I own the BOOX Note 2, it's an android tablet with some E-Ink friendly modifications. It's the best electronic reading experience I've ever had:
- It's 10.3", perfect for reading PDFs like scientific papers without being too large to carry around.
- The included reader is stellar, with special modes for reading PDFs, comicbooks, etc.
- The included note-taking app is pretty good and fully featured. It integrates with the reader and there's a side-by-side mode.
- It supports every open format I've tried: PDFs, DJVU, epub, mobi and more. (Haven't tried PS.)
- I can scribble on all document types, including ebooks.
- I can install apps from the app store. In particular this means I can read my Kindle library and Wallabag feed, and...
- with Syncthing syncing is set and forget. When I download a PDF or book on my computer, I simply pick up the tablet and start reading it. Any notes I make are synced back to my laptop.
- Of course, the above is in addition to the standard E-Ink features you'd expect: It lasts for weeks on a charge, the reading experience in bright sunlight is fantastic, it's lighter than an iPad, zero eye strain, etc.
I installed only the software I need for reading and syncing, but there's a lot more you could do with it since the play store and F-droid are available. You can use it as an external monitor, for instance.
I bought, and returned the Note Air.
The build quality is impressive. I had it for 2 weeks, used it for about an hour daily, and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.
Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time. Yes, I was quite positively impressed.
However, their theft of code (which is what you do, if you do not respect the code license, eg, gpl), the fact that even a brand new model tablet was 3+ monthly Android security updates behind, and the pcaps I took showing all the phoning home, including IPs in China...
Well...
As I said, returned. Quite sad, loved the hardware.
Would it be a security threat to have that on oneās home network?
Iād mostly want it for reading articles online and email newsletters. I could make a burner email account for this purpose.
That seems a tolerable tradeoff, as I donāt consider what I read on HN to be super sensitive. (Though others may reasonable differ there)
Vote with your money. Donāt buy stuff from companies that are doing the wrong thing.
The trouble is that it is behind your security perimeter once it is on your home network. It can start discovering other devices, monitoring traffic, enumerating ports and services, etc.
> Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time
I have the same model with insane battery life. I think your unit might have been defective.
14h hours using up only 52% is impressive to me.
> and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.
Might it have been this?
This was a pretty thorough traffic analysis of their Max Lumi device. I think it would be pretty similar with the Note Air. I bought a Max Lumi after this as there didn't seem to be much concern.
For anyone looking for pointers to buy e-Ink devices, Voja from MyDeepGuide has a comprehensible collection of different e-ink devices and is a trusted reviewer.
You can watch the comparison of all the e-Ink tablets here on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkK_HQRf6xg
This guy is indeed awesome, a very valuable resource, however he only reviews from the perspective of usage, not covering things like security updates, gpl compliance, phoning home, etc.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been pondering getting a Boox Nova 3 in the near future (mostly because it has the yellow backlight and ends up being only $5 more than a Kindle Oasis (where I live)... and then I get the benefit of all the additional features. :-)
This is what I did and love the device. You can adjust color temperature by mixing cool and warm light. Also, larger screen than the kindle and high res enough to read technical books.
Came with a case and stylus.
The BOOX tablets seem really interesting. I'm wondering if you or anyone has tried a terminal app (e.g. termux)? Is the refresh rate fast enough?
It's usable, but only just, and you have to fiddle with your colorscheme (most of the defaults are unusable for some colors).
My major problem with basically all the BOOX devices is they're violating the GPL by not releasing their kernel/uboot sources.[1]
[1]: http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/install-linux-or-alterna...
I've tried it with the Boox Note Air 10.3 (arrived a couple of weeks ago!), it's decent enough but I had to install the termux-styling apk to change its background from black to white. I think it works better that way.
The refresh rate is good enough for me but I'm not very picky so YMMV. I'll try to use it for work one of these days using ssh, so I'll report back once I've done so.
With all the phoning home, and lack of security updates, you may want to reconsider ever entering anything sensitive into a Boox product.
My Max Lumi can be used as a monitor, and it is possible to work on it, but visual feedback is sluggish and you have to accept a lot of artifacts for the sake of speed.
I do hope to try coding in the sun with it some time. Got it in winter though, so haven't yet.
You have to make sure you don't have a cursor. Normal printing is fast enough, but the typical block-style cursor makes it not really usable for me (Tolino Epos (Gen1)).
Maybe this is just way too niche, but I've been wondering why there hasn't been any e-ink based laptops with a powerful enough of a processor (e.g. 10th/11th gen core i7 would be great) and ability to put enough RAM (e.g. 16GB) to run a development environment.
