing (though as a sibling mentioned, they are apparently not allowing automatic email deliveries for paid books anymore)

> one that everyone is already familiar with.

You'd be surprised. Many people genuinely aren't familiar with it these days because it's not necessary for other devices they're using day-to-day. E.g. most don't upload music to their phones in this manner like we used to 20 years ago - more often, it's all "in the cloud", so you just install the app and sign in.

I think one reason for the eReader market not being big is that they're so good and sustainable. I bought my Sony PRS-T2 in 2012 and am still using it to this day. It has battery life for weeks, storage space for 100+ books and works just as well as when I bought it. It's really hard for me to motivate buying a new one when the only interesting "new" tech is backlight and I guess it's the same for most eReader owners.

The ~90e I paid for it back in 2012 was for sure good value!

I had the same issue with my Kobo, which I've had for about 8 years. I was looking at the replacements, but they're quite a lot of money for...what? Slightly faster page turns? A screen that might look a little bit better?

So I just didn't bother.

Am I crazy or is a $100 kindle not “cheap”? It’s not like it’s a single-use product. I don’t understand the desire for a $8 e-reader, it’s effectively a one-time purchase (maybe once every 4-5 years at worst?).

i got my scribe for $250 and its my most used device after my laptop. great value.

Agree! I bought my kindle in 2016 and have read hundreds of books on it. The cost per book at this point is in the pennies. It's not like you have to buy a new device every book, or even every few years.

Also I was very confused by the assertion that ebooks are a niche market. By the authors math more than 20% of people in the UK use e-readers to read on a regular basis. That seems like a very healthy market to me!

Do 20% really use e-readers? Sounds like a huge number. Do 20% even read frequently?

I'm not from the UK, and I'll admit my current reading habits are a sad excuse for what they were in my childhood and teens, so there might be some selection bias here.

Probably "20% of readers..."

I can say that out of the people I saw reading during my last beach vacation, almost all were using an e-Ink reader. They used to keep a small library of "beach books" you could read; that's gone. Casual readers have moved on to something else; people who read a lot have moved to e-Ink for outdoors.

Yeah, my Kindle is still working well enough after 10+ years. I haven't thrown it off any cliffs but I've dropped it a few times over the years. Whatever I paid works out pretty cheap at this point.

Yeah my impression is that Kindles last basically forever. They’re like typewriters where you should just buy the nicest one you can afford when you need it and use it until it can’t be repaired.

IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.

>IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.

I'm really surprised the cheapest one is $100 now, they used to have a little one for ~$50 that physical buttons on either side of the screen with the old non-paperwhite screen.

Yes when the alternative for a hardback book approaches $20, $100 every five or more years seems reasonable. If you wait you can likely get an older model on sale

I think it's mostly down to how cheap tablets and phones are. The cheapest Kindle on Amazon's site seems to be $130, which doesn't sound that expensive on its own. There's also a version full of adverts for about $20 less.

But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.

For someone who has never used a Kindle/e-ink reader I would agree with you, they will be tempted by the "cheaper, more capable" device but as someone who has owned iPads/Fire Tablets/Android tablets _and_ an e-ink reader (Kindle) I can tell you it's a whole different world. E-ink is just so much nicer to read when you are reading a book and the battery life is amazing.

Compare that to Android where you might be tempted to install Social Media Z app (I can't use X anymore :/) or your email/IM app. The distractions from that make it a sub-par reading device IMHO.

Absolutely, I have a e-ink reader and I love it. But if you stick it next to a tablet half its price, it looks outdated and overpriced by comparison, because things like the benefits of e-ink and the build quality meaning it lasts years aren't very visible or apparent.

> But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.

$60 for all that? I wonder how it runs in reality, and how well it'll run in just a year or two.

The thing about these dirt cheap tablets is... they're cheap for a reason, and it's not simply because that hardware is cheap these days. I've never once used, or had a family member bought, one of those super cheap tablets or laptops, and not have it be unusable in less than a year. They grind to a crawl, stop receiving updates, etc.

On the other hand, as many other comments here say... my Kindles are the absolute best value electronic device I've ever bought, no contest. I got one of the first generation Kindles, and only had to replace it a couple years ago after quite a few drops eventually broke the screen.

That's just from a quick look at Amazon - I'm sure you could find something cheaper and with better specs with a bit of effort.

And yeah, it's probably a bit crap. And there's good odds that it'll be dead or broken or unsupported in a couple of years - although you could throw it away, buy a second one and still be cheaper than the Kindle was.

I certainly wouldn't buy one, and in the long run you may regret doing so. But it looks shinier than a Kindle, it has colour, it's far more responsive, and it has far more functionality. So when you stick the two side-by-side, the Kindle looks pretty overpriced by comparison. Just like how graphical calculators look horribly overpriced when you stick them next to a dirt cheap Android tablet that has 100x the functionality they do for less.

The biggest thing I've experienced with cheap tablets is that the underlying storage medium of the device just sucks, and there's often no good way to actually know how bad it'll be when just looking at a spec list. Auto-updates from the Google Play store of the apps will quickly wear out the on-board storage and lead to everything going extremely slow until it finally dies.

Also, usually they have extremely bad screens with terrible viewing angles. Using them as something you're going to stare at for hours is miserable. Sure, the spec list says it's a higher resolution than the paper-like e-reader, but in practice the paper like display is far more comfortable to stare at for long periods of time.

Spec lists don't tell the whole story.

A lot of those android tablets are essentially manufactured e-waste that aren't compatible with the common stores and apps though.

I think the main answer is smartphones displaced them. It's the same thing that happened to cheap digital cameras.

> As I understand it, Google requires Android devices to have colour screens and, so I've read, won't certify eInk eReaders for newer versions of Android.

Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation will not be palatable to mainstream consumers. An eReader is not a phone, and consumers do not have the same expectation that it will run every app in the Play store.

Some Boox brand eReaders use Android on monochrome displays, but those are far from the author's definition of cheap at $200+.

