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e-reader - i-pad - l-aptop

June 13, 2026

Eros - Eris

I have a love-hate relationship with all portable screen devices. I love them for their portability. But, I hate

  • laptops - because of their small screens (as compared to my desktop),
  • tablets - because I miss a decent keyboard,
  • ereaders - because every manufacturer locks them down.

I will rant some other time about laptops and tablets. Let's put our burning focus on ereaders.

Eros

These modern book-like devices, have lot going for them:

  • leightweight: no backpain when carrying them around, no hand or arm pain when using them for for many hours sitting on your sofa or lying on your couch.
  • very high-quality e-paper screens that are easy on your eyes, some of them with frontlight; the refresh and ghosting problems they used to have, have been reduced to a level I would call these issues 'minor'.
  • because of the low power-consumption of the screens: a high battery autonomy.
  • the feature to write on them: using Wacom EMR pen infrastructure with a low latency of about 20ms as modern devices allow, makes writing on them - almost - like writing on paper. Note taking really becomes a pleasure on these devices.
  • so much long-term storage memory that you can fit the library of an entire nation onto them.
  • network connections that are so fast that downloading a PDF or an epub happens in the blink of an eye.

Eris

Then why does every freakin' vendor choose to lock-down their devices in such a way that they almost become unusable? I bought a Sony DPT-RP1 about a decade ago. Nice large e-paper, with good - but not perfect - writing facility (with a pen that needed charging). However, managing your libary of PDFs on it was a pain. Until some-one wrote a python library for it, managing your device with their windows/mac-only tools was a pain. And even with the python library it is a pain. Why not just run an ssh server on the device such that you can mount the thing, log in to it or run an scp or rsync?

Recently, I bouth a Viwoods AI paper, which came highly recommended by a handful of (almost professional) ereader reviewers. It would have an excellent display, an excellent writing infrastructure, run android and provide access to the play store and even sync with cloud services. I agree with the former observations, I don't agree with the latter. The sync is only working in one-way: from your device to the cloud and not vice versa. No reviewer cared to mention that? Seriously, these reviewers are not professional ereader users. I loathe their fake stories on youtube.

Moreover, why did Viwoods decide to build a wall between the internal file system, the internal storage, and the cloud? Why did they compartment the device into writing (the 'paper' section) and reading (the 'learning' section)? Life is not split up in writing and reading. Poor system design. I even think: probably deliberate poor system design. I found a way to sneak in my writing notes into the 'learning section' by using a single-page PDF with a background that looks most similar to the jpeg-background that you can put onto pages you can add to that single-page PDF. However. The writing facilities on the PDF are limited compared to the support you have in the paper section.

Eirene

I would love a vendor that makes an e-paper with a high-quality e-paper screen, decent processor, decent memory, storage, wifi, USB-networking, running a standard GNU/Linux. The eco-system would be open to anyone. The community would make decent quality tools soon enough. Alas, the world is littered with morons, and I seem to have no choice but to become one of them.