# My e-reading Journey Created: [[2023_10_18]] 20:09 Tags: #Blog #Remarkable #Boox I unknowingly ended up with several reading devices. By chance, I have bounced around from a Kindle Paperwhite, to a Remarkable 2, to an iPad and have just landed on what, I think, is the king of them all, the Onyx Boox Page. ![[all_readers.jpg]] ## Kindle Paperwhite Starting with the Kindle Paperwhite, it was given to me as a gift because I was always reading things on my small little phone. I actually quite enjoyed reading on the Kindle Paperwhite. It was light & small enough to carry with one hand, had a backlight, and could reasonably read many formats (as long as you had the Swiss army knife of e-books: [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com/)). The form-factor was nice, but getting books onto the device was a bit cumbersome, with having to add books by USB to circumvent Amazon's monopoly on books. Thinking back on it, the Kindle was actually a great device that I really enjoyed using, it did what I wanted, and it did it well. But it just did not offer everything I wanted. For example, I'd have loved to peruse Hacker News on the device & when I was using it the web browser had not come out, yet, I think. I just tested it using my preferred Hacker News reader of choice: [Hacker Daily](https://hackerdaily.io) and it was unable to even load the page despite being a pretty basic page. I was able to get the actual Hacker News site to load, but it is ugly as ever. So in summary, the Kindle Paperwhite was too limited for me to enjoy as anything other than the device that I read books with. ## Remarkable 2 When the Remarkable 2 was announced on Hacker News, I was sold. It was sold to me on Hacker News as a Hacker's dream, you had SSH root to the device, there was already a community of people building things on top of the Remarkable 1 & it seemed like it would be largely compatible. The device was running Linux, it was the works for ensuring that you could modify anything you wanted on the device for years to come. On top of all the software side, as I spoke about in my article [[Remarkable 2, Great Hardware, Lack-luster Software]], the hardware was just phenomenal. I mean, it was super-thin, a good size for writing & actual-size PDFs and the most remarkable part about it, it really felt like you were writing on paper. Unfortunately, reality set in shortly after getting it. The Remarkable 2, was not largely compatible with the Remarkable 1 and all the previous hacks would not work for months. Previously, the Remarkable team maintained an engineering blog explaining how things worked on their busy box based custom system. But they slowly stopped adding anything to the blog. While all the pieces were there, the devs who built up the Remarkable 1 ecosystem largely fell apart around the Remarkable 2 ecosystem. Then came the "connect" subscription that added insult to injury because Remarkable (the company) needed to find a way to monetize recurring revenue on the hardware that they were selling. Then a nail in the coffin, the dreaded v3 update that broke even more of the ecosystem. Even to this day, there is largely no support for any of the home-brew Remarkable v2 software. Sure, on v2 it was great to use DDVK hacks into the Remarkable software or even completely circumvent that and run essentially an entirely different system by using Koreader instead like in my project [[Remarkable 2 with Koreader]]. While I loved the hardware, there were some limitations to it too. Namely, the lack of a backlight. While also being too cumbersome to read with one hand, even when I added a phone strap to mine (which helped, but you can only hold it for so long). Initially, I convinced myself to try to use the Remarkable as part of my daily routine, writing in a journal every day for months. I used it as a scratch pad for ideas, drawing diagrams to better understand what I was working on. I did find some value in it, but again the software made it difficult to extract anything out of the device. For example, if I wrote some important thing in one notebook, it was safely on the device, but I could almost never find it again from the application. Having to go page by page made it no better than an e-notebook. Which I get is exactly what they were going for but remember I was sold on the hack-ability not the notebook part (which is definitely my own fault since that is not how Remarkable markets themselves). So the Remarkable 2 was just too limited for what I wanted out of it, I want an e-reader to read books, articles and even Hackernews on, not something with the functionality of a book. ## Boox Page Now, this is the whole motivation for this post, this device (or really the whole line of devices) does everything that I need. Boox devices are essentially a skinned version of Android to work well on e-paper screens. This gives them all the upsides of Android (any apps you want) with the benefit of e-paper (comfortable reading & battery life). I find this to be a perfect combination because I use a service called [[Organizing my reading with Readwise Reader|Readwise Reader]] to read articles that I collect across the web (similar to Instapaper & Pocket). So on one device, I read Hacker News, collect that article into Readwise Reader, read it from there, tag it, or I can read an e-book on [[KOReader]]. I'm very excited about this because I was previously doing parts of this on an e-reader and other parts were on an iPad or on my computer. Suffice to say, I'm thrilled with my purchase, the Page specifically is quite small and portable (I can fit it into my bigger pockets) making it convenient to hold with one hand and read for hours if I wanted. ## References -