I have always been perplexed, and annoyed, by reviews of ereaders that focus almost entirely on hardware issues – how fast, how sharp, how bright, how much memory, is it made of metal or plastic etc. Important details but, really, the issue is does it make reading a pleasant and satisfying experience? The technical stuff takes one or two sentences.
Reviewers hardly ever tell you what it is like to actually read books with them. They might say it is comfortable to hold in the hand but what is the highlighting system like, does it work easily when actually reading, can you retrieve and download your highlights (how do you do that, and in what format), is searching for words and phrases in the text managed well, does it provide easy to dictionaries and other internet resources, are page layouts and formats easily adjusted, does the ereader tie you in to a particular cloud service (and if so how easy is that to use?) etc. etc.
No it;s always minor details about processors ad memory – important enough bu not the main reason for buying an ereader.
The situation has not improved now that we moved in to the era of ereader/notebook hybrids. In fact with notebooks the issue is even more important. Reviewers forget that there are at least two kinds of notebook users – journallers and workbooks. The former are well suited to eink notebooks for, by and large, they are ore likely to keep a notebook as a running, routine commentary on a topic. The man feature of journalling is that it is a continuous record, developed over time. A prose diary is the most obvious case.
For me at least, a workbook is much less coherent and usually involves a ore fragmentary approach. Entries are not necessarily sequential though they might be but never spread across an entire notebook. To coin a word, workbooks are ‘heterotopic’.
So when I read reviews of eink notebooks I want to know what purposes they suit best. Like many people I have on three occasions decided, or been persuaded, to try them out because they seem like the next best thing (I’ve own a Boox, a reMarkable, and lately a Scribe). I do not currently have one because they do not suit my ‘workbook’ style – disparate notes – yes I’ll call them ‘jottings’ – that, when written into the ‘white box’ of an eink screen are not easily ‘retrieved’.
But reviewers never tell you about these issues – how well does an eink notebook enable search and how easily do they all the writer to extract and organise retrievals into useful lists – much like ‘notes’ from a Kindle – No reviewer tells you about how tools for find, retrieve and organise scribbles from disparate sections of disparate workbooks. And I have yet to to find an eink notebook that does this.
This example is bit extreme, but it sums up how irrelevant so-called reiews can be. This one aims to be general – to cover 5 reasons why eink notebooks are great – but it never talks about note taking!
https://www.xda-developers.com/e-ink-tablets-are-the-best-notetaking-devices
5: No more inky fingers (Ink! OK maybe but now excuse and can’t even use a pen correctly!)
4: Instant backups (doh! standard these days across almost all software’/hardware and especially handhelds
3: No more wasting paper (dubious – wasting? not if you are maintaining your paper notes; besides this is small beer compared with eh production footprint of devices)
2: I can do other tasks too (well, this isn’t the point is it?)
1: Handwriting recognition (agan, fair enough, but come on – if you can’t read your own handwriting what’s the point?)