Tablets too. I should be shocked that nobody has mentioned the aggressively low pricing of Amazon's Fire Tablets, but somehow Fire Tablets are invisible to the technorati. (e.g. people used to ask "Why are Android Tablets dead?" and the answer is that Samsung can't compete with half-priced tablets subsidized by AMZN any more than your local taxi company can compete with half-priced Uber rides subsidized by Softbank)

Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.

Can’t speak for others but the bizarre Android fork Fires run is a big part of what makes me rule them out.

That, and I have an Android tablet that was ~$250 when new that has various aspects about it that are somewhere between awful and underwhelming, and I can’t imagine a $30 Fire tablet to be any better in that regard, subsidized or not. That said my tolerance for electronics being bad in any capacity I feel on a day to day basis is low.

I've had a lot of tablets. iPad is better than most of them but my feeling is that tablets are sorta disposable, even if you don't intended them to be disposable. [1] If you want to read the web, read PDFs, it doesn't really matter that you're running AMZN's fork and using AMZN's gimped app store because you need like: a web browser, a PDF viewer, maybe ssh and RDP clients and that's it.

The only (relatively) high end Android device I had was a Google Pixel, everything else has been a medium Samsung, BN Nook, I even had a $99 Windows tablet that was "good enough".

A lot of people who would want a Kindle would be pretty happy with a Fire, it is not so easy to read in peak daylight and the battery life is worse, but the value is good enough that AMZN has driven quality affordable Android tablets out with very little fanfare.

[1] I can't believe anyone gets an iPad Pro, but if I did I'd get an expensive case for it and treat it like a laptop. What I like about tablets is that I can take them places where they might get smashed.

Even if they’re technically sufficient in terms of specs and my use case is simple, if I see things like animations hitching, times when the tablet is struggling (e.g. while running updates), the screen being sub-par (low pixel density, bad viewing angles, etc), etc it’s going to bug me.

On tablets being disposable, it depends on the user. The only electronic device of mine that’s regularly in harm’s way is my phone, and it’s insured so if it gets smashed I have a new one in a day or two. Been carrying iPads as auxiliary devices while traveling for years and never had a problem.

> Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation

This SafetyNet nonsense is now why I begrudgingly have an iPhone. After playing cat and mouse with Google for a long while, I'd had enough. The main reason I was on Android was because of the freedom I had (or, used to have). If I have to be walled in, Apple has a better garden than does Google.

That's not an entirely unreasonable take, though sideloading apps is still fully available on Google-approved Android and it is not on iOS.

I only have one or two apps I actually want to use that required a SafetyNet bypass. I don't think it's people like us Google is targeting with that though; the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.

> the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.

In general such an attested environment provides guarantees a lot of software makers want. Starting from just anti-malware and anti-cheat ending with just DRM.

Some app developers might want attestation for those reasons, but Android is big enough that almost none of them would leave if it was unavailable.

All of these points are made in the article, nearly verbatim.

I read a lot.

I used to have a Kindle. Eventually it broke. Kobos seem even less reliable, my wife has been through 4-5 of them so far.

After my Kindle broke I switched "temporarily" to using the Kobo app on my iPhone to read. Although the form factor isn't ideal for reading, it's just so convenient that I never bothered buying another eReader. It also has all the advantages of a modern smartphone: touches to turn the page are instantaneous; controlling brightness is familiar and easy; I can copy and paste text into Safari to search anything I'm interested in. About the only environment where an eReader wins is bright sun, and well, I live in Northern Europe.

So yeah, I think I would say, although they're a nice idea - eReaders just aren't strong enough in their own niche to beat out smartphones for a lot of people, which means that niche stays pretty small and prices stay quite high?

The main advantage for me of a dedicated e-reader is that I don't get distracted and do something else, which happens to me constantly when I try to read on my phone.

Put it in airplane mode?

Oh, sweet child.

Airplane mode can be disabled as quickly as it was enabled. As can Raycast's 'focus mode', which is why I'm typing this (on my laptop) and not reading my book, and why a thread about cheap e-readers immediately caught my attention.

One of the most popular eReaders with the BookTok crowd is the Boox Palma, which is an eReader with the form factor of a phone.

It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.

There have been several takes on "Android phone with eInk screen" to date, e.g. https://minimalcompany.com or Kingrow K1. They are fine for reading but for some reason the form factor doesn't stick; or at least I haven't seen any model like that remain in business for long.

Yeah all these “save your time and attention from your smartphone” value propositions run into the problem of just being shitty phones that end up being quite expensive. This goes for eInk phones as well as things like the Light Phone or that Humane Pin.

The fact is people actually just like their phones, and the main problem with them getting zombiefied staring at them comes from specific attention sucking brainrot apps. Aspects of hardware design can be a nudge factor but it’s not the main driver. The problem is TikTok, Instagram, et al and nobody wants to have a shitty phone experience when they could just block those apps. Compromising functionality runs into the problem where you get too much bycatch as most of the addicting functionality overlaps with stuff people want. I may not want apps or a screen but I want maps, and once you have maps and navigation you probably need a screen. Maybe I want to avoid video because I want to avoid TikTok but then I am searching for a How To guide and that ends up linking you to YouTube. I don’t want WhatsApp but I want to receive text messages, but once I’m in a group chat how different is that from WhatsApp?

I recently had this issue with notifications. I turn off notifications on everything except phone calls and messages. But I was trying to marketplace some items and it turned out I just couldn’t communicate with people without live messaging them on LetGo or the BuyNothing app or Facebook marketplace. But once I turned on notifications to get those messages suddenly they’re constantly spamming me with push notifications and emails trying to bait my engagement. The hardware is not the problem.

I have a kobo. The firmware is absolutely terrible. Somehow it's gotten itself to a state where it doesn't detect books that are added to the device, even after fully reseting the hardware

Give koreader a try, I regret not switching sooner

For whatever it's worth, I've had a Kobo aura one for about 6-7 years and it still works beautifully

I’ve had an Aura One for about the same amount of time, and yeah, it’s been no trouble at all. Love that it functions like a USB thumb drive and can take plain old ePubs without having to mess around with Calibre (which is powerful, don’t get me wrong, but that UI/UX… yeesh).

