Corporations like Amazon are a scourge. Switch to free and open formats, software and hardware. Ditch what you can. Hack and pirate what you must. Starve big tech.
Here’s a reminder that Boox makes amazingly good e-readers in all form factors Amazon does (including a variety of tablets!), with stylus support (USI 2.0 for smaller devices, EMR for their Note series and above), fully open (recent Android versions, regular updates, unlockable bootloader, straightforward to root devices), support KOReader, with a solid built in reader (plus support for cloud sync, including syncing books to a free 10GB Boox server storage), support for OPDS (a better way to access your library than Calibre’s sync, plus it can be utilised with most digital libraries too), and altogether quite well priced devices.
At the moment I have on my hands a Go Color 7 gen2, a Note Air5 C, and a Palma2 Pro. The experience is surprisingly good for a “random Chinese brand”, the hardware, compared to similarly priced devices, is superior (seriously, 4/6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB internal storage, SD card support), not to mention their customised e-ink waveforms (which give you near LCD-like scrolling with minimal trailing effect and little to no ghosting, something I can’t say about my Kindles…)
The only downside I found of these devices is the relatively bad battery life in locked/standby (due to Android, but you still easily get over a week per charge with average use, or about 20-22 hours of active use!), and the speakers… definitely not meant for audiobooks.
It’s more for note taking, annotation and drawing than purely reading ebooks though, the form factor alone would make it uncomfortable for long reading sessions I think
It hasn’t really been a problem for me, but I like having a big display, especially for pdfs or comics. It’s also been great for character sheets for roleplaying games - especially since they get synced to the cloud, so I can always pull them out on my phone if I forget the tablet.
The interface, marketing and development all seem to be very focused on note taking and sketching, though. I’ve used it for drawing, but the exported files are kind of crap - IMO, the best way of exporting a drawing from ReMarkable is to lay the thing on a scanner. If you want high resolution, you zoom in on your drawing and scan it in pieces.
it is definitely too closed down, haven’t had those other experiences though, I’ve had my ReMarkable 2 for quite a few years now. Then again, I haven’t tried hacking at it
Just another day in the life of an enshittificator.
Corporations like Amazon are a scourge. Switch to free and open formats, software and hardware. Ditch what you can. Hack and pirate what you must. Starve big tech.
I’m poor. I pirate stuff. When I can, I buy physical copies of the stuff I like.
Here’s a reminder that Boox makes amazingly good e-readers in all form factors Amazon does (including a variety of tablets!), with stylus support (USI 2.0 for smaller devices, EMR for their Note series and above), fully open (recent Android versions, regular updates, unlockable bootloader, straightforward to root devices), support KOReader, with a solid built in reader (plus support for cloud sync, including syncing books to a free 10GB Boox server storage), support for OPDS (a better way to access your library than Calibre’s sync, plus it can be utilised with most digital libraries too), and altogether quite well priced devices.
At the moment I have on my hands a Go Color 7 gen2, a Note Air5 C, and a Palma2 Pro. The experience is surprisingly good for a “random Chinese brand”, the hardware, compared to similarly priced devices, is superior (seriously, 4/6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB internal storage, SD card support), not to mention their customised e-ink waveforms (which give you near LCD-like scrolling with minimal trailing effect and little to no ghosting, something I can’t say about my Kindles…)
The only downside I found of these devices is the relatively bad battery life in locked/standby (due to Android, but you still easily get over a week per charge with average use, or about 20-22 hours of active use!), and the speakers… definitely not meant for audiobooks.
Being Norwegian it is my patriotic duty to shill for ReMarkable, it’s pretty good at being what it is.
It’s expensive, though.
It’s more for note taking, annotation and drawing than purely reading ebooks though, the form factor alone would make it uncomfortable for long reading sessions I think
It hasn’t really been a problem for me, but I like having a big display, especially for pdfs or comics. It’s also been great for character sheets for roleplaying games - especially since they get synced to the cloud, so I can always pull them out on my phone if I forget the tablet.
The interface, marketing and development all seem to be very focused on note taking and sketching, though. I’ve used it for drawing, but the exported files are kind of crap - IMO, the best way of exporting a drawing from ReMarkable is to lay the thing on a scanner. If you want high resolution, you zoom in on your drawing and scan it in pieces.
Sorry but no. Abysmal hardware, shitty software that’s locked down AND crap when opened up, and horrid QA. Talking from experience.
it is definitely too closed down, haven’t had those other experiences though, I’ve had my ReMarkable 2 for quite a few years now. Then again, I haven’t tried hacking at it
The hardware weakness is super obvious if you try to add any third party apps. Slow loading times, badly exposed pen API, among other things.
in their defense, it is marketed as a device that’s limited on purpose, though