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with extras like […] no lockscreen ads
What the fuck? Why is that an extra not just the default? It’s great that this product isn’t riddled with ads, but that’s like saying it’s great a burger is not made of human shit; it’s crazy that anyone would tolerate a shit-burger in the first place.
Maybe ads are normal in the e-reader space for some reason, but that’s just insane to me.
I think it’s only Amazon that does lock screen ads but since they have two-thirds of the market share globally (and a near monopoly in the US where the Verge is based) then whatever they do in the e-reader space is “normal”
Just talking here in the US, the only competitor Amazon has really had here is Nook which also has lock screen ads
Kobo is also available in the US
I know but I meant as popularity wise. I don’t think most people outside the Hard-core privacy/tech focused crowd know it.
Yeah it’s a big contrast to continental Europe where if you go into any electronics shop they’ll have Kobos on display as prominent as Kindles.
what a damn shame
You can buy “discounted” Kindle e-readers with ads, or you can buy them without ads for full price.
There’s no discount there, you’re just accepting their marketing bullshit. That sounds to me like the company is double-dipping by shoving ads in your face and making the product objectively worse, then charging even more for a “premium” model where the only difference is they haven’t intentionally downgraded it.
Hence the quotation marks.
Lock screen in a ebook reader is not something you are bound to see much often since I would hope you have some kind of protection over it.
I’m trusting y’all to let me know if it’s worth it
What do you need it for?
It isn’t up to snuff for reading Comic Books or Graphic Novels, and it’s worse experience than a good Non-Color E-ink display. Which is saying it’s worse for the vast vast majority of books you will read.
I’m not sure why it exists other than it has to - in order for a better version to eventually come out. R&D isn’t free.
I have the Boox Onyx Note 3c. Its a color e-ink and its okay for comics. But I mainly use it for note taking. The colors are helpful for more detailed notes. The eink display makes it easier in my eyes especially for long days of note taking.
Oyeah the E-Ink is so great for your eyes. Just like a book. I just meant Color vs BW E-ink.
Yeah. The color definitely isn’t a replacement for an actual comic or graphic novel. It’s good enough to give you an idea of what it should look like. And I agree. If you have no need for the color, then black and white is going to be much better.
Good to know, re: comic books
How do you like it for note taking? Does it convert handwriting to type? That is one of my dream features that I’ve yet to hear has become robust
I prefer to keep my notes as handwritten (I draw a lot of diagrams and graphs in my notes). But it does indeed convert my handwriting to type if I want it to. And it does a great job of it especially with how messy my handwriting can be.
The feel of it is very comfortable too (feels like writing on paper). I used to use a Surface Book in tablet mode for notes, but wanted to get away from Microsoft. The screen of the Note 3C isn’t smooth, it’s textured like paper
Their note app takes some getting used to, but it works pretty well (templates are a little tricky, but they just made an update to improve it).
The only thing I really miss from OneNote on the Surface was printing PDFs into OneNote. That said, you can annotate directly onto PDFs, it just makes things a little less organized unless you use the PDF as a template.
Both use E Ink’s latest Kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.
I had to check just how bad 150ppi would be when dropping down the resolution for color.
A 24" Full HD monitor has a PPI of 92. So it’s actually okay.
I’m still using my old Kobo Aura HD (now roughly 11 years old) and the battery still lasts over a month. The screen was already decent back then, but a bit sluggish. I just checked, the old one has 265 ppi. Maybe it’s not time for an upgrade yet :)
A PPI of 92, but that screen is going to probably be between 2 and 3 feet from your face, vs the 150 PPI sitting 6 inches to a foot away… Doesn’t mean it isn’t good enough by any means, but it’s certainly not a conclusive comparison
I have a Boox Ultra C. It has the same screen, I can confidently say the colours are utter shite for any kind of colour sensitive work or media. However, they’re more than good enough for conveying information, like different coloured lines on a chart.
The colours also look sharp as fuck, as the grey scale is still used for brightness, and the colour just tints it. Meaning it looks a lot sharper than 150ppi and almost indistinguishable from 300ppi
How is your boox, BTW? Would you recommend them?
I’m in the market and they look interesting to me but the price is a bit of a shocker
I would get a Galaxy Tab if the E-Ink isn’t vital for you. But otherwise it’s a very capable E-Int tablet, and it running Android means you can do anything on it you can an Android tablet.
The real killer is the latency though, for most things it’s pretty bad, except in Boox’s own apps where it’s so damn quick it feels like writing on paper.