4/5 kobos? What did happen to them? I suspect the screen broke after a fall. Happened to the one of my sister. In that case try to use an harder cover because 4/5 are a lot

Yeah, some were dropped, but not from great heights or anything - normal wear and tear that a regular smartphone would easily survive. She does have covers for them. I think one even had like a 1' fall onto carpeted stairs and then wouldn't turn on anymore.

I think her latest one has lasted a lot longer though, so maybe they've steadily become more sturdy...

For me, a dedicated e-reader (Kindle in my case) has two or three benefits...

1. The screen is easier on my eyes. Especially at bedtime, when I do the majority of my reading.

2. The form factor - larger than a phone, smaller and lighter than a regular tablet. I find it much easier to use lying down (vs my iPad).

3. Cost - WAY less expensive than a good tablet. I can take the Kindle on a backpacking trip and not worry about breaking it. A hammock and an e-reader are my "luxury" items on these trips.

It's not more convenient to read on a phone. You have made it a habit and then made yourself believe that your habits are rational. Not only for you, but for the rest of the world.

E-Readers are absolutely better for reading than phones, that's why there's a big market for them.

It really depends on how you're reading. I find that smartphones are actually more convenient to use for reading lying down in bed, and the screen works better at night too because with modern OLED ones you can use black background with very dim amber text for very comfortable low-light and no-light reading. OTOH eInk is the best option for outdoors reading for sure, and the multi-week battery life is very nice when travelling.

It's wildly more convenient to read on a phone. I prefer the screen, form factor, and overall UX of an e-reader for extended reading sessions, but I haven't turned mine on in years because the phone is just sooooo much more convenient. Most e-readers don't fit in a pocket, and even if they do it's annoying to have to guess when I'll need it and carry the 2nd device. Whenever I have downtime....airport, doctors office, curbisde pickup, wife isn't ready to check out yet, lunch takes 5 minutes in the microwave....that phone/kindle for iOS is always ready to go. I probably do half my reading in 5-15 minute increments of formerly dead time. For a while I even tried switching to the e-reader whenever I sat down to read "for real", but even the relatively painless syncing process wasn't worth the minor UX benefits of the ereader. The phone is my least favorite way to read, but convenience is the one category where it absolutely mops the floor with e-readers(and paper for that matter).

You're not saying it's more convenient to read on a phone. You're saying that it's more convenient to bring your phone.

Sure, but we can all choose our habits. If I'm stuck waiting at a doctor's office, I will read on my phone like everybody else. But in all other situations, when you actively want to read, an e-reader is better.

I'm saying that it's more convenient for me to read on the phone in all situations I can imagine. Even at home....I just sat down, kicked up the recliner, and decided to read a noeel rather than the cookbook on the end table or putting something on TV. The phone is in my pocket and the e-reader is in another room, maybe in need of a charge, maybe in need of a sync. Maybe I should have thought about that before I sat down but I didn't. Sure I could choose to change my habits, but changing habits is difficult and inconvenient. And even once I've succeeded, the new habit takes more time and effort which is inconvenient. That inconvenience is modest and may be totally worth it for the (to your mind significant) benefits of an e-reader. But it is still an inconvenience. First world problems to be sure, but I will not expend 5% more effort for a 2% increase(my number, yours is a lot higher) in reading device quality, and I'm hardly alone in that decision.

For me it’s kobo all the way. The ereaders are open by default (no need to jailbreak them because they don’t block from doing whatever you want with it), and are easier to repair (or upgrade, need more storage just put a larger SD card inside). Plus it’s not making bezos richer. Not to mention the terrible text layout engine on the kindle, i can put a ruler to the right edge of the text on my kobo.

And with koreader I can set it up exactly the way I like (invert Colors at sunset, customize gestures and taps, copy paste text on my phone via a qr code…) it’s very easy to install it on a kobo.

I read a lot, and just use FBReader on my phone. I like e-ink displays, but I read a lot more with my phone since it's always in my pocket. I imagine if I read on the kindle app, I could switch back and forth between a phone and ereader, but reading bootleg epub files doesn't give you the best options for synching between devices.

> Moore's law is supposed to drive down the cost of electronics

The core of the article is this complete misunderstanding of Moore's law. From there, all the rest of the confusion follows, unsurprisingly leading to the author's claim that ~$100 for a long-lasting device is unreasonably expensive.

I realise “cheap” is in the eye of the beholder, but a new kindle is £95 today and is probably one of the best bang for buck spends for hours spent. I’m using my wife’s kindle from 2013 and other than a decade of cosmetic damage it works just as well as it did on release.

At a certain point them being “cheap” makes them disposable not accessible. If you can afford a few new books a year you can afford a new kindle. If you can’t, they are readily available for about 90 minutes of minimum wage work on eBay.

I want to know why—in the 21st century—the Kindle app still doesn't support the interrobang or many other completely normal, not-that-obscure characters.

I sent feedback to Amazon about it: "Why TF don't you support the interrobang‽"

The other e-readers use normal, free fonts and thus, support nearly the entire unicode spec. Yet Amazon—with all it's enormous resources—can't seem to pull off supporting basics like the interrobang.

I can't wait for an usable open-source e-reader software for this reason amongst many others. I had to jailbreak my Kindle just to run Syncthing on it. Now I finally have an always up-to-date library. Why is it this annoying I don't get.

While you’re pondering this important question the author raises, I‘d like you to zoom out for a moment and remember how, when Amazon first released the Kindle, the entire World (especially the majority here) would have betted the farm on paper books being extinct by now.

But instead, we read an enthusiast‘s blog post lamenting the innovation‘s niche-of-a-niche status, which it cant leave neither through super cheapness nor through feature improvement, since that would be too expensive.

Keep this in mind when the next technology (crypto, ai, …) is sold to you as this fatalistic all eclipsing event (on which you have got to spend money on now or else).

I think he's just using the wrong date range.

2012 things had already matured.

2009-2010 eReaders were a lot more expensive.

The "Kindle 2" in 2009 launched at $360.

So basically by 2012 prices had tanked, and there's a limit on how much cheaper they could actually make them in the years since.

