I’ve been gifted a Sony PRS-T3 over a decade ago. I’ve recently gotten into reading again and used it to read a manhwa/webtoon/web novel (or whatever the Korean ones are called) and most recently a light novel.
It’s functional and perhaps even decent (especially given its age) but my main gripes with it are:
- Size: It’s much too small to fit an entire manga page with readable text, so you need to use hacks like kcc which is suboptimal. I’d like the display to be the size of a typical manga or slightly larger.
- Lack of customisation: It has this ugly indented paragraph style in books which I don’t like and the selection of fonts aswell as font rendering isn’t great.
- Artifacts in images: When anything more complex than text is on display (and even with text it’s subtly noticeable), you always see ghosts of the previous image. This is perhaps the most critical flaw for the purpose of reading Manga. Image quality in pictures isn’t great to begin with either.
- Slow: Page turning is fast enough but doing anything else it turns into a slog. Switching between “books” (the manhwa had each chapter as a separate book) was annoying to say the least.
- Bad UI: It’s just generally poorly organised and common things required way too many interactions (which, mind you, are slow).
- No light: I appreciate not requiring a light but I’d sometimes like to have the option.
- Ergonomics: It’s light but not very comfortable to hold. I think I’ve seen readers that have a thicker end on one side so that you can better hold onto it? I’d appreciate advice here.
It’s also showing its age; I had to tape the lid already as the material started to disintegrate.
I did very much appreciate how simple it is though. Open the lid, it immediately turns on, (I enter my PIN) and I can continue to read my book where I left off. Just like a real book but more convenient. I’d like to retain that property.
Battery life is also still great, even after all these years. I can close the lid and leave it sitting around for weeks and return to it with barely any battery drained. Again like a book where I don’t have to worry about any battery charge either.
It’s also quite light which I like, though a little bulky but totally acceptable.
Deal breakers:
- Enshittification: If the primary purpose of the reader is to sell books rather than read them, I don’t want it.
- Espionage: I don’t want Google, Amazon or anyone else spying on when I read what books. I’m probably going to have its networking off anyways but I don’t want anyone spying on me offline either.
- Gesture-only page navigation. Physical buttons please.
- Ads of any kind.
- Any power/data connector other than USB-C
I don’t care for DRM. I’ll be loading epubs onto the reader from another machine.
I don’t think I need colour. I mean, it’d be nice I guess (especially for manhwa, those appear to frequently be coloured?) but if that compromises on greyscale or text clarity, no thank you. I also don’t know whether e-ink can reproduce colour accurately enough that it’s even an upgrade over greyscale and doesn’t just look ugly.
FOSS firmware would be amazing but my research suggests that’s not really a thing? I’d settle for a decently customisable proprietary firmware as long as it doesn’t suck donkey balls or needs to be connected to the internet.
I don’t need to draw on it.
Price is secondary but I don’t like wasting money either.
I’m in Germany/EU.
I don’t have a single clue about the e-reader market. I’d appreciate any advice on what I want and, more importantly, don’t want given the constraints and desires I described.
The Elipsa is, like almost all >8” screens, designed specifically to be an e-note rather than just an e-reader. For that reason, I’m pretty sure it too lacks physical buttons. The two use cases are pretty distinct, as you wouldn’t want to accidentally change pages while writing or drawing.
That said, I have heard that the Elipsa line does a pretty good job of still functioning as a reader because of the Kobo pedigree. So it’s probably one of your best options. I’m pretty sure the software is going to be very similar to that of the Sage or Libra lines. In fact, I suspect that apart from screen size and such, it’s identical to the software on both the Sage and the Kobo Libra Colour since they both support pens too.
Image quality should be roughly as good as anything else out there. The number of e-ink screen makers is small and almost every common black and white e-ink device uses a Carta screen. But reviews say good things about the quality overall. Your concern with ghosting is common to most screens, which is based on the fact that an e-ink “pixel” is actually a bubble of suspended black pigments that can be magnetically oriented to the front surface of the bubble, making it show black, or to the back surface, showing the white solvent instead. That process isn’t complete and perfect though, so quick changes can leave a ghost image. The remedy is to do a “refresh” that flashes the whole screen in order to fully orient the pigments again. It’s slower, but it ensures a good clean image. It depends on the device firmware how often and when/why it triggers a refresh. Now I just checked on my Libra Colour and it provides a specific setting on how often to do a refresh, which you can set as often as every page if you don’t mind the delay.
I also looked into whether you need to sign in. Apparently in 2022, kobo specifically ADDED the ability to use your device without logging in (https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/02/10/how-to-use-kobos-new-sideloaded-mode/), which is a move in the RIGHT direction for once. Based on that and my history so far, they’ve been a very hands-off company that will probably not do a villainous heel turn anytime soon. Now I can’t promise anything about them changing their minds (I was surprised by Roku pulling their bullshit about forcing you to accept updated TOS or stop using the devices you own), but so far kobo has been “one of the good ones” in my experience.
Now if you’d rather pay more and be pretty damn sure you’re going to be safe on all counts, you could look into a Supernote device. They cost a lot and they are definitely designed around note-taking, but the company is very conscientious, to the point that they literally insist that you not buy more devices from them than you need. They support old devices as long as possible and they don’t offer trade-up discounts in order to limit e-waste. I have one I use for note taking and it’s a solid, well thought-out device and you definitely don’t need to sign into any account to use it. There’s a touch gesture strip along the side that if you slide your finger up the bezel, you can manually trigger a screen refresh whenever you want. They are probably the closest I’ve seen to a “we’re just here to sell you a good device” company, pretty much ever.
Edit: I don’t know much about KOreader but someone else sure does!
I don’t need that functionality but having it doesn’t hurt.
I’m done with uni but being able to take hand-written notes with a pen every now and then could be useful from time to time.
I’ve actually looked into it and it appears you can turn pages by just tapping and even adjust where you touch to perform which action.
It’s not as good as a button but this would be fine by me.
What I don’t want is weird swiping gestures that don’t work half of the time. A tap OTOH should be simple enough to get right.
Hm, I’d expect the image quality to be determined in part by firmware magic which would mean there’d still be differences.
I’ve seen a review since writing the previous message and it compared the screen side-by-side with a similarly-sized Amazon tablet and there were significant differences in contrast.
Neat, that sounds like exactly what I want from the device.
Will look into that.
I’m also aware of ReMarkable which I heard has a big hacking community around it. By chance, I actually spoke with someone who showed off theirs and how it’s just a plain Linux+systemd environment today. The GUI is just a plain old systemd service that runs the GUI binary and when they restarted it, the GUI restarted.
The biggest issue with these devices is that they really are made for writing rather than reading and are missing handy features such as a frontlight.
I forgot that yeah, a lot of these don’t have lights built-in on order to reduce the distance from the pen tip to the display layer. The Elipsa does though.
As for display quality, you’re right that the handling of gradations can be affected by firmware, but lots of them are all working with the same base display hardware. So if you drop some kinds of custom firmware or system on, you may be able to change how it’s handled. I’m not completely sure. I suppose it’s possible that there are display controllers that could vary between devices. That said, Kobo will likely be tuned for a variety of content by a bigger company that’s had a lot more time to dial in the quality.
The ReMarkable is a very nice device but one of the reasons I went with Supernote is that the nibs are ceramic and never need replacing. But yeah, there’s no frontlight on it, so it behaves a lot like paper for better or worse.