There are plenty of lovely e-readers out on the market that come with an nice big e-paper display. There aren’t nearly as many that come with two. [Martin den Hoed] developed the Diptyx e-rea…
Um lol no. I could see using a pair of Inkplate 10’s connected by (at least metaphorical)) duct tape. Doesn’t seem worth mucking with special hardware.
Every affordable e-reader I know of is simply too small though. I mostly want to read stuff like ArXiV preprints (A4 sized pdf’s) so would want at least a 13" screen. Someone a few days ago posted a link to a 14" Android tablet with a semi-reflective display at around $300. It seemed interesting but I’d rather degoogle.
There are some hinged Waveshare displays that look nice but they are regular TFT displays so wouldn’t be great for a portable e-reader with long battery time:
The small kobo kinda fits in a jean pocket, easily in cargo shorts or inside jacket pocket. Only comfortable for reading novels though. I prefer a little bigger even if it isnt pocket size.
Oh hmm, I just use my phone for that. It doesn’t seem worth having an additional, limited purpose device. I assume a 7" e-reader is too big for a pocket.
The Inkplate 10 isn’t pocketable but it’s very light, easy to put in your backpack or whatever. I just wish they had a 13" version. The 13" Ipad Air is really very nice if you don’t mind Apple products.
There are also some folding phones now with largish screens. A buddy of mine has one and it’s nice. Too expensive for me though, and it’s more Android.
Being able to fold down a larger “sheet” display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I’m kind of over all-in-one devices. They’ve turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.
Obviously that’s not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I’d want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.
My buddy’s folding Samsung phone is really cool and you might look into it. It unfolds to a single screen of maybe 10" diagonal and square perspective. I think for full page PDFs though, I need something bigger so I’ve given up on pocketability.
I just upgraded to a foldable phone and it’s a game changer to have an 8in screen in your pocket. Reading long form content is so much more enjoyable, and I’d love to have an E-ink reader that folds like my phone does.
Yeah most 7" readers have the page turning buttons on the side which usually makes the device too wide for pockets.
The 6" readers fit my pocket quite well… So a foldable dual screen 6" sound like a pretty nice upgrade.
Most of what I use my readers for are reflowable text like epubs… But I guess if you could show a single page from a PDF across both screens then it might actually be big enough to be able to read while still being pocketable… You would probably want to go with the high resolution e-ink screens, like the one in the Kobo Clara HD (1072 x 1448). A combined resolution of two of those would be 2144 x 1448,
Hello there, just scrolling through and I saw your comment. You seem to know a bit about this topic.
I’m currently thinking of buying a reader as I lost mine some time ago. I used a kobo and a kindle in the past and didn’t see much difference.
However, this thing about reading papers seems really cool. I have tried in the past reading PDFs on those readers without much success.
Do you think you have good options for reading articles/manuals?
Consider I end up printing about 50 pages a day in articles I read. If I can turn that into something digital that’d be cool.
I’m still looking for a good answer myself! There are lots of possibilities but all have drawbacks from my perspective. I guess the 13" Onyx Boox sounds nice if you don’t mind the cost. I haven’t tried it though. Same with the 14" TCL Android tablet if you don’t mind Android.
If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)
If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device
I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that’s quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.
However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan.
I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.
Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that’s quite rare.
The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don’t want to be panning up and down a page all the time.
I don’t know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.
I’ve had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn’t perfect.
It’s just 10" and looks like an old design. Micro USB, oops. The Inkplate is 10" ESP32 epaper so it uses very little power. Alternatively there are tablet-style x86 laptops and I almost bought one last year. Now the price is way up due to DRAM shortages and so on, oops. I have some scrounged HDMI monitors so I want to try using one in portrait mode with my raspberry pi 400. If that works I could see getting one of the Waveshare dual screen monitors and maybe a Pi 500+.
Um lol no. I could see using a pair of Inkplate 10’s connected by (at least metaphorical)) duct tape. Doesn’t seem worth mucking with special hardware.