Something like that would be oh so light and great/easy to carry around. And something purely used for dev doesn't need to have the ability to play videos, etc. (that would just be distracting anyway, right? =)
I know there have been a few tablet/reader-based devices that use e-ink and have the ability to run Linux, but of the ones I've seen, none of them seem to have powerful enough of a CPU (and definitely not enough RAM).
Because programming on e paper would be horrible. You canāt scroll text properly. You would be limited to page up/down. And then it takes a second or few to do that.
And then the e paper panel costs a bunch so what would be a $1000 laptop becomes $4000 and is strictly worse for the vast majority of users.
There are e-ink displays with higher refresh rates where scrolling is possible, like Dasung's new e-ink monitor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY
That's amazing. It's so retro... One is tempted to build with it some kind of steam punk computer.
e-ink screens are objectively worse for our eyes than an IPS panel screen. I mean, this is besides the fact that e-paper screens are also more expensive and less capable than the standard iridescent screen that we spend 24 hours on daily.
>And then the e paper panel costs a bunch so what would be a $1000 laptop becomes $4000 and is strictly worse for the vast majority of users.
IMO, this is fundamentally a niche object. But that nicheness means that if it did exist, it would have several options without worrying about pissing off the mainstream.
#1 on that list is that you don't need to seamlessly emulate an LCD screen with an e-ink screen - instead of having a single multiplexed screen, have 2-3 80-char-wide separate e-ink screens and have text on each of them.
This has two advantages: one, it's cheaper because e-ink screen costs scale geometrically with size, not linearly. And two, AIUI partial-refresh doesn't work well when you're literally refreshing a third or half of your screen, but two completely independent screens can obviously refresh independently of each other. I'm assuming partial refreshes are faster due to taking a smaller absolute number of pixels, and not due to being a smaller proportion of the screen, so e.g. a quarter of a 4" screen will refresh the same speed as a full 2" screen refresh but faster than a full 4" screen refresh.
Ideally, you'd want to split the e-ink screen into as many smaller screens as possible anywhere it makes sense (and design the UI in hardware), simply to reduce costs.
Sadly, large cheap single screens have made the concept of software controlled UIs so obvious that people don't even consider the alternative.
cough Back then in the old days you used page down/up because the computer was too slow to make scrolling line by line useful. You can live without scrolling.
And a function should not take up more space than a screen anyway!
I purchased a Boox Max2 and got the version with HDMI to code. What I had not realized is that I would miss source code highlighting with color coding so much. Everything else can be more or less worked around, scrolling did not bother me.
Check this ThinkBook Plus by Lenovo (2nd Gen)[1]. The latest version has an updated e-ink secondary screen with bigger and higher resolution to match the main conventional screen.
[1]https://www.engadget.com/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-gen-2-i-e-ink...
combine this project (DIY eink screen): https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/ljq262/epdiy_eink_pc_...
with this latest release (Raspberry PI alternative board which supports eink): https://www.makeuseof.com/quartz64-e-ink-sbc/
and this solar powered, power first open source (eink) laptop project: https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-open-source-autarkic-...
Vola!
I'm guessing the BOM cost of the display would be far too high.
Dasung's 13" external e-ink display costs $1200.
Boox's 10" e-reader costs $500.
I can't imagine there are enough people willing to trade color and syntax highlighting for that crisp e-paper goodness on their $3000 13" development machine.
All I want is an ereader that shows up as a printer on my network, so I can just "print" to it.
Something like this exists for the reMarkable: https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_printer
Yeah, it works well, and Onyx Boox has a similar extension.
I have both, and.I have used it on both and found the experience great. Much preferred to pocket style save for later.
If an online article is too long for me to get throug, and I want to, I will always send to a device.
I would LOVE to hear your comparison of the both. If you have time my email is in the profile.
> Onyx Boox has a similar extension
Could you please share the source? Iāve got a Boox Note air and would love to have this.
Did you get it to work? I tried to install it on my remarkable and print to it with my Mac, but my Mac sends Postscript files which the software doesn't recognize.
I installed the reMarkable android app and I have sent so many pdfs (through remarkable's cloud) onto my device and I am so happy with it, I can draw on them ad libitum
the "send to kindle" browser extension does a great job of sending web content at least. and you can email word docs etc to kindle.
I use Pocket with my Kobo. Works great for public web pages, but not really suitable if you want to throw bank statements or doctor's reports or whatever onto a reader.
