/lounge/ - Lounge

the screen of mine looks amazing even though it is 14 years old and the battery is still holding up plenty. i've been meaning to read more but i hated reading on a laptop and i never succeeded in managing my physical books reasonably.

this is a picture of one that is even older then mine. it has even girthier bezzles then mine.

this is a picture of the exact model i have. i guess this is still kind of girthy but i don't mind. i already dropped it from a chair once foolishly but it did not seem to mind too much.

with the little device i can sit in the sun and read from the device. i hated using a laptop or a phone in the sun and always wished for the sun to be gone so i can see the screen better but this e-ink i actually consider very pleasant, i feel like this has been missing from my life and now that i have found multiple things at the same time with it:
>the way to read
>the way to get more sun
>the way to spend time more wisely when i can't find interesting videos to watch
>the way out of the intellectual void that my life is

i am not proud to say this but i have tried reading the last few years and it just never worked. it felt like sitting on a bench that is inclined downwards just slightly and i kept slowly slipping off and constantly had to re-adjust myself, i could just never get comfortable with it and quit after 5 minutes. now i enjoy it, now i eagerly scour the web for interesting epubs to read. i very much enjoy the .epub file format. reading pdf with this small of a device is not fun because in pdf the text can't just reflow easily to adjust to the small size of the device.

also mine is just black and white. the resolution looks good but reading something like a cookbook with it isn't fun. i can make out what the picture is but the color is clearly missing. it is fine for simple pictures and pictures of graphs, diagrams, tables though. for all more serious things this is wonderful.

here is a picture of a more modern one then mine that can display colour and apparently even play audio. i'd rather just use my phone for that though.

on this picture you can see the slider and the dedicated backlight button. slider puts book into standby (which shows the cover of the last epub file i opened) or when i hold it it actually powers off. battery has probably lost half it's longevity but i have not even thought of replacing it yet. works good.

i thought reading was over, i said this for a few years but now that i succeeded in getting to read, videos just can't replace the timeless feeling. videos only go back a few decades. i can read books they say have been passed down for thousands of years.

imagine playing a 500 year old video game, people in the year 2526 will do this for fun and then get bored with it and turn back into liquid.

i looked for quite a while until i found exactly mine because i was worried that these newer ones are just completely enshittified technocratic surveilance nightmares.

the ones from the company 'remarkable' apparently don't even have usb because you're not supposed to just be able to connect this to your computer easily and conveniently, they want to force you into cloud subscriptions. this is shoved down the cattle's throat and i am not participating. i expected that from that company because they actually exhibited their devices to try out in my local technology shop (that used to sell everything, now doesn't even sell hdds anymore)

reading isn't over, i was too ill-equipped to see clearly!

just getting the little device out and reading a few pages for 5 minutes several times throughout the day and a small book is quickly completed. takes but a day or two or three and these little books melt away in my hand.

this is more user-friendly then having to look for another 10 minute video because i have already seen all my videos from my feed. i just get the little thing from my backpack, get it out of sleep and i am already at my page and i can just instantly continue. if i lived a busy life and had to be in meetings with people all day, i would love to have this because when someone is running late or i was too early or just had these little windows of time i wouldn't quite know what to do with, i could always just whip it out and knock off a few pages!

first it felt so unusual to read without having found my pace but after musceling through it i found there is a natural rhythm to reading in when to pick up the book and when to lay it down. when i want to dwell on something and read i again the next time i pick it up i just stop reading.

that's the book being so interesting that it knocks itself out of my hand! this is when the information is so good that it transcends the digital and grows into reality!

just found a nice site where you can download free legal ebooks that had their copyright expired:

https://www.globalgreyebooks.com

my market research so far:

kindle: awful because they are made by amazon. they can be "jailbroken" to give it a few additional liberties but as i understand it only in a way which adds another reading app, everything else undesirable in terms of software remains intact unfortunately. obviously amazon is not into respecting the user but into selling subscriptions and bothering people with advertisement, micro transactions and feed what you read to big brother and being a zionist and a war profiteer.

in terms of hardware … who cares. they are evil. friends of epstein. i don't even look at the hardware specs.

kobo: my favorite so far. apparently they used to be awful in forcing people to activate the device with an account but they came to their senses and gave people the option not to.

i did this and added a line to a config file in the internal storage, which can be accessed when connecting the device as a thumbdrive to the computer. deactivates the need for an account and also removes the button for the kobo store. so it can be used purely as an offline device to display files that can be copied over via usb as if it was a thumb drive.

