Are E-ink devices still a thing?

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Alternatively newer DVD and BD burners support M-DISC, which provide greater archival media longevity (up to 1000 years). Of course, you’ll still need some sort of disc reader to extract the data in 1000 years.

A question nobody asked

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by theducks

Multi-terabyte USB3 (they should work on USB2, just slower) Hard drives are available for (well) under US$100

I keep my books, music, etc. on a Western Digital My Passport hard drive and back it up a couple of times a week to a Western Digital My Book. Every few years I replace one, then the other and send the old one to a friend in California.

I'm waiting for the day when Google Drive or OneDrive offers a cheap enough option to back up everything online.

[Thasaidon]

Originally Posted by Luffy

Thank you, JSWolf and Sirtel. Maybe hard disks fail in cold countries only? Not equatorial islands like my country.

I am in the Philippines temperatures usually 30 to 40 degrees celsius, humidity 80 per cent. The hard drive in my PC died earlier this year. I have had two hard drives fail in work PCs (in the UK)over the last twenty years,

A mechanical hard drive like ALL mechanical devices WILL fail eventually. The more complicated it is usually the quicker it will fail.

[Luffy]

Duly noted. I won't be using cloud though. That's out of the question. I feel confident in my back up policies. I'll report here if my data is lost.

[pdurrant]

22 years ago, Salon magazine ran a competition for Haiku error messages. My favorite was

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

-- David Dixon

[Luffy]

That was depressing.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

How well do those work when you've no internet, the service is down, or you are travelling etc.?

I know a lot of these are convenient, but not one is as cheap and reliable as your own laptop and none are backup solutions. Most people have no idea of the uptime, how to back them up, security or privacy either.

The Sony PSR350, Kindles (DXG, Paperwhite 3, Keyboard) and Kobos are almost never separately charged. After sorting out the fetching of annotations (Kobo) or deleting or sending of books I leave it connected till it's charged. They all still charge after Eject Device on Calibre or the Desktop. I also backup the Kobo database, not possible on Kindles, Nook, Binatone or Sony I've had.

How well does Calibre work with no cable to sync the device? Or if your Kobo and Calibre versions get out of sync with no internet while travelling? I feel like those are all about as likely as one of the cloud services having meaningful downtime.

Calibre IMO is a PITA. There's some useful plugins for it, but I hate sideloading books. I hate fiddling with conversion settings, I hate that it doesn't work properly with Japanese books with an English interface.

I recently picked up a Boox Nova 2. It's great that I can buy a book off Amazon or Kobo and just read and not have to download the book to my PC, make sure the desktop clients are all the right version, etc. I just download the book. It's great.

I still periodically backup my books, but it's nice not to have to do that with every purchase (or every purcahse on a another store anyways).

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

How well does Calibre work with no cable to sync the device? Or if your Kobo and Calibre versions get out of sync with no internet while travelling? I feel like those are all about as likely as one of the cloud services having meaningful downtime.

Calibre IMO is a PITA. There's some useful plugins for it, but I hate sideloading books. I hate fiddling with conversion settings, I hate that it doesn't work properly with Japanese books with an English interface.

I recently picked up a Boox Nova 2. It's great that I can buy a book off Amazon or Kobo and just read and not have to download the book to my PC, make sure the desktop clients are all the right version, etc. I just download the book. It's great.

I still periodically backup my books, but it's nice not to have to do that with every purchase (or every purcahse on a another store anyways).

Given that you mention you buy books from Kobo and you own a Kobo, you could easily "buy a book off Kobo and just read and not have to download the book to your PC, make sure the desktop clients are all the right version, etc. You just download the book."

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Given that you mention you buy books from Kobo and you own a Kobo, you could easily "buy a book off Kobo and just read and not have to download the book to your PC, make sure the desktop clients are all the right version, etc. You just download the book."

Yes, but sometimes I buy off Amazon because it's only there or it's significantly cheaper or I'm buying in Japanese which means I have to do that whole thing regardless of who I buy off because they both require seperate accounts to do that. Yeah, I can buy off Kobo, and do, but when I didn't it was a PITA.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'm waiting for the day when Google Drive or OneDrive offers a cheap enough option to back up everything online.

Have a look at Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Customers can store data for as little as $1 per terabyte per month,

It is the retrieval that is [relatively] expensive.

Or you can use Bulk retrievals to cost-effectively access significant portions of your data, even petabytes, for just a quarter-of-a-cent per GB.

....

Q: How much data can I retrieve for free?

