Hacker News Reader

Comment by branon | Hacker News Reader

I found the lack of backlight and built-in dictionary to mostly cripple the e-reading experience on rM2.

Format support wasn't great either, only PDF and EPUB. Which does cover most bases, to be fair. AZW3 and MOBI aren't dealbreakers, but... really, no TXT?

View on HN

RM Pro (and this new product) has a backlight. I print everything to pdf when I want to read on the remarkable.

No dictionary on an e-reader?! What the heck? Can you at least install your own or is there simply no lookup functionality at all?

There is no lookup functionality at all that I could find. You cannot install your own dictionary on the stock firmware.

I wound up down the https://toltec-dev.org/ rabbit hole which was fun and gets me additional features but has its own issues (suspend/resume is dodgy sometimes now)

Again to be fair the rM2 is not sold as an _e-reader_ per se. But regardless I do find the e-reading experience weak.

> Again to be fair the rM2 is not sold as an _e-reader_ per se. But regardless I do find the e-reading experience weak.

It's just such basic functionality that... why would you not, if even a small function of the device is indeed to read files?

Honestly from what I'm reading in this thread I'm rather turned off by ReMarkable now, which is sort of disappointing. Still, I'm glad to see more and more e-ink options.

Ditto! I was a fan, planned to buy it some day later (it’s a bit expensive for my use case of mostly reading, I utilise old Kindle for that).

reMarkable is adamant that their devices are "digital notebooks" - no more, no less. They intentionally do not implement features that aren't in support of this use case.

FWIW, I think that makes sense from their perspective. There are a ton of eReaders out there, but reMarkable is the only company that I'm aware of that focuses specifically on this use case, to the detriment of others. They don't _want_ them to be world-class eReaders, because then they would have to support the features that market wants. They want to support a smaller market niche.

They're clear about that, too. If anything, I wish more companies would focus on a specific use case and stick to their guns when it comes to scope creep.

Huh. Other people have said similar but yours is the first post that resonated with me. Ok, sure. That makes sense. It still feels odd to me because it seems like all the “hard” parts are in place, but that’s their business model.

I do still contend that a subscription fee on top of the cost for a single purpose device is a bridge too far, though. I’d strongly consider one to see if it’s truly that great as a note taker if it weren’t for that. I’d hate renting features on a premium device.

"Basic dictionary lookup" does not equate to "world class e-readers"

Yeah I’m not suggesting anyone go out of their way to buy it as an ereader but it does the job for me considering it would otherwise be a paperweight.

The reMarkable isn't an e-reader. It can display books, but that's not its primary purpose. If you want an e-reader, there are many significantly cheaper options.

The fact that they're so expensive is, to me anyway, a pretty good reason to expect basic functionality like that.

Every feature is an eternal maintenance price until the company goes bankrupt (or an opportunity to piss off the handful of users who use it when you cut it). I'd much rather they focus their limited time on polishing things that matter more.

Yes, nobody is denying that "every feature is an eternal maintenance price"

But the maintenance price of such basic features is absurdly low. Seriously, we're talking about a basic dictionary lookup. We're not talking about massive, expansive features that will require many hours of maintenance.

Anyway, if you don't use a dictionary at all, even while reading - and you think a "handful of users" use them - then this conversation probably is not going to go anywhere.

But… don’t you sometimes want a dictionary when you write? That’s not a reading-mode-only tool by a long shot.

No. I don't use the dictionary on my Kindle. I've never missed it on my reMarkable. Not while reading and definitely not while writing.

Huh. Everyone’s workflows are different. I surely wouldn’t want to be without one.

It may be once every 2-3 years, if that, when I pull out a dictionary. Never something I seem to need.

It’s bursty for me, too. I won’t use one for ages, then I read something like Infinite Jest where I’m looking something up every other page. That’s super easy on Kobo readers and I’d hate not having it elsewhere.

I'd just use my phone, honestly. It's in my pocket and has access to much of the worlds information.

And now I'm reading/writing with 2 devices. Eh.

You're already carrying that device though, it's not an addition to your pocket. In fact, I'd argue the 2nd device is actually a problem.

No, you are. Not everyone reads when they have their phone on them, or otherwise have their phone on them 24/7. When I'm reading, my phone is at least on a table, if not in another room.

Ah, that's fair!

I guess I consider a device like that, for me, to be mostly used when traveling!

I feel that this is a "writer" around the note concept, versus long-form writing (where a dictionary could certainly make more sense). But I'm sketching, diagramming, etc., more so than anything else (I don't own, though I've been interested in this and the Scribe, and given that I barely use the Pencil on my iPad, I'm having difficulty justifying it to myself, although I might check out the return policies...)

For the price it feels like it should be a good e-reader also.

Granted I've only used a remarkable as an e-reader, but i read a lot of paper books.

I don't understand why this is such a necessary feature. Most people don't read paper books with a dictionary handy.

Of course not, because that would be annoying and unwieldy. On the other hand, you can add expansive dictionaries for every language to an ereader for the low, low weight of... nothing at all.

I suspect if you compare the usage of dictionaries among paper book readers vs ereader users, the latter use them more often - probably at least partially because they're so much easier to use. I suspect the incidence of not understanding a word would be pretty much the same.

For myself, I read a lot of older books with archaic and niche terms, so it's practically required to be able to look things up if I want to really understand what's going on.

(As an aside, I looked up a definition on Google just writing this to ensure I was using a word properly. :P)

I get that. I also read many old books. Usually I can get context out of the sentence itself, but i'll occasionally bust out my phone. I see why it's nice, I just don't see why it's a top-tier feature.

Each their own of course. I can imagine if I was looking up 2-10x as many words as I am now then the convenience would indeed be much more important.

It's incredibly useful for obvious reasons

I'd suppose it depends on things like your vocabulary level, if the content you're reading is your first language, if you're reading more niche things, etc.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I read a lot of books in their original English. Being able to quickly look up a word you've never encountered is a god send

I find myself really missing this feature when I occasionally read a paper book, thinking about clicking the word on the page to get a definition.

That's how I got hooked on macos nearly 20 years ago. Dictionary + thesaurus taught me so much.

Yeah, I didn't think of non-native speakers. I def see the value there.

When reading on my iPad or Kindle (back when I had one of those), I would regularly encounter a word used in a context slightly different from my understanding of the word - so I'd quickly skim the definition to fill in the gap in my knowledge that this made apparent.

I _do_ miss that functionality on the reMarkable devices. It seems odd to me that it's not included; a dictionary isn't a huge file, and the devices have more than ample storage for their intended purpose. I used my daily for a couple of years, and I don't think I've ever deleted anything from them.

You can install koreader pretty easily. It's way better than their built in reader.

The rM2 basically isn't an e-reader. It's a PDF viewer with a focus on annotation, and it's a notebook. Any ability to read ebooks is just circumstantial.

You and the other commenters who are saying this know that... devices can do multiple things, right? That's why phones don't just call people anymore.

Anyway, I don't really see why reading a PDF means one wouldn't need a dictionary. A lot of PDFs - that I read anyway - tend to be more technical stuff; looking stuff up is helpful there too.

I’m a little surprised at the pushback, too. I read lots of things on other devices where it’s easy to select a new word and see its meaning. And it seems like such an incredibly cheap feature to implement and support that I can’t imaging not having it.

Just because a device can do something, doesn't mean it should. The RM team, for all their faults, were intentionally minimalist, and did not set out to make their device an e-reader. Complaining that the non-e-reader reads e-books poorly is just missing the focus of the device. It's about imitating paper but without futzing around with reams of actual paper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com