i like that it doesn't use android, doesn't have any stupid bloat on it, just works. i like the ui. i can change everything that matters to me in terms of font, i can highlite text, type annotations to passages of text, tap the corner to make a book ear and best of all i can quickly find and jump in between all these types of interactions i made with the book. there is a button to jump to another chapter, i can search a book and have it turn onto the page where a certain word appears or when i don't know a word i can use the included dictionary. there is even a way to have it search wikipedia but i don't wanna give it wifi so i never tried. these days you can't give things internet access because companies conspire against you. besides wikipedia is just a nasty digital battlefield.

i probably wait for their next line of readers to come out and when they still have not been enshittified i will buy one that is bigger to display pdf in color.

boox:

they use android so i don't really looked too much into them. they have big devices with pens that can make annotations but they use android so i can't imagine that they are into respecting the user and i would never give that thing wifi.

PocketBook:

if kobo didn't exist i'd probably pick one of these. some of those have android, others use their own operating system. i like that they have a file explorer so i can navigate my files by their names and not by how good their meta-information has been completed in the epub file. they too ask for wifi and demand some kind of account being made but never giving it wifi is an option to use it as an offline device.

those apparently have headphone to listen to audiobooks, some even have speaker, on a device where i can install my own operating system i would like a speaker, on a device where i can not, i don't want it to have a speaker, because i once heard all speakers are also microphones, dunno how true that is.

remarkable:

those seem like the worst after amazon to me. they wanna force cloud on people hard, they can't even simply connect via usb, they use a web interface instead of just regular tried and tested usb mass storage. i just read it can be used without account and internet account which was a surprise since they expect you to be using companion apps and sheit. they seem annoying and data-collecty. apparently they act like they are free open source but don't make everything available. so i don't even respect them enough to look at their hardware specs.

Viwoods: "A newer Android-based brand offering AI-integrated devices"

big brother type shit, sounds so disgusting to me i wouldn't even want to see a picture of such a device.

Supernote:

they have 2 models which use some kind of old android without play store. too expensive. they are designed to be used with pens. i dunno, i'd never seriously consider a device at that price where i can't even put my own linux on.

pine: this is the only silver lighting on the e-ink horizon. for some reason costs 600€ in the europe store currently while 400$ in the us. the company has wronged me already and did not give a fuck, which is too bad, otherwise i might have waited for this one and gave it a try. what bothers me is they have microphone built in but i am sure i would be able to remove them, the pine stuff is built to be accessed by the user, i assume it would be as easy as removing cables from the connector to get rid of it.

Any good ereaders around 8" that have long battery and SD cards?
Would like to load some manga on there too not just books.

>>323277
>Any good ereaders around 8" that have long battery and SD cards?

depends on if you want a colored e-ink display. i don't know in what fileformat the manga come though.

the biggest color e-ink on a kobo is the kobo libra colour with an 7 inch display and 32gb internal memory and no sd card. assholes took the sd slot out apparently. they say the battery lasts for weeks.

if you don't insist on colour, you can find an older kobo for cheap that has a 6 inch screen and an sd card slot.

i didn't know the newer ones don't have sd card slot, that's quite disgusting behavior by the manufacturer. costs them literally nothing to include an sd card slot in mass production and is imensely useful to whoever uses the device.

>>323280
Yeah couldn't find one with SD card either in the 8" range is why I asked just in case.
Feel like 6" is too small for manga.
32gb ain't much for manga either, it's not horrible, but I'd rather not have to make due.
I'll reconsider if I want one for purely reading.
I don't care for color. Feels like another layer of complexity that could go wrong and is more expensive.

>>323285
>I don't care for color. Feels like another layer of complexity that could go wrong and is more expensive.

i'm hoping for one to be released this year (by kobo, assuming they don't enshittify and keep letting users use a device without account and internet) that is big and uses color so that i can use it for pdf files. some books i can only find pdf versions and converting them to other formats seems like a nightmare. i could use them to look at jamie oliver cookbooks, which are colorfully illustrated and i always enjoyed looking at when i was younger. though it is kind of silly because i don't eat cooked food anymore…

if it comes with a pen i wouldn't mind, maybe it is fun to doodle on the actual pdfs i am reading, that looked pretty cool in videos i have seen about their current biggest reader, something like a ~10inch display.