Thoughts on “E-Readers” (2009)
Thinking through the capabilities and limitations of tablets recently, I reached a few conclusions:<p>- There&#x27;s no one thing that an emissive-display tablet does which some other device does not do better.<p>- For virtually all productivity roles, a laptop with a keyboard, even a low-end one, is superior.<p>- For specific capture and communications roles, I&#x27;d prefer disconnected &#x2F; wired-only <i>or</i> specifically dedicated device:  camera, audio recorder, dumbphone.  These are small enough and capabilities sufficiently high that in <i>most</i> cases the additional-device concern isn&#x27;t significant.  The improved security and privacy situation is also a major concern.<p>There&#x27;s one exception:  in portrait mode, a tablet is far better for reading texts than the landscape display of all laptops and most desktops.  (A sufficiently large, high-resolution desktop display becomes useful for either 1-up or 2-up reading.)  <i>But,</i> even here, the emissive display typically has a lower resolution and higher battery consumption than an e-ink display would.<p>Since February of this year I&#x27;ve been using an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, a 13.3&quot; Android-based ebook-reader &#x2F; tablet.  For reading it is in fact delicious.  As a tablet ... it&#x27;s actually somewhat better than I&#x27;d prefer (the distractiosn are too close at hand).  It&#x27;s also quiet good for podcasts (large flat surface gives good speaker response).<p>In particular, Onxy don&#x27;t run their own bookstore, there&#x27;s no &quot;ecosystem&quot; (a&#x2F;k&#x2F;a <i>captive market</i>) the company is trying to corral users into.  Virtually all content is sideloaded or downloaded.  The bookreader is quite good (with some limitations), as is the notetaking app (handwritten notes), <i>not</i> something I&#x27;d through I&#x27;d make much use of, but that I have.<p>I&#x27;d considered a number of other devices, and emphasized:<p>- Not being captured by a specific market (eliminates Amazon, Nook, Kobo).<p>- Not being tracked (eliminates Amazon, Nook, Kobo, most Android and iOS devices).<p>- Sufficient storage (eliminates reMarkable).<p>- Multiple format support.<p>- Large display size.<p>- High-quality display.<p>My main issues are:<p>- Organising content is tedious.  That&#x27;s pretty much par for the course with such devices and apps.  If you&#x27;re planning on managing a large library (100s to 1,000s or more items), the onboard tools <i>and all available apps I&#x27;ve found to date</i> are sorely wanting.  I&#x27;d really like a bibliographic + worfklow management suite.  I don&#x27;t have one.<p>- Some interactions are cumbersome.  As with any touch-based device, distinguishing actions (clicks, drags, actually writing on or selecting content, etc.) are ambiguous, and the software often confuses these.  Again, par for the course in my experience.<p>- Android itself imposes severe limitations.  I&#x27;m not a fan of the OS, but it&#x27;s the best of a bunch of bad choices.  I&#x27;m looking at the upcoming Linux tablets, though those will face a long uphill UI&#x2F;UX slog to produce useable and intuitive tools.<p>- Ebook formats themselves still have much shaking out to do.  I actually strongly prefer PDFs (or DJVU), that is, explicitly-laid-out formats, to reflowable ones (ePub, .mobi, HTML), and <i>in most cases</i> PDFs are reasonably readable.  Response reading scanned documents (rather than rendered ones) can be slow.  And in cases, publishers and typesetters make bone-headed decisions about layout and formatting.  (Less is more, stick to standards.)<p>- Colour might occasionally be nice.  There <i>are</i> colour e-ink devices available (as with virtually all aspects of displays, this is entirely at the control and whim of the patent holder), though the effect is muted.  Price premium is fairly modest, but only 8&quot; displays seem supported (good for comics and narrative text, less so for textbooks and journal articles).<p>- My one post-purchase regret is that the subsequent rev of the device has doubled onboard storage to 128 GB.  In all seriousness, I could use the extra storage, and the Max Lumi&#x27;s 64 GB was a massive advantage over the extremely pinched 16 GB offered by the reMarkable, an utterly inexcusable limitation.  That said, 64 GB has been sufficient <i>so far</i>.