I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but if it is what you want then it’s easily best in class
6 inches? I think you need glasses …
Yeah, 6 inches is about the furthest something can be for me to see it with any clarity at all without glasses, regardless of size and resolution, but still often read without them on my phone just to relax my eyes (and also, nothing looks clearer to me than something a few inches from my face with my glasses off)
But i did say “6 inches to a foot” which I’m at least assuming is not that atypical a range that people hold their devices at, but I’m not that great at judging distance overall… At the very least, my point is you’re holding the small device much closer than the bigger screen will be so needs higher PPI to still look as crisp
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Of course, but it’s mostly for reading. The color will probably be used for notes and the occasional image, for which it’s easily good enough. When I read it’s usually a foot away, while I keep my monitor at 2 feet.
Black and white content (text) has 300 dpi atleast, so for that it’s perfect.
E-Ink is fantastic for lots of reading and battery life, for everything else an actual screen is leagues ahead. The response time is awful too.
Fully agree, just an observation about the comparison
I like my Kobo, but wish it had a bit better of a storefront. I want to get my books from more than just the kobo store. Overdrive support is nice. It sometimes loses my page just like a real book, ironically.
Still, I find myself still letting it collect dust due to it’s limited storefront and long book checkout times at the library. Physical books and newspapers are a bit bigger and stable software-wise.
I really wish epaper displays were more common. It’s a really cool technology. I’d love an inexpensive epaper monitor or maybe an alarm clock?
Install Calibre on a computer and use that. Browse online sailing forums for your favourite books and new releases. Then support the authors financially by buying their paper books directly from them or their publishers.
If you buy your books from them digitally use a DRM remover (Like the plugin available on Calibre) so you can forever own your books and move them to any device you want in any format you want. Forever.
Have a few ebooks and audiobooks in calibre that have been removed from Amazon/Audible. Nothing dramatic drama wise as far as I can tell other than the license expiring/moving.
It’s nice not having to worry about it.
Interesting, I might look into that! Thanks.
pebble smartwatch with ePaper please!
The Watchy exists ;D
I use a kobo libra 2 with calibre and it’s great. If you buy a kobo either make sure you really like it or buy it from Amazon. Their customer service is absolutely horrible.
That’s kinda hilarious. Buying a product from its own competitor.
Bought a math book from them, they refunded it with no questions, after I read a lot of it, because some of the equations were unreadable.
I had a good experience with their customer service.
My Kobo bricked a few days after the warranty expired (it’s possible I broke it installing koreader improperly or something) and they replaced it no problem.
Took a few weeks but I was happy they replaced it at all.
I’m glad you did! I ordered a device from them and wanted to return it and it took multiple chats over multiple days (maybe weeks?) to get it done. Was quite a headache.
I hope the reason they took so long is that they were waiting on a really good color e-ink screen, but I doubt it. That said, I love my Kobo Sage and my LazyLibrarian + Calibre-web + Kobo Sync workflow, and if you can do the same on these, then they’ll probably be a good buy.
Keep in mind that only one company makes eInk displays. They’re all using the same displays.
Only one company in the entire world makes e ink displays?
Yeah, E Ink is actually a brand. AFAIK there’s no one else producing suitable displays for ereaders at scale.
All the panels used by all Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Boox eReader models are made by Carta.
There might be other companies that make those other kinds of small updatable eink displays used in stores, or the tiny ones on microcontrollers.
Sure. I don’t see how that affects what I said, though?
Any chance you could share your docker-compose.yml for your stack?
I can, but I’m not happy with it. If you containerize this setup, each container needs it’s own Calibre instance and it’s very inefficient. I run it on Proxmox and plan to either package it all in a single Docker image or roll it into my Ansible playbook on a different VM.
If you want pretty good color screen, try the Boox Tab Mini C
I really REALLY love my Kobo Libre 2, it’s a fantastic reader. I would like to move the Color version, but they didn’t actually show anything like a graphic novel, guess I’ll be waiting for reviews, not sure why they wouldn’t show the most common use for one of these unless maybe it’s not great at it.
I have a Onyx Boox Nova C that has pretty much the same technology (Kaleido Plus) and would say that the color display is mostly just a neat gimmick that comes with some tradeoffs. Compared to a pure monochrome E-Ink display the contrast is much worse and colors don’t really pop either. You basically always need at least a bit off background lighting to be able to read.
I’d recommend these types of display only if being able to read without background lighting isn’t a must and even then only for stuff that’s better with color, like notes, technical books or the occasional colored page in a book/manga. If you want to read something reliant on stunning colorful artwork like graphic novels I’d stay away.