This - the Nook Simple Touch was £29 in 2013 - https://pomeroy.me/2013/05/review-nook-simple-touch-ereader-...

Was (and still is) a great epub reader - I still do most of my ebook reading on it. Same that Libby won't work on this version of android as I'd love to read current magazines on it.

I think I wanted to say elsewhere in the thread, but probably did not, that my first Kindle was $35, brand new from Amazon. No keyboard but it did have hardware buttons for page turn at least. It lasted until I ran it into the back of my heel backing away from my desk in an office chair, and amazon gave me $15 for it toward a new kindle, which were on sale the week I broke mine because a new kindle was being released, so my new kindle cost $45, but was originally over $120 new, if not $150. Paperwhite.

End of ZIRP is what happened. Money are nknlonger cheap enough to buy your way into the market hoping for the profit from books and subscriptions.

I bought a used kindle paperwhite for £15 last month, and spent about an hour to mod it (which really wasn't all that difficult; it just involved copying files).

I'd say that's pretty cheap.

I suspect the reason why there are not more new devices for the budget pricepoint is that the market is saturated. Unlike phones, there isn't really a compelling reason to upgrade regularly. My mother has used her kindle for years at this point, and probably will use it for years to come.

> I suspect the reason why there are not more new devices for the budget pricepoint is that the market is saturated. Unlike phones, there isn't really a compelling reason to upgrade regularly. My mother has used her kindle for years at this point, and probably will use it for years to come.

I think e-ink patents are holding the ecosystem back in terms of possible designs (and trade-offs). I'm sure we'd see more and cheaper e-readers if the tech was freer.

The software still seems like the biggest let-down in terms of progress though. I've used like five different readers over the past decade, all from different manufacturers and they all have something that really annoys me. Things like one missing notch on the brightness slider, no custom software option or just poor UI button placement.

Back in I want to say around 2012, maybe earlier I got some sort of eReader for super cheap, less than $30. As I recall it had some sort of non-backlit color LCD, similar to the GBA but easier to see. It was ok in direct sunlight but not great.

It was exceedingly incapable. Could only open a very limited number of formats if I recall, laid them out very poorly. I'd wanted to try to convert my collection of CBZ comics into some format it's color screen could display, but there was no way without intensive manual editing to make them readable on its roughly 4 inch screen.

Insanely slow and most of all unpleasant to use. I used it a handful of times before it went in a cabinet. Years later I threw it out, I almost always try to resell things or give them away, but I genuinely didn't think it was worth anyone's time.

My ideal device for reading disappears in my hand, and that is something that my kindles achieve. I have never seen a cheap eReader that can achieve this. I've heard good things about the Kobo devices but I've never used one.

Update: I found the order and it was a Kobo ER430 and I got it for $19.99 on Woot. Well I hope Kobo has improved! They'd almost have to.

They're on eBay and Facebook Marketplace. I've bought a bunch of old generations of Kindle devices for less than £15 and they work perfectly fine.

It happened mostly that available devices fails to target a reasonable usage and industry do not want it anyway.

The reasonable usage means A4/B4 size, to read most common pdfs, to be loaded locally via USB or LAN not by some third party proprietary service, driverlessly, no app needed. A FLOSS base to let's say synchronize with Zotero or some personal note tool, that part developed by a community thanks to the FLOSS base.

Another reasonable usage is 6-7" maximum for those who want paper like notes, again locally sync-able with a desktop/mobile not needing any third party or special software in the middle.

A third reasonable usage is as a desktop secondary monitor to be used to read without burning our eyes, or with raster graphic apps no special software needed as well, just a standard displayport/HDMI.

I think ereaders are cheap if you used them heavily. I read on it every day and I take it with me wherever I go so I can read instead of scrolling of my phone. I’ve hundreds of books on my Kobo and is really the best tech gadget I have, and it cost me around $130 if I remember well.

If you compare the cost for example to a gaming console, is it justified? Probably depends how much you play video games. There are heavy players and people that play video games only occasionally. Same for readers.

Yes the price is slightly increasing but still justified for people that used them frequently. With a good cover they become pretty resistant and the battery stays for weeks.

P.S. Interesting insights in the article about the price factors and patents.

I used to read paperbacks a lot. Now, I almost exclusively read on my Boox Tab Ultra, which I got used for ~300€. It's rather expensive when compared to regular eInk devices, but I feel that it is worth it for me to be able to take notes in the margin with the physical pencil that comes with it - just as I used to do in physical books.

That being said, given that high quality eInk readers can last for many years, it has come out cheaper for me to get this rather expensive device when factoring in the price of ebooks vs physical books. Also, I read a lot of literature in the public domain, which is of course entirely free to download.

If you read frequently, get a reader.

The book drm is a much bigger problem than the readers

Being locked in is near unavoidable if you don’t want to accept a more limited library.

To be honest, I've never really understood the need for a stand alone reader.

I read a lot of ebooks, but it's almost all on my laptop with calibre. I tuned the color scheme to be easier on the eyes at night and it's honestly fine. I used to have a kindle, but I lost it in a move long ago, and haven't really missed it.

It's a matter of preference I guess. I do find eink substantially easier on the eyes though. Plus the form factor is better for lying in bed while reading

Different strokes for different folks largely. My e-reader mostly languishes in a drawer. I'll maybe use it on a trip or around the pool but mostly do my reading on regular computers and my phone as those are what I have handy. My wife loves her e-reader and uses it daily but doesn't really bother spending much time on a laptop or desktop outside of work. To her, it's a better device more catered to precisely the needs she's looking for, while for what I'm looking for its too constrained.

eReaders are really just a specialized version of a tablet.

Specialized devices have to be either really, really special or really, really cheap to make it in the marketplace. Otherwise, they get absorbed into a more widely usable device.

The smart phone is a good example. It can replace multiple specialized devices --- a phone, a watch, a camera, a flashlight, a GPS navigator, a TV --- and yes, even an ereader.

It may not be as good as a specialized device for any of these tasks but the real selling point is that it can do all of them reasonably well in a pinch. It packs a lot of functionality into one easily portable device.

