Of those notes: I have used mouse pointers with E-Ink and had little issue - only, I also had touchscreen so the mouse was in general unnecessary. That statement about hypertext is absurd: hypertext consumption is fine on E-Ink - provided your purpose is to read those hypertexts, instead of using the web in some "different" way, by the way alien from what it was intended. And video is usable, though suboptimal, if needed - the technology was not born for that, but just in case it can cope.

The practical verification is given: there are people who have been using large E-Ink devices, coupled with keyboards, for a long time, to work on documents.

And again let us suggest an important thing: if you actually have to work intellectually on a document, the same contents will remain in front of you for a relatively long time. This makes a technology "cheap on state retention, costly on state switch" the sensible solution.

The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should.

Makes no sense. What is your point? "A huge part of woodwork deals with nails, and one cannot easily use a screwdriver for that". Well, if you are into woodwork, use a hammer! Evidently, we are not talking about woodwork here. Clarify your assumptions. It may seem you wanted to state "EPD is not the best solution for [some website] users", which brings nowhere unless you contextualize the statement with some idea (very preferably a plausible one) that makes it logically productive.

> Even if we confine

Confine? A screwdriver is optimal for driving screws. To """confine""" a screwdriver to that is "proper use". Hypertext (the World Wide Web, as intended, none the less) is something meant to be /read/ and at the same time explored non sequentially: it is properly consumed with reading friendly technologies. EPD is meant to be that.

> needs scrolling

Absolutely false, and also irrelevant: scrolls have in fact disappeared as standard practice centuries ago, and we invented tablets and paging in 3300BC, in Sumer (not to mention sheep and cattle raising eight further centuries earlier, from which the folio comes): paging has been the standard for over five millennia. And when we used scrolling, it was because some technology had that as the most appropriate use. Clay? Paging then. Papyrus? Scrolling then. Paper? Flipping then. What has changed?

Hypertext and sequential text do not need scrolling - we have paged since forever. And when the user wants, scrolling is available and perfectly usable with EPD. Slower than LCD? Well LCD has a number of properties inferior to those of EPD: if you have no use for these, why should you use EPD? Clearly the balance determined by all properties changes according to use case. This is really basic.

> The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should

Very trivial principle, contextualize it - it can be applied to CRTs and brass plaques: there exist a number of properties for two or more technologies; some use cases will turn the balance in favour of A, others in favour of B etc. You will use a hammer when it is appropriate to use a hammer, and a screwdriver when it is appropriate to use a screwdriver, and you will do just like Ben Franklin recommended and "saw with a file and file with a saw when pressed". Again, all of this is as trivial as reasoning comes; to make the reasoning productive (and debatable), you have to add the uncommon assumptions, not the foundationals. You have confirmed the opposite point: just refer your statement to LCD!

It seems, outside analysis and towards immediacy, that you just do not see use cases for EPD: - it's you. We have tried to tell you: you do not have the need, others do. Just trust it, you will see it when you will want to see it. Some people do appreciate «working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow».

"Ah, and all the compromises then are overcome by the benefits"? Yes, that!

Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.

LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.

As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.

Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.

Slow refresh is a fine way of supporting healthy data dieting.

There's lots of places I would like to put an information readout, but not have it be an attention draw through anything.

More related to the fact that eink uses external lighting I suppose. Still.

Also I wish I had an eink screen for code.

Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".

In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety.

I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.

That's not true. Electronic shelf labels sold to supermarket chains and retailers, far outnumber the number of e-book readers sold to consumers. Especially that electronic price tags usually have a fixed shelf-life (~3 years or even shorter if they get damaged), so they need to be replaced often, while consumers generally keep their e-book readers for many more years.

You'd need the PUK from the manufacturer based on the device S/N to unlock them first, but the S/N of each device is tied to the store that bought it so the manufacturer will know it doesn't belong to you and not give you the unlock PUK.

Plus, at the kinds of volumes retailers are buying ESLs, I doubt they'd go through all this trouble to pair a few stolen units.