Amazon S3 Glacier offers a 10 GB retrieval free tier. You can retrieve 10 GB of your Amazon S3 Glacier data per month for free. The free tier allowance can be used at any time during the month and applies to Standard retrievals.
Q: How much does Amazon S3 Glacier cost?

[sakura-panda]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Kobo displays the cover art FYI. They have since the beginning. One of their cooler features. If you just want a reader to read ePubs they are pretty good.

Problem is there really isn't much reason to upgrade for most people unless they break. Screens haven't changed much in the last 5 years.

I did not know that! I had a Sony that displayed the book cover and I loved that feature.

I believe that ebook readers are not competitively priced for their perceived value. With one size being slightly larger than most phones and the other size being slightly smaller than most full-size tablets, there isn't much incentive for people to pay a premium to try one out. I've used them, and I know for myself I'm more likely to read on an eink reader than on a shiny tablet, but I think most people wouldn't know that about themselves and aren't willing to pay the premium to test it. (I bought my first ebook reader when tablets cost twice as much or more than an eink device. I recently bought a new iPad, just to use for reading, for a bit over $300.)

[fduniho]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Now that the novelty has faded,
Are E-ink devices still a thing?

It's not as though E-ink devices are just some kind of fad that only had novelty going for them. For some people, E-ink is a must-have technology that makes reading easier.

Have there been any significant improvements made, since the invention of it?
I started out with a PRS 505, then had a Jetbook nano, Jetbook color, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Paperwhite, and a 2017 or 2018 Amazon Oasis.
The Oasis was my last device.

I started with a Kobo without a touchscreen. Thanks to having a touchscreen, my next ereader, a Kindle Touch, was a huge improvement over it. My last two were the Likebook Mars and the Paperwhite 4. Both are very good devices for reading books, and the Mars is great for reading manga too. What I hope will eventually become available is a large color ereader suitable for color comic books. Color would also be useful for web browsing and in various apps that don't support black and white screens very well.

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

People who think phones or tablets are fine for reading most likely aren't reading like I do, or they don't have the vision issues I have. I read on average 3-5 fiction books per week, especially since mid March.

I can't take my glasses off and hold my iPhone or Mini 7" from my eyes in a dark room for 1-2 hours every night. I can do that with my Paperwhite or Oasis, and I could on my Kobo Glo HD.

I have read a few books on my phone or mini, when they were only available on the Overdrive app. But I avoid it like the plague.

When reading non-fiction, I use my Mini or Pro if there are pictures or maps, but the reading is done on e-ink.

E-ink gave pleasure reading back to me in 2009. It means a lot, is very important, and my life would not be the same without it. And I say that with no hesitation nor apology for being too precious or emotional. If backlit devices were my only choice for reading, my reading would be seriously reduced, at least by 3/4ths.

What I used to do, is use my Ipad Mini, set it to darkest setting, and then apply a screen dimmer app (filter). I set it to triple click the home button, so it would engage.
It would be dark enough to read in a dark room (especially when dark mode has been enabled), and could darken the screen by an additional 0-95% (totally dark); with best settings between 50-65% additional darkness on the darkest ipad setting.
Dark enough to not wake the wife, but still bright enough to read.

[kandwo]

E-ink is a godsend! My eyes get tired sitting in front of a computer screen for big chunks of my day and reading on an active screen for more than a couple of minutes is torture.

I feel today's e-ink is almost as good as paper. I couldn't do without it since I move around a lot and can't take my library of physical books with me; and I refuse to read on a normal screen (I have done so in the past, and my eyes were sure to punish me for it). I also read in several different languages, so an e-reader makes it easier to gain access to the books I want to read; they are often not available in physical copies or crazily expensive. The built-in dictionary also helps - I remember hauling around a big dictionary whenever I read a book before.

Whenever I find myself a more permanent place to live I will prefer physical books for everything except language learning, traveling and the books I can't easily buy other than electronically.

For me the future of e-ink lies in another direction, though: in higher refresh rates and colour screens.

I look forward to the day when I can buy an affordable e-ink monitor for my computer with a high enough refresh rate to allow writing without visible lag. The other thing I'd really want is a 13 inch colour ereader for graphical novels and comics. Oh, and a black and white e-ink phone. Then I'd be all set

[rem736]

i don't see why e-ink should not still be relevant. the bar here is to match ink printed on paper. strictly for text like those printed on novels where color is not required, e-ink screens look much more like printed text on paper than the same text viewed on a conventional tablet/phone screen.

as long as there is the want/need to replace something analog (book/paper) but with digital advantages, then people will keep on innovating. e-ink will be no longer relevant when there's better technology at reproducing ink on paper than e-ink. but at this point, that device would not be a conventional back lit screen.