That’s the marketing that they do, one gadget to replace them all. In reality I’ve an analog watch at my wrist, I’ve a powerful flashlight (mostly using my smartphone tho), I’ve a dslr camera and TV. One friend of mine his into boats and has multiple GPS devices properly adapted to boats. So the one fits all is good for generic users, but if you rely heavily of certain technologies, specialised gadgets are better, less distracting and more reliable.

EReaders are special, their screens make them an entirely different product category for an entirely different market.

eReaders are really, really special. It's the only usable electronic display when you're in a bright environment.

I do read ebooks, even of books that I own as paperbacks or hardbacks. I never bought an ereader because I read them on my phone because in that way I always have them with me. No need to have a separate device. Of course I could read both on my phone and on an ereader but why bother? I imagine that other people read on their phones too.

No one bought MP3s from Apple through iTunes. Audio was in their native format. Apple even had a page about importing MP3s into iTunes, so not exactly a walled garden there even for iPod. And the iPhone could play MP3’s in the native music app since it was first released.

https://support.apple.com/guide/itunes/choose-import-setting...

Also, while eink might be more expensive when assembled into an ebook reader, why not use a color android tablet with brightness set on low? Why are the hardware specs so restrictive? I understand the preference for long battery life, but it’s not like power outlets are in short supply. It seems like tablets are much more open as a device than an ebook reader

Buy used. Same argument could be made for smartphones but the used market is so big that price is no issue, homeless people have smartphones. A quick search says $30-40 for mid-aged devices, I saw paperwhite models for $10 on flea market (got a few for smart home use).

> As I understand it, Google requires Android devices to have colour screens and, so I've read, won't certify eInk eReaders for newer versions of Android.

The linked article says "[Device implementations] SHOULD support displays capable of 24-bit color graphics.", contrasted with "MUST" in other bullet points. So I'd say Android shouldn't be a blocker. That doesn't necessarily mean Google will happily license Google services including Play Store (possibly for a fee), but there are manufacturers that build their own app store, or just let users sideload apps. Worst case, just put AOSP on the device. The experience isn't going to be perfect, but it's usable.

I do find the really old android versions to be quite frustrating. I don't particularly know what I'm missing, but it feels so not good buying a device and seeing that under the hood it's Android 11 (2020).

I suspect it's mostly that e-readers tend to use pretty old chipsets, & that no one has bothered updating support in a long long time. Maybe perhaps possibly there is some technical gotcha but I expect its more an issue of neglect.

Whatever the case, incredibly discouraging. I've looked at Boox Palma's and others but heck no I'm not buying such a clearly unsupported unloved system.

I haven't crunched the numbers, but my hunch is that my kindle is easily the best price/use ratio tech device I ever bought, by far, even considering I upgraded to an oasis and gifted my still-working paperwhite to a relative at some point.

> But it got me intrigued. Moore's law is supposed to drive down the cost of electronics.

Moore's law only observes that the density of transistors within an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years.

It does not comment on the cost of the individual transistors, or other electronic components.

Often, increasing transistor density can lead to significantly increased costs in the short term as production issues are ironed out and massive investments in new technologies are recouped.

There are transistors in an electronic paper display, but they are an irrelevant portion of the cost of the panel.

EInk have the patent on eink technology and their essentially a monopoly. As such the prices for EInk screens are never getting cheaper.

You can buy "cheap" EInk devices [1] with an ESP32 and flash your own software on it, an ESP32 costs less than 5$, so the rest of the price is all down to the price of the EInk panel and controller.

[1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5papers3-esp32s3-developm...

> EInk have the patent on eink technology and their essentially a monopoly. As such the prices for EInk screens are never getting cheaper.

That's not why. Volume.

I bought a 110 Euro Boox eReader, it is great. It has the size of a slightly larger, but very thin, paperback, the display is extremely crisp and I can easily use alternative software on it. It has Bluetooth, wifi, USB-C and basically everything you can expect from an android tablet of that size.

Sure, 110 Euros isn't 10 or 30 Euros, but it is obviously very affordable to anyone living in the west.

I do not know what the point of these cheap readers would be? To create throwaway trash? If you read somewhat regularly a 110 Euro eReader is a very good investment.

Same here. I bought a boox poke for € 130 a couple of years ago and it's a vast improvement over my (at that point 9 year old) kindle paperwhite. No ads, no spying/data transfer to amazon, and I finally OWN my books and don't have to sqabble with amazon over them deleting books from my library. I buy books as files and sideload via USB (another thing amazon stops you doing). I read a lot - 150 TO 200 books/year - and de-DRMing every single one year after year just isn't an option. The poke is smaller than the paperwhite but crisp in display and has the same features you noted including tts. It's 4 years old and I expect it to last another 4, so I come to the same conclusion: cheaper readers would certainly increase electronic waste since people tend to take less care of objects that are cheap and easily replacable.

I guess most poeple that really dont care in reading in a device instead of paper, endup buying cheap tablets.

Yeah, the experience is not the same, but ereaders are fragile as fuck (i broke 2 of the damn Kindles), and very limited. Even if the the experience of reading is worse in an active iluminated screen, even a shit android tablet can be used for multiple tasks, like watching youtue, listening to music or checking e-mail. ALso they have colored screens.

I used a terrible samsgung android for 1 stuff only: reading old comic books, something that I could not do in my kindle.

I've found this giant comparison table for e-readers, cheapest is €60:

https://comparisontabl.es/e-readers/

One possible way to get them closer as cheap as paperback books might be to make them per book. Like, if you didn't need an OS or networking or anything but a charging port, because the thing only ran one app and came preinstalled with one book, you could theoretically get the cost way down.

The only market I can really think of for these would be airports, or maybe libraries, for something you'd borrow and give back shortly thereafter. But then I don't know how they'd be enough of an advantage over paper books to be worth it.

I'd had to be like lending a book or renting e-scooters; otherwise it'd turn into a huge e-waste issue.