Every affordable e-reader I know of is simply too small though. I mostly want to read stuff like ArXiV preprints (A4 sized pdf’s) so would want at least a 13" screen. Someone a few days ago posted a link to a 14" Android tablet with a semi-reflective display at around $300. It seemed interesting but I’d rather degoogle.
There are some hinged Waveshare displays that look nice but they are regular TFT displays so wouldn’t be great for a portable e-reader with long battery time:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/15.6inch-dual-monitor.htm
I hope you get what you want. Me I want something I could put in my pocket.
The small kobo kinda fits in a jean pocket, easily in cargo shorts or inside jacket pocket. Only comfortable for reading novels though. I prefer a little bigger even if it isnt pocket size.
I do like the old kobos. Fully hackable.
I like dedicated devices for things rather than all in ones. If you have the money of course.
Oh hmm, I just use my phone for that. It doesn’t seem worth having an additional, limited purpose device. I assume a 7" e-reader is too big for a pocket.
The Inkplate 10 isn’t pocketable but it’s very light, easy to put in your backpack or whatever. I just wish they had a 13" version. The 13" Ipad Air is really very nice if you don’t mind Apple products.
There are also some folding phones now with largish screens. A buddy of mine has one and it’s nice. Too expensive for me though, and it’s more Android.
Being able to fold down a larger “sheet” display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I’m kind of over all-in-one devices. They’ve turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.
Obviously that’s not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I’d want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.
My buddy’s folding Samsung phone is really cool and you might look into it. It unfolds to a single screen of maybe 10" diagonal and square perspective. I think for full page PDFs though, I need something bigger so I’ve given up on pocketability.
I just upgraded to a foldable phone and it’s a game changer to have an 8in screen in your pocket. Reading long form content is so much more enjoyable, and I’d love to have an E-ink reader that folds like my phone does.
Yeah most 7" readers have the page turning buttons on the side which usually makes the device too wide for pockets.
The 6" readers fit my pocket quite well… So a foldable dual screen 6" sound like a pretty nice upgrade.
Most of what I use my readers for are reflowable text like epubs… But I guess if you could show a single page from a PDF across both screens then it might actually be big enough to be able to read while still being pocketable… You would probably want to go with the high resolution e-ink screens, like the one in the Kobo Clara HD (1072 x 1448). A combined resolution of two of those would be 2144 x 1448,
Hello there, just scrolling through and I saw your comment. You seem to know a bit about this topic. I’m currently thinking of buying a reader as I lost mine some time ago. I used a kobo and a kindle in the past and didn’t see much difference. However, this thing about reading papers seems really cool. I have tried in the past reading PDFs on those readers without much success.
Do you think you have good options for reading articles/manuals? Consider I end up printing about 50 pages a day in articles I read. If I can turn that into something digital that’d be cool.
I’m still looking for a good answer myself! There are lots of possibilities but all have drawbacks from my perspective. I guess the 13" Onyx Boox sounds nice if you don’t mind the cost. I haven’t tried it though. Same with the 14" TCL Android tablet if you don’t mind Android.
If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)
If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device
I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that’s quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.
However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan. I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.
Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that’s quite rare. The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don’t want to be panning up and down a page all the time. I don’t know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.
I’ve had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn’t perfect.
Give PineTab a look. Pine64 makes open source hardware that is pretty cool.
You probably mean the PineNote, the 10 inch eink tablet. Pinetab is a normal tablet with a lcd screen.
This? https://pine64.org/devices/pinetab/
It’s just 10" and looks like an old design. Micro USB, oops. The Inkplate is 10" ESP32 epaper so it uses very little power. Alternatively there are tablet-style x86 laptops and I almost bought one last year. Now the price is way up due to DRAM shortages and so on, oops. I have some scrounged HDMI monitors so I want to try using one in portrait mode with my raspberry pi 400. If that works I could see getting one of the Waveshare dual screen monitors and maybe a Pi 500+.
EInk gets expensive fast as the size gets bigger. At 10” its hard not to just use an lcd and bigger battery.