I was considering reMarkable. If only it was more open…
I might still fall for it, since it gives root access out of the box, so I could, in theory, disable bits I don’t like, and perhaps add bits that are missing.
Also it only has 8GB of internal storage - that would fill up quickly with all the books I’d like to put on it.
But I’d rather spend equivalent (or even three times that) money on something like this from Purism. I’m tired of getting around limitations and annoyances imposed by vendors. Not my game anymore.
So I’m on a lookout for e-reader/writer, that would allow me to comfortably read something, write or draw something, and would have enough flexibility to get those somethings out of it, or into it, without having to connect to the Internet.
My ideal e-ink reader would look like this:
- Running free software
- B5 format - ideal for textbooks, a bit tight for music scores, but still OK.
- Enough storage for hundreds of books (Project Gutenberg, Project Runeberg are great sources of classics), so that I can go offline and still read (Librem 5 have storage solved completely, with its support for sd cards as big as hard disks)
- Support for USB flash drives, keyboards, mice, and ethernet (act as computer)
- Export filesystem over usb (act as flash drive)
- Ultra low latency touch screen. (1ms latency ideal, 50ms latency makes lines lag about one inch behind stylus)
- E-ink screen working comfortably in direct sunlight, and with a support for partial screen redraws.
- Matte display - I hate mirrors that pretend to be screens.
- Low power CPU/GPU sacrificing performance to get longer runtime - this thing is supposed to replace a paper book or a sketch book, not to be a high end number crunching millions of petafloops beast.
- Two weeks on one battery charge. (Without data syncing, simple reading/writing 4 hours a day, otherwise idle)
- Weight: up to the same weight as Debian GNU/Linux bible (650 paper pages).
- Basic applications for starters: document viewer, e-mail client, web browser, some open cloud client.
- Killer app: ability to overlay hand written annotations over any document/book (in graphical form) or over an empty page/set of empty pages - That’s what touch screen would be primarily for.
- Any else nice-to-have’s coming at later date from the app store - but this is covered by the point about free software already