This was my fear, thanks. When I saw what they were doing with it I was like come on, who needs to take notes in color.
I’ve had a Libra 2 for almost 2 years now and just yesterday I was thinking “it still looks great!”. I don’t feel the need to upgrade and colour isn’t a must for me, so I’ll just wait for a couple of generations until the colour technology is more mature and they add some kind of feature my Libra 2 doesn’t have besides that.
Yeah, sadly a good color e-ink screens seems like one of those techs that is always a couple years away. It seems like maybe the demand just isn’t there for R&D with everyone having large form factor phones these days.
I thought e ink was just in patent hell with only one company developing it and charging high fees on everything they can related to it and they aren’t that good at r&d but they are good at milking something for all its worth
I thought color DES was decent?
Sorry, I haven’t made the jump into an e reader of my own yet, so I may be missing something, but could the same not be said for phones and B&W e readers? Phones can basically do everything an e reader can on its face, but there’s still a niche to be filled by e readers, so I’m not sure lack of demand would exactly be the problem?
Ooohhh, this is huge! And also an upgraded Kobo Clara (in black and white)!
BW e-readers are sufficient for reading but colors are awesome for image content in books, such as graphics and maps and whatnot. Hopefully some reviews show up soon.
What e-reader should I buy, when I don’t want to use amazon (or similar) services to log in/buy/transfer books to the reader?
I have plenty of free old PDF books I simply want to copy there and be able to read them without ads and online bs.
I don’t need web browser, mp3 player, spotify, google translator or other such nonsense. I need simple controls, backlight (adjustable) to read at night and that’s basically it.
Thanks for any input.
You can easily load PDFs into kobo readers, at-least into mine. However, most PDFs will be unreadable. To reads PDFs properly on a e-reader you need a screen that is at-least as big as their render size. Meaning, that if the PDF was built for A4, your experience will be, in most cases, lacking on any screen smaller than A4.
I have no experience using such big eink and can’t comment on their quality.
PDFs are usually terrible for reading in this screen size. If they are plain text, you might be able to convert them to proper ebooks in Calibra.
OK, thank you for noting that. Never thought about it. My local library hands out free e-books of classic old literature so it might be available in other formats too. I grabbed some PDFs, because it was easiest to open in PC or android. Will check it out.
This guy reviews all kinds of e-ink devices. https://www.youtube.com/c/MyDeepGuide/videos
I watched his videos before deciding to get a large format BOOX Max Lumi (13") for PDF reading and note taking. I wanted the large one to split screen a PDF textbook on the left and notebook on the right. That was a few years ago, though, and I suggest reviewing some more recent videos to get an idea of what the current devices are like.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/c/MyDeepGuide/videos
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I use a Kindle, but never bought a single book from them. I mostly use their transfer method for convenience instead of looking for a cable. As for books, I downloaded a few gigs of ebooks in html/RTF/doc format well before e-ink was invented, and use those with calibre to convert to epub. Pdfs are rather suboptimal for ebooks.
I agree with the other reply that pdfs are terrible for e-readers. That being said, Pocketbooks can open them (which is not that common) and it is possible to read them, although it isn’t so comfortable, especially for A4 pdfs. It can also open wide range of other formats and I’m quite happy with it in general. You can connect it to a computer and simply copy your books there, among other means of getting books there. But I have to say I have no first hand experience with competition.
Thanks for the input. I wrote PDFs, but it might be possible to get another format. Check the other comment.
As for Pocketbook, which model do you have? Is there anything you dislike about it? Would you buy it again or seek alternative? Thank you.
I see. You can open just about anything, something like 18 formats, it’s on their website. I prefer epub, but it can open Kindle’s mobi etc. That’s why I bought it, I got a large library of pdbs.
I have Touch HD 3, I had some Touch Lux before. I had it for a while, don’t know their newest models. But yes, not only would I buy it again, I already did, just bought a newer version. Unless I was looking for something for hand note taking, I wouldn’t change. What I dislike is that when you break the screen, it’s expensive to replace, so I just bought a new one instead. Nothing you wouldn’t be used to from phones. And I’d very much like to have an option to disable the touch layer of the screen by long press of one of the physical buttons, but it’s a minor issue. What I like is the tunable intensity and colour temperature of the light and I’m quite happy with everything else. You can upload books by sending them as an attachment to a special email. If you don’t like the interface for reading the books, you can even quite easily replace it with Cool reader. I tried it before, but I didn’t do it in the newest one. You can use dictionaries, some are preinstalled, or use notes and highlights, but I don’t have experience with that.