I nearly went down this route, with an old, cheap, hacked, reader-only e-ink device with all the cleverness done on a different machine and the output pre-optimised for the specific target device.
However, when I looked into it, I found that buying a Boox with a recent version of Android on it, meant that I could replace most of that with apps on the device itself, including borrowing DRM'd books from my local library, which is handy sometimes.
And the price difference didn't actually seem that bad, once I took into account my desire for a warm backlight. Maybe if I already owned a simpler device with that feature, I'd have hacked it instead.
Having said that, I don't have quite the same aversion to short length reading on e-ink, so I also use Pocket and even a browser (Firefox mobile with DarkMode addon in "light" mode) and so I'm probably getting more use out of that side of things for my money.
I have heard very good things about KOReader, but the standard Boox reader is also pretty great, and integrates with the device well (e.g. the default launcher lists books from that reader) so I've not had reason to try anything different.
As someone else has mentioned, the only bad thing about Boox I've found so far is that they seems to be withholding their Linux modifications. Doesn't affect me directly in practical terms at the moment, but it's the principle of the thing.
Oh remembered, one other potential bad thing, there are apparently core apps that phone home. People have workarounds involving fake VPN apps that block specific urls.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203389
Note that netguard (a vpn firewall solution) is not active at boot. It gets kicked well after wifi comes up.
My tcpdump tests showed a few seconds of traffic before it started blocking. This is a known thing, but it is time enough that I watched loads of traffic phone home on boot.
Another thing, is that the wifi connectivity test/beacon has been modified to point to the boox store url. This is not blocked by a VPN, and thus, anything could be happening.
To be fair, once netguard was up and running, it did block all but that, and I ran tcpdump over several days watching.
Of course, if you want any part of the Boox ecosystem, you have to let it phone home.
How crippled is it without wifi? Let's say using just the USB port for reading/annotating pdfs?
I used adb to move files on/off the device. Zero issues there.
Now sure about their note app, but I bet that review guy, mentioned elsewhere in this topic, covers it?
Plus you can also use a boox as an HDMI screen from any output.
My particular Boox is a small 6 inches, so it's not ideal for that use case, and I think there's only one model that has an actual physical HDMI input but yeah I'm pleased enough with the reading experience that I may upgrade to a larger one that can be used as a coding screen, pen input tablet etc.
Again, with screensharing apps, or terminal apps as others talk about in this story, it's possible to do certain things of this nature without the HDMI cable too.
I'm currently using an older Kindle (the Touch, which sadly doesn't include a backlight at all) with a booklight cover, but it's getting very slow thanks to what I assume is storage degradation after 12 years of use. I'd really like to upgrade to a better ereading solution, but I'm at a loss right now. Here are my requirements:
- Bigger screen than my Touch (7" would be about perfect, I suspect, but I'm not too picky) - Backlight with warmness adjustability (my current light keeps my girlfriend up at night because it's not embedded) - The ability to take notes on device would be a nice add, I like to annotate PDFs and such - Ample storage to use for another 10ish years.
I don't need many bells and whistles. Unfortunately the Kobo series looks like it's a bit out of date right now, or I would just get one of those. Any recommendations?
I have an Onyx Boox Nova 3, it should perfectly fit your bill: 8", warm backlight (color and brightness are individually adjustable), comes with a pen in the box, 32gb storage (no SD card slot though), doesnt break the bank. Fast SoC and full Android as nice extras. Not affiliated in any way, just really like mine.
Reviewed here for example: https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/onyx-boox-nova-3-review
Nice, thank you! I actually decided to get one of these after reading some of the other comments in this thread -- it's close to the Kindle Oasis in price, but the notetaking features, ability to sideload apps, and support for file types other than proprietary amazon, mobi, and PDF convinced me. I really wanted to get a Kobo a while back, but all of their devices seem slightly worse in build quality than the equivalent Kindle, and for a device I'm going to hold in my hand for hours a day that is important to me.
The Kobo Aura One with Koreader is the way to go. It just works after you turn off automatic software updates for the kobo firmware.
What do you find outdated about Kobos? I find them pretty much perfect. And the constant software updates make them even better.
Mine is a couple years old and has an embedded light that automatically adapts warmness throughout the day.
I think most of their models haven't been updated since 2018-2019. That might not be a huge deal for an ereader that I'd keep offline all the time anyway, but I would definitely be a bit sad if I paid $300 for the top-tier big-screen ereader with 32GB of memory only to have a better model come out in a couple of months, or to have them stop supporting that model soon after.
