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A comment on Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader?.

Re:Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader? by edeion on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:33AM (#25747371)
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/

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Re:Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader? by ernie24 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @02:16PM (#25751934)
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?
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Re:Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader? by edeion on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @07:09AM (#25761040)
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.)

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Re:Ask HN: Good and affordable E Ink reader? by ernie24 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @07:41AM (#25761276)
I don't know about EPUBs support too much, my only experience was with Apple's iBooks, which (in most cases) handled EPUB ebooks very nicely (display-wise) with well formated, colored code and ect.
[ Parent | on HN ]