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the day will eventually come that I need to replace my kindle and I assume e-ink will be full HD by then.
Honestly if an e-reader doesn’t last you decades you’re doing something wrong.
I agree with your sentiment, but the resolution on e-readers has been better than HD for about a decade now.
so I can read full colour comics on an e-ink e-reader then?
My kindle oasis (1st gen) cover disagrees with this statement. Somehow my Kindle Keyboard outlasted my oasis by a decade.
I’ve used the Boox color e-reader. It’s fine. My one complaint is that the white background of the screen is not as white as the background in traditional e-readers. Like I saw somewhere that the Kindle’s white background is somewhere near 85% white, and the Boox color screen is 65ish% white. It was noticable when I used it, to the point that I sent it back and got a non color e-reader.
I ended up getting the Boox Nova Air 2. it is fantastic. https://onyxboox.com/boox_novaair2
I don’t understand why everything by Onyx is so much more money than anything else on the market. I want to try one because Kobo Software is ‘meh’ but I can’t justify double the price for… ???
I’m guessing because onyx doesn’t have a book store to subsidize the price with like Amazon.
I know nothing about this topic, but was thinking of grabbing a Kobo. What about the software would you say is meh?
My last Kobo was bought 4 years ago so it may be different but it was very slow compared to a Kindle bought at the same time. Searching for books took a very long time. Looking through your library was click next, wait 10s, click next, wait 10s.
Once you were in a book it was perfect.
I only use Calibre to push books on to the device so I can’t speak to their store. With that modifier - Kindle can’t do that well at all so it’s a non-starter.
I wonder if that will be at all improved with the new model coming out? I do like that Kobo doesn’t have ads on its home screen, as well; I’d probably be willing to put up with less optimal performance if that stays the case. Anyway, thank you for the response! It’s definitely given me stuff to consider before buying an e reader myself
Calibre is a fantastic Ebook organizer. It can handle all sorts of file conversions, firmware updates and de-DRMing books you own. Whichever eRader you get - I would highly recommend it.
It is the iTunes to your iPod except for eReaders. It is also FOSS.
E.g. Here are 5,000 books available for free forever as part of Project Gutenburg.
That’s is download, and click Sync within Calibre. It handles all formatting, metadata, etcetera. Good luck accessing them without third party software. Kindle, Kobo, B & N do not want you reading free books.
Separately given the price differential these days. Get an eReaders with a back/front-light. eReaders are as difficult, if not more, to read as books are without bright light.
eReader lights point into the screen instead of at your face - it’s much different than a phone and much easier on the eyes. It’s like staring at a lightbulb (LCD Phone) vs staring at a newspaper lit from overhead.
I don’t know how much time I have spent reading in bed with-backlight-on not bothering my wife but it’s a lot. It’s where I do the majority of my reading. Not possible with a real book - she’s a light sleeper and any light bright enough to read would keep her up.
Amazing comment, thank you. Saving it for future use :)
Crappy file management is the biggest flaw, imo
Looks like Kobo’s primed for the top spot since Jassy gave up on innovation
Kinda surprised they even still exist. Bought one for my mom years ago. She used it a lot but thought 10-15 bucks for an ebook was too much. So i had to download a bunch of public domain stuff for her. Kept her occupied for a good while
You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It’s way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it’s a lot lighter than carrying books around.
They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.
I just wish the tech was there for Graphic Novels.
Why would you be surprised? And why would 15$ for a book be too much?
Because we are/were not j.p. gotrocks kin
It might depend on which part of the world they live in. In the West? Not so much. But in a third world country? It might very well be a day’s work wage.
Believe it or not there are lots of pockets in “the west” where money is that tight. Fixed incomes didnt and dont stretch that far
Why at you surprised? You can have 10000 books in the space of a single folder.
I know. Mama was very picky though
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Both use E Ink’s latest Kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.
The seven-inch Kobo Libra 2 is my favorite e-reader outside of Amazon’s ecosystem, offering the Kindle Paperwhite’s IPX8 waterproof design but with extras like physical page-turning buttons, no lockscreen ads, and more storage.
However, it’s $30 more expensive than the Kobo Libra 2, and you’ll have to buy the stylus separately for $69.99.
It offers the same six-inch display and IPX8 waterproof design but now comes with 16GB of storage, as well as an improved processor.
I hope so; the Kobo Clara 2E’s sluggish performance was one of my chief complaints.
All of the devices are available to preorder starting today and will ship on April 30th.
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