“Long live e-ink”

i’m always worried it’s just around the corner from outliving its usefulness/profitability to most people. even within my tech/gadget bubble it still feels like a relatively niche thing. this keeps me upgrading my Kindle pretty much anytime a new one comes out because i’m always worried the technology will be discarded. i really love the fact that i can fall asleep reading on it pretty naturally. this DOES NOT happen when i’m in bed on my phone or tablet. i’m glad to see devices like reMarkable and Scribe pushing it further, and i just hope research continues to get the tech to a point where it can refresh quickly without artifacting at near lcd quality. and yeah, it’s nice to have a device where i physically can’t distract myself with inane social media or other silly things. i’m generally of the Alton Brown thought that anything uni-task is unnecessary, but i’ll continue to make a happy exception here.

My wife and I have Kindles for one purpose: reading outside. We use iPads inside (I’m posting from mine), but there is nothing like eInk for reading in the sun, because it looks like a book.

In a world of uni-task devices, that is one worth owning.

If reading at night, Kindles should be used inside too.

I'm someone who had them during the boom around 2010 or so, then found myself giving them away because they didn't seem useful, and now find myself wanting them again. Mostly I've noticed how I like to read in bed at night rather than on my phone, am not happy with the illumination options with real books in that situation, and not happy with the screens on my phone either.

I'd probably buy one immediately if I could be guaranteed I could put any pdf on it and have it display flawlessly, and if it were relatively open in terms of compatibility.

WRT PDF, if you want it rendered flawless, you want it rendered verbatim. No reflowing or columns removed.

That means an e-ink device the size of the pages. So probably A4. A device of 21x30cm. (8.2x11.7inches). That is huge. Equivalent of the largest iPad.

I'm getting a lot of use out of my ancient Sony DPT-S1 for this purpose. It has a huge screen but is very light and well-balanced so holding it for long periods is not a problem for me, compared to holding a similarly-sized lcd tablet. I've converted most of my epub ebooks to pdf (thank you Calibre) just so I can enjoy reading them on this device.

I got one too and they really rock! I read papers on them mostly and the odd text book. I had a Kindle fire reading novels but have last it recently. I'll maybe take a sieve or of your book (ha!) and try converting everything to PDF, but I really like the built in dictionary on kindles. just wish The DPT-S1 was open to writing your own apps for, I would have done it by now.

I would love an e ink slab in a4. Especially if I can easily push over whatever media vs some proprietary nonsense. Anyone sell one?

I'm surprised Honey hasn't come up in here. They seem to be trying pretty aggressively to be the defacto tool for this sort of thing. I also find it really funny that their premium offering is called "Honey Gold." Do an image search for that ;).

They do in the mac mini.

When digital cameras first came out everyone thought tech would take over. Then everyone realized the things that mattered about analog photography held true with digital. Lens tech trumped all. That only goes so far though. The giants now are those that had enough of a foot in both. Nikon has their optics, but they're also a major player in lithography. Sony has their Zeiss relationship, but they're also huge into tech otherwise. Keiretsu are neat. No reason to mourn here. Olympus is still big in medical imaging among other things. But even that will probably be Sony in the near future.