In the FAQ at https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2:

> reMarkable 2 features USB-C for faster charging and data transfer.

Even if this does not mean that mass storage is or will be supported officially, maybe unofficial support could be added using the Linux Kernel's USB Gadget API g_mass_storage as a module. More info:

  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/mass-storage.rst
  https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_use_mass_storage_gadget
  https://github.com/reMarkable/linux
  https://remarkable.engineering/ -- toolchain here

To be fair it looks like a pretty small team (7 people listed with 2-3 actively developing) so I doubt it is management. More likely not a priority right now, limited resources, or in the too hard basket.

There is this repo in their Github org: https://github.com/reMarkable/vfatbuse

Looks like the CTO had a crack at implementing mass storage in v1

This is the only other method I've found: https://github.com/nick8325/remarkable-fs

You'd think scp would work also but I haven't found info on the subject and I don't own the RM1 to try.

edit: found someone's scp script: https://github.com/reHackable/scripts/blob/master/host/repus...

The changelog is public so you can see the rate of development if you're interested: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500546010...

I get it isn't possible from an end user point of view to connect as mass storage. But I wonder if it might be possible with the hardware after modifications to the kernel configuration.

> If you're considering the RM2 for anything other than a sketch/note pad

It is marketed as a sketch/note pad and that's about it. The e-reader feature is like the youtube functionality on a Switch. It's there because "lolwhynot" and little more.

I have one and I really love mine. But all I wanted was a digital notebook. If I wanted more than that I would have gotten a Surface tablet or an Ipad Pro. It's definitely expensive for what it is, but it's not really marketed as a mass market device either.

I personally disagree with this. I almost bought one because I wanted a good notebook and a lot of notes I write these days is specifically related to ebooks and pdf documentation that I work against. I almost ordered one after seeing this post.

However, from the review it appears like this will be impossible to annotate documents with. I want to be able to highlight text on an epub (like I can on my kindle) and write notes to reference later about that section. I want to draw some diagrams as I'm reading the book to make sure I'm understanding code/workflows properly, etc...

I'm not sure why that's so out of the realm for a notebook style device.

It's almost equivalent to being able to write directly on a textbook, however you can export your marked up document as a PDF.

Pretty much by definition people buying e-readers are buying them to read with.

Clearly the Surface/iPad are not comparable to e-screens for that specific purpose and the obvious UX (usability) fail in the Remarkable in that regard means there is still a significant market gap for people who want an e-reader which bridges those two worlds, particularly (for me and many others) reading technical manuals.

It isn't though. It's a note taking device and marketed as such. Heck, when it was released, the e-reader functionality was even more deficient than it is today and barely mentioned. It's a note taking device and marketed as such. They improved the e-reader aspect a lot since then, so now it's kind of usuable as one, sortoff, but it's very much not an e-reader first.

Conceding the point to you though means that there is still clearly a gap for those of us who want to read technical manuals (unless there is a device that somebody can recommend) between the brilliant linear-reading experience of e-readers and the smooth larger screen random-access UX experience of tablets like those you cite.

It's not a constant factor. This is best understood as a bug. Here's what the reviewer demonstrated: If you change the font size, then the interface locks up and you can't do anything, until the backend has generated new page images for the entire PDF—no matter how many pages there are. He showed that, while it was fast for a small document, it locked up for about 50 seconds when resizing the font on The Count of Monte Cristo (a large novel, perhaps 1200 pages). Furthermore, he said that if, during that time, you changed any of the other settings (resizing again, changing line spacing, etc.), it would take another 50 seconds, and another if you pressed two of the buttons, and so on. It is very clear that no QA person (whose reports are heeded) tested out those operations on a decent-sized novel or technical manual. (If they tried Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—not the largest book in the series—then, going by word count, it would have locked up for 20.5 seconds.)

A sane viewer app—one of which the reviewer demonstrated—would redraw the current page, then give control back to the user, while continuing to redraw other pages in the background. It's a bit tricky, because until you render the previous pages at some level, it might not be clear where the page break for the current page would be; but you could choose an arbitrary point, use that temporarily, and eventually correct it when rendering catches up.

The reviewer did show convincingly that the viewer app is very lacking in features or basic polish. (Another example: You can zoom into a page, selecting a smaller section of it to view. However, you cannot drag this view around the page; if you want to see elsewhere on the page at the same magnification, you must undo the zoom, then select a new region to zoom into.) This is odd for an e-ink device, whose homepage has a section titled "An eye-friendly reading experience: Comfortably read PDFs or ebooks for hours on end without backlight, glare, or eye strain."

Wow, thanks, I was very interested in this for marking up documents + notes. I guess I could still use my kindle for most of my reading anyway, but the video gave me the impression the RM2 was very fluid and fast.

If I'm understanding correctly, the screen's responsiveness to input is great, but the UI's responsiveness is not?

• The ReMarkable is primarily like a sheet of paper you can write on (or a paper notepad).

• This "sheet of paper" can also have a background template (like dots, a grid, or an arbitrary image), different for every page. (You can add your own images/templates onto the device with scp and editing a JSON config file.)

• When you read PDFs on it, each page (at your specified zoom level / crop region) is rasterized (reasonably quickly) into such a background image, with the result that you can write on the PDF page if you want. (These won't be "PDF annotations" in the PDF-standard's sense AFAIK, which some people complain about: it's just like writing/drawing on some image. But you can export your annotated PDF as PDF/PNG/SVG.)

• When you read EPUBs on it, the whole epub gets converted by some incredibly slow process into the equivalent of what it does for PDF (my understanding is that it's basically rasterizing each page). This means that if you're reading an EPUB (that you downloaded from the internet or transferred from your Kindle or whatever), and you do something as simple as changing the font size, you can expect it to take tens of seconds(!) even for a small 200-page book, as it's "regenerating" an image for each (resulting) page of the book. Once that is done, though (i.e. you don't change/resize font again), it's reasonably quick and straightforward to use.

So, now, I don't bother with trying to read EPUBs on the device; I convert to PDF first on my computer (where I can more quickly and interactively tweak font size, page size, etc), then read the PDF on the device. That works very well.

- The screen size is slightly smaller than a regular A4 or Letter sized sheet of paper. You can go to "Adjust View" on the reMarkable and choose a smaller region of each page to fill the available screen (i.e., get rid of the margins and header/footer), which increases the size a bit.

- Academic papers often have footnotes / references on the last page or two, and if you care about them you'll want to flip back and forth (or in some cases you may also want to flip between two separate documents), which is quite a bit more annoying on this device than it would be on paper. Using https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks adds some features that make it better.

On the plus side, on this device I feel more free to write on it and mark up etc (can always undo / erase cleanly), while on paper (even printouts, let alone books) I somehow hesitate a bit more.

3 - They have issued numerous updates to the software. 4 - They have made improvements to reader functionality. As I and others have noted - font resizing and first use of epubs is slow because those files are converted to a pdf which is what is actually displayed on the device. 5 - The company would not be on a 2nd generation device if they did not understand their target audience. What is clear (to me) is that they don't see everyone as their audience ala Apple or Amazon.

Thank you.

Cheers.