I still have an old Kindle and it still gets months of battery life. I occasionally read comics so this may get me to upgrade.
I’ve had two kindles so far, but my next e-reader won’t be from Amazon.
I’m trying to move my tech life away from closed ecosystems as much as possible, So I’ll probably go for a kobo or boox.
For me the dream would be a really large colour ereader around 10 inches, where you can view even the densest manga or comics comfortably without zooming or scrolling. I think that’s what I’m holding out for.
Have you looked into the Note Air 3 C or the Tab Ultra C Pro from boox? They’re both exactly what you describe, and the Tab is out now but the Note launches October 24th.
Thanks. I’ve been keeping my eye on colour ereaders, and the tech has improved so rapidly in the last couple of years I do wonder if I just hang on for another year then the colour reproduction could be even better.
Can’t wait forever of course, that defeats the whole purpose, but it might pay to wait just a little.
Giving you a heads up as a Onyx Boox Nova 3 owner. These devices are poorly supported. You’d get maybe a year of “updates”, meaning the bundled apps are updated. But after that you are on your own.
It’s a brilliant e-reader don’t get me wrong, and I’ll take it over a Kobo or a Kindle any day. But go in assuming that you’d want to keep it offline.
I need them to make a 13" color so damn bad…
Uhh… What was the Kindle Fire? Wasn’t that color, it was basically a very dumb tablet instead of a smart eReader?
Paperwhite is awesome, anyway. Great battery life. Perfect format. USB-C for charging, unlike the Oasis, seriously fuck you guys so hard for giving the Oasis microUSB, fuck you fuck you fuck you. Sometimes…you just need to know your lane & stay in it.
My guess is that Amazon thinks everyone forgot about the Kindle Fire cuz that was before last quarter and that’s as far back as they remember.
Amazon Fire wasn’t an e-Ink screen, it was LCD.
But it was still a Kindle though?
In name, sure. But not really. It was Amazon trying to sell an Android tablet on the Kindle brand. It could read Kindle books using the same Kindle app as any Android device, but it was far more than an eReader and didn’t feature the eInk screen that makes eReaders worth reading on.
I have an older kindle. The micro USB is the only thing that really bothers me about it. It hasn’t bothered me enough to upgrade, but it almost did the other day if they hadn’t sold out and now jacked the price.
Still, I won’t give in to their monopoly
Anyone know of a color ereader that I can get a custom Linux distro on? Maybe Pine64 will do one eventually.
Onyx boox runs android. You could probably root it, but I’ve never looked into it
The remarkable 2 is apparently good for this if you know what you are doing.
I have one and I’m very happy with it, but I use it exclusively for todo lists and taking notes, so I have no need to tinker with it.
Pocketbook has always been the best option for linux because it already runs Linux out of the box and is easily modifiable by design
Only if you live in the US or UK. Lol I didn’t realize Amazon’s international kneecapping of their products moved to include hardware along with software.
For context if you are Canadian you don’t get access to overdrive or audiobooks on Kindle. Fun fact this also includes their fire tablets.
I just got a boox e ink tablet. It runs android. I have a sideloaded manga reading app and Google books installed. epub books (found easily on Yandex) can be uploaded to Google books from my phone.
I love it.
Which one do you have? That is pretty much my exact use case!
Oh nice! Yeah this is 100% the best way to go. I use the app Mihon for finding/reading manga, its basically the same as tachiyomi before it got shut down.
The one I use is the Boox 7.8" Nova Air2 eReader. I chose one without a color screen. The color screens are cool and all, but for black and white content, the color layer makes the white more of a grey color. For that reason I don’t recommend the color e ink quite yet.
The 7.8" screen is literally the perfect size for manga. It feels perfect.
Good luck!
I have a colour one, I think the white is pretty white tbh? Or, I mean, it looks like paper. Off-white like a book.
I have a boox page and i love it. I don’t use it for reading manga but i haven’t tried it so can’t speak on whether it would be good or bad. It’s amazing for books though, great battery life and SD slot which were huge for me. It also runs regular android so I use Koreader to read books and you could definitely download Mihon to read mangas.
I’m super torn between not wanting more Amazon in my life and wanting a convenient way to binge a lot of comics and manga
I quite like my Kobo Libra Colour
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look into it 🤔
As another owner of the Kobo Libra Colour, I can recommend it for its excellent ergonomics and UI. Plus as a bonus, it has pen support!