This makes me think of Star Trek's PADD - i.e. an iPad imagined some 20 years before the first one was built. Unlike real iPads, PADDs were used more like pieces of paper or individual books - people would exchange them, they'd submit reports to their commanders by leaving a PADD on their desk; one could easily have half a dozen of those PADDs spread around when researching something, etc.

There's a lot of merit to that idea - 15 years since iPad came out, it's becoming clear that a single expensive screen for everything is not a way to go, at least not for productive work. But I feel that, beyond dirt-cheap hardware, it requires a closed organizational ecosystem.

On the show, it's plausible. A starship is like an office building (except people don't live it for months at a time); PADDs can circulate freely around it, going from person to person, changing purposes along the way. Some get lost or broken and need replacement, but it's a neat, closed system of same-ish hardware in constant flow. But try to do that as a regular consumer product/service in the real world, and it stops making as much sense. It's a problem similar to various tool sharing initiatives - they technically exist, but they aren't really "a thing". People prefer to own stuff to ensure it's available and in working condition.

My kid was recently gifted a Yoto Box which plays aIndio and he loves it. I can’t help but think that putting ebooks on scannable cards might be a seriously underrated form factor. At that point you don’t need a file browser, networking, or anything. You just need to be able to read text and images off the card.

The Yoto itself does need networking because the card is just an NFC tag that points to a file in a database somewhere that the player has to download. But something similar to a video game cartridge instead could probably work. IIRC a Nintendo Switch game cartridge costs about $10 per unit and in this use case you wouldn’t even need them to be that small so you could maybe get them cheaper.

Wait the Amazon Kindle not cheap enough? Amazon is actually subsidising it in the hope of making it back on their store (nice try Amazon I just use it for library books).

Several years ago i bought a 2nd hand Pocketbook Touch Lux 2 for around $50. It still loads every format (epub, pdf, etc) i throw at it. The device is pretty slow, but works for lazy reading. My wife couldn't read of it, but loves her (way more expensive) Kobo reader. If i had to purchase an eReader right now i guess i'd go for some 2nd hand Kindle, since they're all hackable these days.

I think the answer will just be to have low-power LCD panels, you can get a 6" display for about £12 [1]. On bulk you might be able to build an entire device for £15 - £20.

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/32805684970.html

Has anyone used Kobo? I have seen a model on display that seems quite similar to reMarkable (maybe some newer Kindles, but I stopped following their evolution a while back), with a nice pressure-sensitive stylus that works with little lag. If it is less locked-down than alternatives, it seems like it could be a good value.

I switched from a Kindle Paperwhite (2023 is the year I got the Kindle, not sure what model that is, but it was the most recent version at the time) to a Kobo Clara BW right after it came out (pretty sure it's the same as the Kobo Clara 2).

I personally really value the "sideload" mode on the Kobo where I have no internet connection and can drop my files onto it via USB without any work-arounds. That's enough for me to keep using the Kobo.

That said, the Kindle Paperwhite's display is incredible and the store is pretty good (you risk losing your book "license" on all platforms), plus the extra small bit of screen size on the Paperwhite is just the perfect size IMO.

But the Kobo is the one I use most. I connect it to the internet like twice a year to get an update and then turn it back off. It's absolutely perfect at showing me text of files, which is all I need.

I still use my old Kobo and love it.

Works perfectly, despite being like 8 or 9 years old now. I've read dozens upon dozens of books on it, it still works like new, still syncs well, has multi-month-long battery life, is lightweight enough to keep in a bag at all times. Works perfectly with OverDrive for eLibrary stuff as well.

My only complaint is that it uses the old micro USB cables to charge (it's the only thing I use regularly that doesn't work with USB-C).

The new Kobo's look nice (and now support color, and bluetooth audio, and such). But I wouldn't actually use any of that, my old one still works just like new, and it feels silly to buy a whole new e-reader just for a minor USB-C charging convenience.

Good to know. I do not really care about colour and the rest, but the ability to take notes and write/draw with a pressure-sensitive stylus is very enticing.

Kobo is generally excellent. Usually if there's a hardware problem, it's visible out of the box, and you can exchange it immediately. Then, you're good for years, usually. The recently available color e-ink screens come with a couple of caveats (no matter what brand reader they are in). The background color is more gray when compared to previous black and white/grayscale e-ink screens (some compare the experience to reading a color newspaper). The second caveat is that at this time, color content renders at a lower dpi than black and white content does on a color/Kaleido e-ink screen.

Thanks! I do not really care about colour screens, but the ability to take notes and write/draw on a monochrome one (with a pressure-sensitive stylus, too) is very enticing.

Thats even worse than not having cheap ereaders, many countries are nowadays Amazon Kindle's hostage. Brazil for example, used to have many others competitors in the market like 5 to 10 years ago (Kobo, Lev Neo, etc). Now it is just Kindle. If you want to read ebooks, you "have" to buy a kindle.

Are there people with eye floaters here? What e-reader would he most appropriate for people with moderate central-ish floaters, one of the reasons I vastly reduced my book reading?

(PS: this is a great thread, an example of "good HN" that reminds me of Usenet)

thrift stores. root, flash koreader. add a hosts file to restrict network activity to your sync server, or keep it in airplane mode.

i have never paid more than $10 for an e-ink device until boox palma. that one sits in a drawer and i went back to the thrifted kindle.

I've never seen an ereader at a thrift store

I would rather have an eReader that does more like my two Kindle Scribes, but costs a lot more. I will never go back to cheaper eReaders after using the Scribe.

Onyx Boox are quite capable devices. I use one over a year, with drgoogled android and togather with Calibre I have completely DRM free experience both for ebooks and sheet music.

They call it "Economies (sic) of scale". Smartphones became necessary enough to modern life that nobody has need for a separate reader device.

Why the (sic)?

I mostly read on an old iPad mini. The screen is good enough for me that I don't feel like I'm missing out by reading on a non E-ink screen.

Battery life.

It becomes very important when you are on a trip and can't easily charge your devices.

(Of course personal circumstances differ.)

How did you manage to get it to not bog down in speed? Every tablet I've ever had has become barely functional by year 3, and that includes the iPad Mini.

But yes, even the first gen iPad Minis were really nice screens and form-factors.

