>Surely nobody is reading entire books on a laptop screen?
You'd think so, but e-readers (hardware) cost more than $0. Plus, phones are more commonly pocket-carried than ereaders (hardware) given that most ereaders (hardware) don't fit in your pocket, and most people don't buy multiple ereaders (hardware).
Same issue for me, I have a 2 paperwhites. But still primarily read from my iPad, as I also like to read online articles. Which doesn't work with the experimental browser.
The Kobo I have actually comes with an official Pocket integration out of the box! I can save articles to Pocket and read them on my e-reader.
And considering that Pocket supports highlighting things in articles, and Kobo supports highlighting things in books, I should be able to highlight articles as well, right? Nope!
Love the e-ink screen, hate the software that powers it.
Yeah, I resisted getting an ereader for the longest time because of the software and how silly DRM is. But with KOReader on my Kobo I'm pretty happy with it as a way to read paperbacks. In theory reading online articles should be as easy as an automatic converter from a browser "reader mode" to an epub. I don't know if anything exists to do that, though. Unfortunately they're just not mainstream enough to get much attention from programmers, which is a shame.
I spent a year reading on my 10.5in amoled tablet, it worked really well for night time reading at low brightness with the night filter on and KOReader in dark mode. In some ways that setup actually worked better for me than KOReader on an eink device because dark mode amoled contrast is much better than the front light on my actual eink reader.
That said, I wouldn't want to read anything except PDFs on a laptop and I'd much rather read them on a large high-refresh-rate amoled tablet.
You're getting pounded by other comments, but you're absolutely right -- it's the elephant in the room in this discussion.
The sibling comments here are pretty much variations on "I don't like/have E-ink devices, so your opinion is irrelevant", ignoring the fact that there's millions out there, and it's genuinely a popular medium.
It's pretty obvious why they're not supporting E-ink devices: that would require embedded Linux skills, and pretty low-level knowledge of the display hardware in these things. But the project was written by Typescript programmers.
Absolutely I do. It's an excellent experience to me. I've never enjoyed e-ink.
First up, excellent ergonomics. The screen is on a natural stand. I hate holding up a tablet/e-reader and always trying to rest it on something. I can change page with space-bar/cursors/touch-screen/touchpad which helps avoid my hand cramping unlike a device that supports a single grip with your thumb hovering/doing the same action repeatedly for hours.
Split-screen notes and ebook on either side with any OS chrome like top-bars, task-bars on auto-hide is beautifully minimal. With a proper keyboard, it's a wonderfully productive setup for technical reading. Navigating e-books efficiently, copy-paste sections, cross referencing multiple books and related web-searches are all vastly easier on a proper computer.
I don't experience any eye-strain with a screen set at minimal brightness with some off white/black e-reader colours.
Technical references, definitely, though they are often available as HTML rather than needing a reader for ebook formats.
I have an old Windows tablet that I use for reading occasionally – it is bigger than my phone (lower pixel density considerably, but fine enough), can be carried around more easily than a laptop, and at this point in its life is expendable – that counts as desktop with regard to running apps. Windows 8.1 though so now EOL, I'll have to see how well Linux likes its hardware as I don't fancy Win10+ on that spec!
Also: you don't need to be reading entire books for the app to be useful, especially as it runs on other devices, so you have the same reader elsewhere.
For technical references it's a very sad day if the only thing I can find is a PDF or ePub. It hasn't happened yet. Technical references aren't read sequentially; random access is essential. By far the best technology available for random access is a book. Web browsers are a close second, but only if the content has been formatted specifically for the web.
I do so regularly on my desktop PC. There's something about reading on a 27" monitor that a tiny e-ink device can't replicate. Plus it's something I already have.
Plus, the ability to reference a book while doing something else is indispensable.
That's your mistake right there. If some workflow or usage pattern is possible, you can bet that somebody, somewhere is doing it, and relying on it. No matter how silly it might look to you.
> Surely nobody is reading entire books on a laptop screen?
At least one person is doing any incredible thing that other people can think of.
Actually I don't care much about eink devices because I don't have one. I don't read ebooks on a computer screen. I read them on my phone. From my point of view an ebook reader is pointless if it doesn't run on Android.
If it syncs the current page to some server that I can self host, great, but that's a combination that I didn't find yet.