Youre looking for an Onyx Boox tablet - a little pricey, but worth it for the un-enshitified tablet.
I want to read comics but I also don’t want to miss out on that feeling when you turn a page and are greeted with awesome two page spreads.
Unfortunately no tablet or e-reader can have this functionality.
My Kobo Libra Color does it. I do sometimes need a bit of time to format manga properly but it’s perfectly doable.
On my iPad, I use an app called Manga Plus and in landscape I get the two page spreads. I suppose any app that’s supports two-page landscape view would work. But that wouldn’t work well for smaller tablets
Of course. However comics have square-ish aspect ratio when it is two pages side by side and rectangular when it is one page.
No screen can accommodate this change properly, yet. Maybe folding or roll-out displays will manage this someday.
Like imagine reading this along
All these interactions arranged in a grid squares
And then you turn over the page to be greeted by this grotesque monstrosity
(The comic is The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing)
A tablet for $100 would do…
Normal tablets don’t have e-Ink screens and for reading electrophoretic displays are vastly superior to LED/LCD screens.
Not the current color ones, even though they’re expensive.
They still have much longer battery life and they’re still like reading on paper. Just not in a very high “print” quality when in colour.
Depends on the OS tho. Android sucks for this.
For e-readers? It’s fine, if it’s modified heavily enough. The tolino e-reader line (before they just became kobos) used a heavily modified version of Android and they were great devices.
There were already multiple such devices from competitors on the market last year.
Personal fazit: they lose in almost every area against a cheap tablet.
I have a 2011 kindle, the silver one with no backlight . I got second hand from a friend and I use calibre on linux to convert books to the amazon format and copy them over via USB. It does the job but I have seen that these are like 20 ducats on eBay and other places if anyone wants a cheap option.
Anna’s archive with virus total for books
Cool, I wonder which type of color technology this uses though, I can’t seem to find that info.
I would prefer Gallery over Kaleido, but I’m guessing it’s Kaleido because of the different ppi listed between the b&w and color modes.
Have you ever actually used gallery? it sucks
Does it still? Refresh time looked much improved with Gallery 3 so I thought it was better now. The ReMarkable is the only device I know that uses it and I haven’t had the chance to try it yet.
I’ve got a Remarkable Pro, and the old Remarkable 2. The Pro is pretty fantastic, re: refresh times.
I’ve often wondered why e-ink displays are so expensive
IIRC licensing monopolies and capitalist bullshit.
old link but still : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407
What’s the @#%^ing point, honestly
Comics and graphic novels mostly. Maybe scientific papers and textbooks.
Oh you mean the point for Amazon? Extract money
Ha, good response. Didn’t know people got comic books on Kindle. Thought the point was having/collecting the physical ones.
Well, once you have a room full of long boxes, you kinda have to either become rich enough to build a new house with dedicated comic storage, or you start looking at digital.
Half joke aside (because good luck affording a house nowadays), reading comics digitally is actually very nice, but being able to have and store an entire published history of a comic on a single drive instead of taking up multiple boxes is too damn nice to ignore. And that’s assuming you’re paying for the digital version. If you pirate, the money issue is a major decrease in resources needed to enjoy comics. Hard to pirate physical copies of the very old and rare stuff, but easy to find digitally.
Because if you read the article, it says it has a battery life of several weeks.
Name one fucking color display tablet that can be used every day for over a week on batteries without charging? I’ll buy it tonight.
Any of the color e-ink readers from Kobo, Boox, reMarkable?
Oh fuck yes, thank you
For weebs and such to read their comics
No clue. I read on a $20 tablet I got off Amazon. With the app that suits you, why not indeed? It’s a total POS for anything but reading, but I bought it for an epub reader.
All e-readers with the e-ink tech are like $499.99
That’s just too expensive. $100 is the best I can do. So I’ll just wait for it to show up on eBay.
I’m sorry I made a mistake. I meant to refer to the note taking tablets. There’s a difference there.
Ah understand. I would assume a drawing accurate digitizer would be a significant portion of the costs.
Yeah. I could use a good note taking tool like that where I could do free drawing and handwriting. It looks like some of the offerings posted on here can do what I want but boy they are expensive. I hope those prices come down to more like the student or hobbyist edition level.
So… a tablet?
A tablet with a color eink display
If the Kindle is a tablet, then yes. If the Kindle is an e-reader, then no.
