Ah, e-readers. I'm looking for a good one since forever, but they are either too small, too slow or too costly. Hopefully technology developments will bring soon a good 10" before my eyes will need a 15" one:)
Reading old books and magazines is also a problem: they're often 100% graphics with no OCRed text, therefore they're really slow, also zooming a page with diagrams on a technical book can be painful on low end hardware.
Does anyone have a model to suggest with 10" screen size?
I don't have many other requirements, other than:
Decent speed, storage space and battery life.
Support for beefy pdfs and other e-book formats. (this is important, one of my old readers took like forever to load a big book, then 15 seconds to turn each page).
I would connect it only to my network, so it must not rely on cloud services et al.
Color not needed, grayscale will do if well implemented.
Taking notes not needed, although being able to fill pdf forms might be handy,
but it's not a requirement.
No offense, but the article discusses 10" ereaders heavily (that's the screen size of both the reMarkable 2 and the Note Air). There's also the Kobo Elipsa if you'd like something that's totally focused on reading.
I've been using a 7.8" Nova 3 myself for a few months now, and it's a dramatic improvement over the 6" Kindle I was using before. I love having a screen that's closer to the size of your average hardcover page, and it's just large enough to make PDFs readable at 100% zoom. It's also very fast, though there's always a bit of perceivable e-ink related lag unless you put an app on the fastest refresh rate. The warm frontlight is also the best I've experienced on an ereader, even better than what I've seen on Kindles.
IMO, 10" might be a smidge too large for comfortably reading in bed -- the Note Air might feel a bit too large physically and heavy to hold up if you're reading for long periods of time with one arm holding it up. If that's a common use case for you, you should really consider the Onyx Boox Nova 3, like I have, or maybe the Kobo Forma, which is a bit cheaper and reading-focused.
I'm using my Nova 3 completely disconnected from the internet most of the time, though I do occasionally find it useful to fire up Firefox for random browsing (and to sometimes transfer files with https://snapdrop.net/, which is like Apple's Airdrop on your local network). I don't think using the Nova 3, Forma, Elipsa, reMarkable 2, or Note Air offline most or all of the time would be a problem, though from what I can tell reMarkable has invested a lot in sync functionality that you might not necessarily want to turn off. Though the reMarkable probably wouldn't be for you, since it's focused on note-taking, rather than reading.
Thanks. They seem really nice devices, especially the Remarkable2.
The problem with working online is that most of these devices phone home regularly, and while I wouldn't mind if they read with me an electronics magazine or book, that would be different since I'd also use a reader for displaying medical prescriptions and/or other personal documents.
Broadly speaking, device manufacturers (TVs, home appliances, etc.) became obsessed with making users sign in to their own cloud and downloading their own app; no thanks, I'd rather buy a device that lets me browse shares on the local network I'm connected to, and/or save documents into their storage using a USB cable. If the reader and the media are both within my house walls, I don't see reasons to connect outside.
I don't use a Boox account or sign into any cloud services on my Boox, FYI -- the device isn't crippled in the slightest as a result. While I usually use Snapdrop to transfer files for convenience, I also sometimes use a USB connection. Both are essentially "offline".
Thanks, I'm looking at the Max Lumi 13.3, and am very tempted, the price tag however is what prevents me from buying it just now. I mean, it's adequate for the hardware, but I hoped I could spend not much over €500. Hopefully their price will drop next winter.
I picked up a kindle fire 10 for the express purpose of reading PDFs (RPGs, mostly, so lots of graphics), and I'm very happy with it. It is far from perfect, but it is really cheap and you get a lot for the money. You can easily install the google app store and get a solid pdf reader (I like Xodo). I got it on a Black Friday sale for $90, but they are normally $150. So worth the price!
I just wish they would put out a 12 or 13" one, and wish the aspect ratio was a bit more square to fit more PDFs perfectly.
I splurged on the 13.3" Onyx BOOX Max Lumi for largely similar reasoning: I do a lot of reads of older materials with poor-quality scans, and wanted to be able to read as many of those at full-screen rather than zoomed resolution. I also had concerns with the size of the device.
I'm happy with my purchase, though with experience, I'm happy to suggest trade-offs.
Onyx's product line is based around 7.8", 10.3", and 13.3" e-ink screens. Those are what their vendor offers, so it's what Onyx bases its builds around.
My previous experience was with a 9" emissive (OLED) Android tablet, which saw principle use as an e-book reader (the only application to which it's well-suited), with portrait-mode presentation of books and articles working fairly well. It was hard to read in bright light, with overhead lighting (screen glare), or, of course, outdoors.
The jump to 13.3" e-ink at 220 ppi makes even low-quality scans of small-print materials readable at full size (without zooming). There are a few specific cases that really impressed this on me. Many books can be read landscape mode, 2-up, which is also good.
The device is large, about the size of an A4 or Letter-sized paper tablet. This is just about at the maximum size for comfortable in-hand viewing, and you might prefer a smaller device. It packs easily into my courier pouch.
If you don't wanto to spend the $800 (over $900 when you include stylus and cover), you can shave a a few hundred on a smaller device with some compromises in reading convenience. There's an in-page navigation that will scroll either in "reverse-N" or "Z" mode, for articles or comics, respectively, dividing the page into four regions (a 2x zoom). This makes virtually any material readable, at a cost of not being able to see the full page in a single glance. Even with a 10" or 8" device, you'd likely only have to engage this for a portion of your reading. Most books are readable at 100%, and even many articles. You can also trim margins to increase the size of the actual text on the page.
Battery life is quit good (I get a couple of days per charge, but use the device for much of the day, what I'm spared is any battery anxiety), performance is quite good, the display is delicious.
The notetaking feature wasn't something that attracted me to the device but it has turned out to be surprisingly useful and appealing.
Does anyone have a model to suggest with 10" screen size? I don't have many other requirements, other than:
Decent speed, storage space and battery life. Support for beefy pdfs and other e-book formats. (this is important, one of my old readers took like forever to load a big book, then 15 seconds to turn each page). I would connect it only to my network, so it must not rely on cloud services et al. Color not needed, grayscale will do if well implemented. Taking notes not needed, although being able to fill pdf forms might be handy, but it's not a requirement.