Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader?

7 points by ernie24 5 years ago | 12 comments

As a developer living in Poland getting (original English) print books from O'reilly, Manning or others is expensive, plus this is unnecessary use of paper and space. Up until now I've been using iPad Air 2 (from 2015) for reading books and while it's OK, I desperately need to reduce my daily screen time. I think E Ink reader could help me with that. Features I am mostly looking for are:

[*] good formating/display of code [* ] support for Epub formats and non-DRM books is a huge* plus [* ] quick transition between pages [* ] not too heavy

spazx 5 years ago |

My Kobo Aura H2O edition 1 is amazing. E-ink looks good, battery lasts awhile, waterproof, and you can jailbreak it and install custom firmware if you wish. There are alternative reader packages for it that are great, but the base OEM one Nickel is okay for most epub books and supports non-DRM. (Nickel also lets you "dog ear" pages, highlight, and take typed notes. you can refer to all your notes/highlights in a book through an index) It's also the only one I could find that takes a micro SD. Don't go higher than 32GB micro SD or it starts to act weird.

ernie24 5 years ago | |

Thank you for your reply! Would you like to share your experience with your Kobo and how it handles (technical) EPUBs?

spazx 5 years ago | | |

The most technical thing I've used it for was a compsci textbook or a manual (either O'Reilly or similar) and it looked pretty alright under Nickel iirc. Depends largely on whether the code is rendered as text or an image.

kmclean 5 years ago |

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 fine.

ernie24 5 years ago | |

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?

kmclean 5 years ago | | |

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

edeion 5 years ago |

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 technical books where I want the figures to properly match the corresponding text. Plus some figures are bigger than the screen (have to be so). And reading PDFs is a problem for the same screen size reason...

The best I can think of is Sony's gigantic DPT-RP1 [1] and it seems to have perfect handwriting support. But at almost 800€, I really don't call this affordable.

1. https://fr.kobobooks.com/collections/eReaders

2. https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/design/stories/DPT-RP1/

ernie24 5 years ago | |

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?

edeion 5 years ago | | |

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.)

approxim8ion 5 years ago |

The PocketBook[1] range should be a great option for you, especially since you're based in Europe. I don't have access to anything other than Kindles in my country, but that's not to say my experience with them (Paperwhite owner since 2012) has been bad at all.

Depending on your use case, most standard e-ink (preferably e-ink carta) devices should be just fine. I'd ask you to temper your expectations, however, if your workflow is heavy in PDF reading.

1: https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch

ernie24 5 years ago | |

Thank you for your answer. So basically if you are from Europe your best bet is PocketBook. I feel embarrassed not knowing about them, they actually sell and ship directly from Poland (and many other countries). It seems that originally they were founded in Swizerland.