Meanwhile my Kobo Clara is just trucking along with no obvious change in battery life or responsiveness (despite the standard e-reader application processor with its power-sipping weediness).

I have a pretty old (going on eight years) iPad and it still works well enough to read an ebook. I mean, how much power do you need for that really?

Minutes to start and get the book open, and stuttering when doing things like choosing a book and turning pages was eventual my experience on all the devices: iPad Mini, Nexus 7, and a Samsung Tab 10.1. To be fair, someone else I know had an iPad Air for years and it was completely fine, so maybe they're the only tablets that actually work (or the Mini was a lemon and Androids just are bad?). Or maybe tablets are better since then: it's been a very long time since those devices went into a drawer, never to be used again.

I know ebooks are nice, but for me it is a waste of money. I prefer to read from my smart phone and even from my computer when I'm at a desk.

I don't like IPA beer, should I have to seek out discussions about IPA and tell everybody?

If I, hypothetically, thought your comment to be completely useless, should I really spend my time and say it to everybody?

My comment added nothing of value, now that I think about it.

Well, I read a lot. I have two e-readers and stacks and stacks of paper books...

...and, I still read 90% of my books on my phone. It is good enough. It is fast and responsive. It is always with me.

I read a lot, I have 2 e-readers and stacks of paper books, and an iPad Pro.

And it has been at least five years since I read a book on the phone, or iPad, though a couple years ago I read part of a PDF book on the iPad.

I think this stuff is really down to personal preference. And the kind of reading you do and where you do it.

My iPad never leaves home, and as such, it’s always going ahead to head against the e-reader, and losing except in the case of PDFs.

I do occasionally find myself with too much time and in a place with just my phone and not my laptop case (which almost always has e-reader in it, along with my laptop), and in those cases, I generally read hacker news.

Paper books get read when I cannot find an electronic version - which is fine, better than any other form except the e-reader.

But that’s me and my devices and my usage patterns and hangups. It’s not my wife, It’s not my kid, and it’s probably not most of you.

Good question.

A while back I looked for a phone-sized eReader and was surprised there were none about at a decent price.

*what ever happened I hope I’m not the only one.

I feel like the industry sort of gave up on them

I blame the average customer. They don't know what they want, so they buy the option that's trying to do too many things.

This thread perfectly exemplifies what happened to cheap eReaders. People were willing to pay more for them, so they now cost more.

I have a paper white from years back. I've thought about getting some eInk displays for projects.. it's really dumb how much new [device that has an eink dislpay and displays a file/PDF] cost.

But it's also infuriating that people pay for emojis and sound boards on Discord and the like. The world we live in.

"I'd love a £8 eReader. Something I could throw in a pocket and not worry about damaging. An eReader which was the same price as a hardback book - around £20 - would be amazing."

Personally I already think ewaste is out of control, imo this sounds like a recipe for disaster.

E-ink is already pretty expensive as a display technology, no way anyone can make a decent e-reader that you can "throw in a pocket and not worry about damaging" for £8. Maybe if it has like 8 "pixels" total.

> E-ink is already pretty expensive as a display technology

but why? is it because of patents? Shouldn't this technology get cheaper with time?

Apparently so. I recall this explanation back from 2021:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779

Supposedly, a core patent for the technology expired a year ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/1e3icaz/any_company_d...

It's probably too soon to easily tell whether that's enough to make e-ink screens cheaper and more available.

If only there were some article on the topic of why there are no cheap ereaders... I hope somebody posts one to HN soon.

There are patents on nearly every active component in the cheapest of electronic devices. I don't think it's patents.

There are many tens of millions of e-Ink store shelf-edge price labels around, for example, and they're a cheap commodity item.

On this line of thinking though, I miss gadgets which patina nicely.

Consider the iPod Classic: the shiny back scratched incredibly easily, and after a few years it looked better than it did new (like an old leather wallet, or well worn jeans).

I remember some blog (maybe HackADay?) suggested sanding the back to give it a brushed aluminium look and that ended up looking so cool. Those early iPods were all-time-great products.

All the iDevices of Apple in their prime. I still have an old broken iPhone 4 as a reminder of what peak mobile phone design looked like. I miss being able to reach the whole screen with my thumb.

> I miss being able to reach the whole screen with my thumb.

This. Oh, so much this. I have hated every phone after my OG iPhone SE so much because of this lunacy in design. It's ridiculous that we can't use our phones one-handed.

I know-- people don't want small phones. >sigh< I wonder if we're getting to the point that most phone users have never actually used a phone with a screen they can reach across with one hand.

Moved from SE to 12 mini, now a 13 mini - just bought used last year. Will likely hold on for another year or two. Desperately want a small screen. There just seem to be no options.

Re: thumb - I have found some gesture to pull the screen down halfway so you can reach the 'top' part without moving your hand. It's close to OK, and it's almost second nature now, but still annoying.

I keep a working iPhone 8 in a drawer for the same reason.

From a few years ago with a Thumb Zone Heat Map - https://www.scotthurff.com/posts/how-to-design-for-thumbs-in... (searching around, this appears to be the source since other blog posts that include it or mention it with attribution have 'Based on Scott Hurffs "How to design for thumbs in the era of huge screens"'

I remember masking off a flame pattern and doing the brushed aluminum look!

That's one way to upsell a design flaw tbh. I preferred the anodized and scratch resistant case of the Mini.

That said, I too miss long time daily use Things. I haven't worn a physical wallet in years, it's some cards in my (tatty) phone case. The phone case doesn't age gracefully either, it's pleather, fabric, cardboard and some magnets. I suspect the only thing I really own (but rarely use) that would age like that is a leather shoulder bag.

I disagree that it's a design flaw. Wear and tear is part of the product lifecycle, and whether that wear enhances the product, or makes it look broken/shabby, is up to the designer.

This reminds me of something Bill Moggridge said in the industrial design documentary Objectified:

> I like the concept of wearing in rather than wearing out. You’d like to create something where the emotional relationship is more satisfying over time. You may not worry about it or think about it very much, and people don’t have to have a strong love relationship with their things, but they should grow a little more fond of them over time.

