
Is the E-Reader Dead - lizpete
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/is-the-ereader-dead,review-5158.html
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YourMatt
Up until recently, I was totally off the grid with e-readers, meaning my
purchases were never known. I bought 10-year-old e-readers for like $10 at my
local used electronics store. I still bought physical books, but I'd download
the epub as well and drop it on my reader over USB. To me, they were
disposable devices with a utility I feel like I can't live without.

There wasn't an incentive to buy a new one up until the waterproof Kindle
Oasis came out. I'd ruined my old e-readers in the bath, and this seemed like
a worthy purchase.

I don't think e-readers are dead at all. They just tend to last a long time,
and there hasn't been a lot of innovation to make people want to upgrade. I
think once waterproofing hits the cheaper lines of e-readers, they'll see an
uptick in sales, but that may just be me projecting my own use case.

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pjmlp
My E-Readers are doing just fine.

E-Ink is much easier to the eyes than regular tablet screens, and the battery
lasts several days.

The only downside is how they display PDFs.

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lou1306
> The only downside is how they display PDFs.

Sadly this is not just a "downside". PDF is so endemic that e-readers would
flourish if they supported it better.

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pjmlp
Fully agree, I get around it converting them into epub, but of course it only
works on those that aren't just pure images.

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jenkstom
I just bought the new Kindle Oasis. It's by far the best e-reader I've owned,
and I've owned quite a few including the original Sony readers. After decades
of staring at computer screens my eyes are very sensitive to harsh lighting,
and so I can't read for long on an LCD/LED/AMOLED screen. Up until the Kindle
Oasis my complaint was that e-readers were too hard to hold for very long. The
offset balanced design solves that problem, finally.

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forapurpose
My main concern with ebooks is preserving the books and my annotations for the
rest of my life, at least. The former seems easy (I assume I can get DRM-free
books easily enough?), but is there a platform-independent format for the
annoations, and one that I can depend on being readable, or at least
convertable to a newer format, in 30 years?

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secfirstmd
I bought a Remarkable. A completely different type of e-reader. While overly
expensive I would say it represents the future evolution of e-readers. Mostly
focused around realistic writing feel, making it easier to read .pdf and less
eye strain.

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scaillib
Indeed, personally I just purchased the Onyx Boox Max 2, a 13 inches e-ink
tablet running Android (6.0). quite expensive (some will say far too expensive
if compared to iPad pro, but keep in mind its niche market, small company,
R&D). PDF is quite well support, and now we start seeing Android apps with
special mode for e-ink (Librera).

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pathartl
I think price is a factor. I'd totally buy a large e-reader for things like
holding manuals, recipes for the kitchen, etc but large e-ink displays are so
expensive that these aren't places where it makes sense to bring one in.

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bitlax
I feel like they could drop the price by making them read-only. I just want to
read full-size pdfs.

