Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader?

#11

Post by kmclean » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

ernie24 wrote: post #7

kmclean wrote: post #3

Also not cheap but I really love the Remarkable 2. It's great for handwriting and good for reading. I had an onyx boox note 2, which would be a good size for reading text books, but it's even more expensive. Seems like anything with a large e-ink display is expensive. Right now I use an Onyx boox poke 3, which I found reasonably priced for a flexible e-reader. It's small but I mostly read non-technical books so it's…

I've only seen Remarkable on photos, but comparing to all other (even the expensive Sony models) it just looks best. Maybe it's because its frames are white, and in these days we tend to perceive electronic devices with small (or almost none) frames as more modern? So does the real-life look hold up?

Yeah I would say so. It's a very nice device for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader?

#12

Post by edeion » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:09 PM UTC

ernie24 wrote: post #6

edeion wrote: post #2

That's a good question. I regularly get interested in e-readers but one key point in your question is affordable . Kobo readers [1] look promising. Especially the biggest one Kobo Forma (8") but it's far from cheap (280€). In general, what deters me from e-readers is the lack of a nice way to annotate (with handwriting). I get the problem with EPUBs but it should be fine with PDFs. Generally, EPUBs are a problem for…

So in most cases affordable == small screen size, and the second factor is handwriting support. Also, is there a general issue with EPUBs, or just most of e-readers handle them poorly?

I haven't noticed EPUB suffers from bad support. I like its principle (just a markup language), the two problems I came to see: 1) handling images, tables... objects that may need to be cut are cut at the expense of the ease of reading. And 2) no handwritten annotations.

But you're right: deep down, both depend on the implementation, not on the format itself so you could actually blame the support. (Yes, I somehow changed my mind in the process of writing this comment.)

Re: Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader?

#13

Post by ernie24 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:41 PM UTC

edeion wrote: post #12

ernie24 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in most cases affordable == small screen size, and the second factor is handwriting support. Also, is there a general issue with EPUBs, or just most of e-readers handle them poorly?

I haven't noticed EPUB suffers from bad support. I like its principle (just a markup language), the two problems I came to see: 1) handling images, tables... objects that may need to be cut are cut at the expense of the ease of reading. And 2) no handwritten annotations. But you're right: deep down, both depend on the implementation, not on the format itself so you could actually blame the support. (Yes, I somehow ch…

I don't know about EPUBs support too much, my only experience was with Apple's iBooks, which (in most cases) handled EPUB ebooks very nicely (display-wise) with well formated, colored code and ect.