That was an idea he applied to the Grid Compass, which was an early laptop with a black-painted magnesium chassis, which you can imagine would patina quite nicely.

I've had my current laptop for "everyday" use (a Thinkpad, naturally) for well over a decade. It's very much a "laptop of Thesus" with the only original components being the top and bottom covers. (Bottom modded for extra airflow, top optimally stickerbombed.) I can't really imagine writing or web browsing on a different device. (Portable computer, that is. Work is done with one one of my mechanical keyboards.)

Reminds me of those one-time use battery banks you can buy.

Then crack it open and get yourself a decent battery for a project!

(or more likely find one lying in the streets somewhere)

Usually the battery chemistry does not allow recharging

Depends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65DpT2nqEI

Though the UK did just recently ban some of the worst offenders https://www.gov.uk/government/news/single-use-vapes-banned-f...

The ones used in these “single use” devices are almost universally just standard Li-Ion.

In vapes it’s almost certain, as other battery types just don’t work very well for this application. Also, many of these come rechargeable now (but not refillable).

In “emergency chargers”, you could in theory use something different but usually it’s lithium too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lflk6iY56w

I purchased one for £24, 11 years ago, and still use it. Ironically from amazon (code B006GTOYDS) - can't find it in way back machine still have it in my purchase history. Before they started killing the competition. Miles better than the kindle to read in daylight and battery life still lasts weeks... cheap isn't always throwaway.

In contrast, i know people who have went through many kindles in this time and spent a small fortune on them.

Kudos to you, but most would not be wise enough to know the difference (between cheap and throwaway).

How do you imagine that people would not notice if a product they use is good? Why would they consider it throwaway if it works well?

Sadly, for a lot of people, a "friend" mockingly saying "that's crap" would suffice.

Because they could always buy a replacement for cheap. Sadly, our consumer goods prices do not correctly reflect environmental externalities, so in a way a higher price is better for the environment, even if the difference doesn't go in the right pocket.

I don't think they would have a choice. In a scheme like this, publishers would lock it down so they can sell it to you again. Perhaps even only allow a particular book to be read.

> Miles better than the kindle to read in daylight

Are you comparing it to the Kindle ereaders or their tablets? Standard (non-tablet) Kindles such as the Paperwhite series are like you describe (though they cost more than $100 and come with all of the lockin issues).

I don't know enough about the different kindle versions to say;

> Also, that £8 price was the subsidised price when purchased with a mobile contract

So there never was an £8 reader, it was more likely a £30+ reader that's cost was hidden in the mobile contract or the hopes of you using their book store as it sounds from the wiki that it was a proprietary format

> The internal format seems to be basically uncompressed Bitmaps of 3 or 4 bits per pixel. Font size can be specified in the source book but not changed after the transfer.

If you could make an e-reader for £8 presumably including profit in that price so it doesn't have to be subsidized by vendor lock in book stores or mobile contracts you wouldn't want to use it. The screen would be underwhelming, the plastic creaky, file transfer slow and possibly wired only and the processor slow. It would be ewaste before it's even off the production line.

There is nothing wrong with spending money on nice quality versions of things aligned with your tech ideology, and if you do there will be more things like that in the world. Cheapo disposable tech is actually bad because it all ends up having to be subsidized by exploitative practices like data selling or ads to actually profit from it.

I also don’t understand the anxiety. One of the reasons eReaders are expensive is because they’re designed for durability in light of how people actually use them, which seems to be getting thrown around loose in a tote bag or in environments hostile to electronics such as hot tubs or by the beach. I’ve had my Kindle 2nd Generation since it came out and it still works. I don’t baby it, and at this point its biggest problem is that the battery life has shrunk to only last a couple of days.

YMMV. My wife used at least five Kindle second-gen devices. Every one of them failed, all but the last one under warranty.

Both our Kindle third-gen devices are still chugging along happily. We only use them for reading outside - indoors, we both use tablets. But in sunlight, you need that e-Ink.

Yeah, at £20 it becomes throwaway, that's in the same price range as a physical book; you'd see publishers selling these e-readers with a single book preloaded on it, possibly even locked down so you can't get anything else on it.

E-readers don't need to become cheaper, ebooks do, and at the moment there's still a huge gap between "pirated" or "borrowed from the library" and "bought". That, plus DRM and lock-in makes people think twice about buying ebooks.

I had to find a source, but [0] shows that physical books out-sell ebooks by a huge margin still. I think this chart would only change if ebooks are as readily available for cheap as streaming music.

Come to think of it, I remember now; during that time, tablets also quickly became popular and were the direct competitor to e-readers. The low-cost e-readers were often regular tablets with LCD screens, since both then and now, e-paper is expensive. But you can buy a tablet for cheap.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/24709/e-book-and-printed-book...

Just bought a Nook Simple Touch from ebay for £9 delivered - I already have one that I bought new for £29 delivered back in 2014 - but a second one felt useful.

Getting an old but useable ereader for £20 or less is very doable right now - plus you can get the Nook simple touch to run (very old) Android.

I was so enamoured with the original gen2 Nook I acquired a pile of them. The batteries, unfortunately, are all dead and I've found no reliable replacements. Then there's that slimy rubber thing that happens after so many years, and that makes anything intolerably miserable to handle.

I sure did adore the old black n white Nooks, which I could load as I pleased with any file of my choice, often converting text and PDFs to ebook with Calibre.

AliExpress now sells the batteries - about £9 delivered. I haven't bought one yet (both my nook last over a day before needing a charge and that is fine for me for now) - and I still have a battery somewhere from my very first nook that I tried putting in my pocket then cycling to the station. Not a good idea, no idea how that battery is - I really should charge it to see.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32867625480.html

> ewaste is out of control

What’s the specific harm that you are worried about?

Mostly leachate. The 11th generation Kindle weighs 158 grams, £8 reader with 30 g polymer: 100 M units, assuming a 1 % annual leach rate, that is 3t of bromine and phosphate compounds per year entering groundwater, that is actually close to the total UK industrial discharge of the same chemicals. Then there are the heavy metal ions.

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