I can only violently agree with the author: koreader is incredible. When I look for ebook readers, running koreader is an absolute must. The nicest thing about it is how hackable it is, since most of it is written in Lua. When I got my Kobo Aura One, koreader did not yet support the colored background LEDs, and adding support for that was actually pretty easy. The koreader developers are incredibly helpful and it's just a great project.
Koreader is excellent. On kobo the default nickel is very wasteful of space with huge margins. And for some reason ereaders all hate left justification, even though thatās the norm on printed books.
Koreader solves all of that. I love the āstyle hacksā section that lets you very precisely override many layout details in the book, or even define your own. Even its status bar is much more information dense and useful than on other readers.
They donāt cater to the lowest common denominator user so it isnāt for everyone, but if you are unafraid of slightly more complex and powerful software it is superb.
It's such a bummer it doesn't support Android < 4 (which means Nook Simple Touch can't run it), considering it works so well on a pretty long list of different devices.
I've read for hundreds if not a thousand hours on my Kobo Clara HD. I've never heard of Koreader, but from what I see it seems only really useful for PDFs ? I never read PDFs, only epubs, and it looks like on Koreader I would be missing stuff like chapter progress, length to read next chapter/rest of the book, marking finished books, etc.
Am I wrong in thinking all these quality of life things for simple book reading are not present on Koreader ?
KOReader has all these features and much more. I particularly depend on the possibility to quickly override styles in badly formatted ebooks, great support for StarDict dictionaries, OPDS support for quickly downloading books from Calibre server, and much more flexible configuration of the backlight.
Where are you getting that from? The github repo (https://github.com/koreader/koreader) lists many supported formats and features, including epubs.
If I'm understanding this correctly, koreader will let me read epubs on an Amazon Kindle. Am I right to be excited?
Yes, but you need to jailbreak your Kindle to install it. If your Kindle is recent or anywhere near the latest release - it can't be rooted.
I think you can do this with a stock Kindle, by sending the epub to the email address of your Kindle (which you can find in your account settings).
No, epubs - presumably as a competitor format - are not supported.
You can do it (email "conversion" - often just a horrible mish-mash of text and images) with PDFs and text etc.
Epubs need to be converted first by a third party service, eg calibre.
Yup, it will.
Where does everyone get their books from? From what I could tell, all books you can buy commercially come with proprietary (Amazon) or Adobe (everyone else) DRM, making them impossible to read on koreader. It seems like you always have to buy into someone's ecosystem, or am I missins something?
I personally use Amazon. But I rarely download directly to my Kindle. I download to my PC. Use Calibre with the DeDRM plugin. Then put it on my Kindle. Or read it on my iPad. That way Iām not locked into any one ecosystem. I get to own the books for as long as I can keep the data.
Iāve heard DeDRM also works well with Adobeās protected epubs. But I donāt have direct experience.
If Amazon ever makes it impossible to strip the DRM, then Iāll probably switch to buying physical books and getting files from LibGen. Or just using the library more.
If it's a book that's only available DRM, I buy it on the Kindle. I'm not fond of buying DRMed books, but most are only available that way, and Amazon is the most likely to still be around in the future.
For non-DRM:
Tor Books are no longer DRMed.
Baen Books -- https://www.baen.com/ -- don't have DRM, and you can buy directly from the publisher, and manage your library on their site, and download as many times as you like. You can also often purchase eArc versions, and they have a monthly subscription bundle were you can read parts of the book as it comes out, and then you get the complete book when it's done.
If you're interested in translated Japanese light novels, there's J Novel Club -- https://j-novel.club/ -- for a monthly subscription, you can read book parts for free as they're being translated. Once they're fully translated, you can then purchase the final epub directly from their site.
Books are interesting in that they both are and aren't fungible. If, say, I want to read the next Martha Wells Murderbot book, or the next Julie McGalliard Rougarou book, I have to buy that particular book.
But if I'm just looking for another book to read, I always check Tor, Baen, and J Novel Club first.
I don't know if you specifically want to buy, but I steal mine from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
Buy off Amazon, rip the DRM using https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/releases, and then read with KOReader on Kindle.
Are there any eBook readers with wireless charging? I'd like a reader with zero ports that will survive a salt water environment.
The latest Paperwhite Kindles are IPX8 rated (it can survive in two meters of water for up to an hour at a time)
That doesn't mean it will last long in an environment with a lot of salt water, does it?
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