I would love to have an unadorned A3 or larger e-Ink device to mount on the wall next to my front door for a smart calendar/weather/to-do.
I also really, really want an A4 sized eReader but for reasons completely beyond me the only manufacturer of such a device is Sony and not only are they ridiculously overpriced they've got bizarre anti-consumer constraint to basic functionality as well.
Yeah i'd love to have giant epaper screens for use in a coder's workstation where emphasis is only writing code and looking at terminal screens. along with a b&w focused windowing system.
It'll be like sitting on an old school workstation again, more focus, less distraction and still have modern underlying hardware.
Oh very much yes. Though I feel compelled to point out that my brief foray into getting Android running on Nook, the disconnect between a graphics system predicated on the sort of refresh rates that exist on LCD screens and the reality of the refresh rates for e-Ink displays suggests that just a naive installation of secondary display on an existing workstation would wind up being intolerably frustrating.
I think there's a market for a workstation like this, but it's the matter of creating the supply first.
people need to see it in action, and boss need to see that they can purchase it for their backend developers (non color requiring devs) and think "wow this will save me $$$ on developer distractions."
Is there really a big market for a hardware solution to something that can typically be solved with software? There are all sorts of focus-inducing apps, from DNS servers that refuse to serve distractions, to software that actively blocks certain non-white-listed apps from running.
I use IDEA, Eclipse, VS, etc on an e-ink. Use the light-theme that comes with your IDE (not the Dracula theme). You will see the colors as different shades of gray (not just b&w) - it's fine, one gets used too. And color e-ink exists just still too expensive - there were rumours that the next Kindle after v3 gets a color e-ink (2010), but Amazon shifted the focus to Kindle Fire. The technology is there, just the volume is too low, so color e-ink are still expensive.
I recently made myself a nice mono colormap for Kakoune. I have four terminal windows open right now, each one connected to the same editor session, and each with a different foreground color, all using the same colormap. I'd give up the extra colors for a big grayscale e-ink display though.
> I also really, really want an A4 sized eReader but for reasons completely beyond me...
I think it's because e-reader screens are made on a glass substrate, and a large, thin glass screen in a large, thin, plastic device frame is going to be difficult to reinforce so that it doesn't break. There have been a couple of attempts to manufacture plastic-backed e-reader screens – I recall Plastic Logic from Cambridge a few years back, who were going to make an A4 e-reader but struggled to scale up the technology, and shifted to licensing.
E-Ink have just recently got their technology into production, called Mobius, but they haven't yet caught on in retail devices yet (given the market is mostly a walled garden quasi-monopoly, in practice I mean Amazon haven't used them in Kindles yet). Hopefully when the technology becomes mainstream it will remove some constraints on e-readers, and they'll become thinner, more robust, and easier to produce in large sizes. And hopefully alongside that we'll also get some competition in the e-reader market, and devices which are more open.
These guys have been advertising heavily recently, and have been featured here on HN: https://getremarkable.com/
The HN discussion has some good arguments about whether the startup can deliver what they say they can or not. Healthy scepticism combined with some signs they really might be able to. I decided to pre-order after reading this thread, and I hope my money isn't gone ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113819
Do you know if anyone is building a large format e-reader for sheet music? Having a nice way to flip pages would be nice, too (full touch screen probably unnecessary).
That looks pricey, but great. Thank you. I'm not sure if a double-page is necessary. I was thinking about using an old iPad in the meantime. I wonder if a microphone could follow the music well enough to follow along -- detect mistakes or automatically change pages.
I'm working on a board that will allow you to address multiple kindle form factor screens in an array (each with 600x800 resolution).
I noticed that the module I purchased last year for development ED060SC4 has become quite a lot more expensive on eBay but is still pretty cheaply available on Alibaba, the issue I forsee having is that the screens have edges which will create gaps in the image, might not be too noticable in a sufficiently large array if the virtual image is larger to account for the gaps in the physical display.
There's also the ED097OC1 which is much larger but I think would still suffer from the edge problem and I'm not sure what the price is at medium scale (10s of units).
Please e-mail me if you have a source on these parts or larger tileable panels!
I have this exact same problem, I'd really like an A4/US-letter sized E-reader, but last time I researched they were insanely expensive ($1k+), had horrible resolution and very hard to find. I can't be the only one, right?
Suggested it to them in another thread for an open version of their Joan product [0] and as I remember it, someone from Visionect hopped in and said it'd raise their support requirements a bit too much for hobbyists.
I bought an 10" / A4 size e-ink Android tablet last year and use it as second/third screen. And I take it outside park/garden and use it with the stylus and a bluetooth keyboard. I feared the latency common with e-ink but it's quite fast nowadays and perfectly fine for coding in full sunlight, even watching YouTube videos in non-fullscreen mode works fine.
CLeary I didn't keep up with the evolution of the technology, the last time I tried e-ink, the refresh rates were so slow that being able to watch videos was completely unconceivable... I'm impressed that you can now do that (even though not in fullscreen mode). By the way, what's the manufacturer of the tablet you have bought?
Aside: I wonder if two Kindles/Nooks couldn't be rigged up side by side, with some xrandr magic on a rooted device... surely would be done by now if possible?
These are fun[0] but no sign of additional screens.
I would love to have a two screen eReader that would open like a physical book. It could have multiple modes of operation:
1. a page turn would change both displays like a physical book
2. a page turn would just shift one page over and bring up the next page
3. one page could be 'pinned' and page turning would just occur on the unpinned screen
I would also like to be able to create bookmark 'pairs' that would bring up two (not necessarily adjacent) pages of my choosing. I think this would make eReaders much more useful for technical books.
> ...they've got bizarre anti-consumer constraint to basic functionality as well.
Can you elaborate on this? I've considered buying one of these things since the price dropped from $1k to $700, but if I can't read and annotate PDFs without pointless barriers it's useless to me.
It's been some time since I have read the reviews of the big Sony devices. My recollection is that the most recent version will only handle PDFs. I think it does support making annotations but with some sort of weird limitation.
Anyway, my memory could be faulty, so it's best if you find and read the reviews yourself.
I also really, really want an A4 sized eReader but for reasons completely beyond me the only manufacturer of such a device is Sony and not only are they ridiculously overpriced they've got bizarre anti-consumer constraint to basic functionality as well.