I work part-time for my university's help desk and I was both impressed and disappointed the first time I came across one of these--one the one hand, its highly customizable and supports SSH access. On the other hand, there is shockingly no way to get the MAC address without connecting via SSH, even though this is popular among academics who often need to get onto MAC filtered networks.
In hindsight, we probably could have connected it to the guest network, gotten its IP and then had the networking group look up its MAC on their logs. What we wound up doing is telling the user to go home and check their own router for the MAC, which is obviously less than ideal service.
The reMarkable is surprisingly good for its primary purpose. Everything else it does... is limited. They things they did do are done well given how they are implemented. The epub/pdf experience sucks because it doesn't have a real pdf reader. It just renders the epub to pdf and then throw the pdf into the note-taking app.
Arguably, none of the functionality is half-assed. It works very well as a writing tablet. It absolutely sucks as a general purpose device because everything except the very core experience is flat-out missing.
There isn't a good general purpose eInk tablet and the reMarkable is the closest thing we have. :(
> It just renders the epub to pdf and then throw the pdf into the note-taking app.
I found it weird at first... But then you realise you're supposed to be able to write on the pages any time. The moment you support general epub rendering your pages are no longer fixed and your notes should move around as well. The moment you change your font size, all your notes, drawings and highlights no longer match the underlying text. I actually think "render to pdf", or more specifically to some fixed page format, is the ideal experience on this device. Realigning your notes is an impossible problem to solve and if I were a dev I would also discourage any features that reflow text on demand.
Missing features (search in document, bookmarks, whatever) should be implemented for both pdfs and epubs.
Not yet. But honestly, the latest few updates have been great! Navigation between docs is much much better, pinch to zoom was a great addition, and screenshare is now better than on any eink tablet.
In general, I haven't felt like I'd reaaaaally need bookmarks since software version 2.8 (but that's a matter of taste).
OK, but both problems are "realigning your notes".
It is possible to render an element to the side of the main text in a flowing epub; I did this when I wanted to include line numbers in a text. You could use that idea to keep visible notes near their original location while reflowing the epub. But it wouldn't work at all with notes that appear over the main text.
It's also possible to just print the notes within the text; this is the approach taken by this recent edition of a selection of the 太平广记 ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/7540351934/ ). Rather than being reproduced images of older printings that include notes, it's all flowing text and marginalia is reproduced inline, within brackets and in a smaller font. (This goes so far as to indicate which part of the page the marginalia originally appeared in, though I think this is more a matter of there being different words for marginalia from different locations.)
That approach, of course, will not handle non-textual notes well.
I think OP could have used a more specific description for the sake of clarity.
The idea is that using a reMarkable is just like using a pad of paper, so you can make arbitrary handwritten notes on the text. It's hard to imagine how arbitrary notes like that would be displayed on different epub renderings, so I think it's understandable why they use their approach. I also think it's a different problem than kindles have solved.
That is exactly what I meant. The simplest UX you can have for arbitrary notes of any kind, scribbles, drawings, highlights, is to not encourage page reflow. You can come up with a bunch of other funky weird technical solutions, but once the user hits them there's a strong chance of confusion.
For tablets which encourage writing on your document, the rm2 approach of "just render epub as you would a pdf" feels by far like the best strategy.
The original epub is still stored within their document format btw. You could technically still do things with that file if you wanted.
Marginalia does not generally appear over the text on which it comments, because that would make both the text and the marginalia difficult to read. (Just look at the word - it's text that appears in the margins.)
So for practically all purposes, treating each note as an image which should be rendered to the side of a particular part of the dynamically-flowed text will solve the problem. This isn't that hard to do.
If someone is underlining parts of the text itself, that isn't independent of the flow of the text, and so it's harder to reflow. But I'm taking "notes" to mean commentary.
In the context of the reMarkable / this conversation, “notes” means whatever the user draws on the device with the stylus: underlining or circling or crossing-out words or drawing lines between them, drawing pictures or hand-writing in the margin or between lines or on the words, etc: whatever you would or could do with a physical book and a pen/pencil.
(A primary design goal of the reMarkable tablet is to be as similar to paper as possible, so (if I understood your suggestion correctly) telling users that their "notes" will be treated as images to be re-rendered to the side of the text, instead of where they put it—anywhere—would break the similarity, and apply only to a small subset of possible "notes", namely "commentary", as you said.)
I guess the affordances of the device influence what notes/annotations are likely to come into existence. On the Kindle, where IIRC input is through a keyboard (apart from highlighting), textual notes would be more common. On printed books and on the reMarkable (I'm even more "trigger-happy" on a reMarkable than on paper, probably because of undo and perfect erasing), annotation tends to be more free-form and varied, with more marks, scribbles, arrows etc, and a bit less text. Some of these annotations could also be understood and associated with corresponding text in principle, but it's not trivial. (Some examples of annotations from printed books: https://entropymag.org/writers-their-margin-notes/ )
I don't think so. The entire point of remarkable is to interact with the text. That is also How I have seen people use them at Uni. It's more like 99% of notes are tightly coupled to the text.
> So for practically all purposes, treating each note as an image which should be rendered to the side of a particular part of the dynamically-flowed text will solve the problem.
I don't think this is true. Even without underlines, which are common in notes, people place their notes based on a combination of the layout of the page and their personal preferences. I don't think it's possible to know, given one layout and note placement, how to place the note in a new layout.
It is also worth saying that many historic uses of marginalia (for example, commentary on the Tanakh) are also associated with particular parts of the text and could not be laid out as you are describing without losing intended meaning.
> It is also worth saying that many historic uses of marginalia (for example, commentary on the Tanakh) are also associated with particular parts of the text and could not be laid out as you are describing without losing intended meaning.
I don't understand this. What part of the intended meaning would be lost? I have a printing plate of part of a Chinese Buddhist text with traditional commentary attached, and it works almost identically to this modern HTML from Harvard Law Review ( https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/06/commonwealth-v-mccarthy... ) - there's an area on the page for the text, another area for the commentary, and symbols identify which comments apply to which parts of the text.
But the Harvard Law Review piece is exactly what I just described, except that the notes do not appear near the text to which they apply.
I can't read Hebrew either! But the way these books were typeset was to balance commentary with the text. For instance, you can see that the right page has a pretty substantial chunk of scripture in the middle (the central columns are scripture) and the left-handed one has only a couple of lines. This style doesn't have the central text with commentary as an optional note, it's a blending of text and commentary. So one "page" of text might be 100% Tanakh and the next might be 10% Tanakh and 90% commentary. Rendering either one of them as a contentious text stream (or even interwoven paragraphs) loses some of the authorial intent.
Obviously this is a pretty specific literary tradition and most marginalia works exactly like you describe, but I think it's worth remembering that our experience of text being one way is often more about the texts we've happened to encounter than any limits to the diversity of how humans have written.
The Chinese religious text looks basically the same as the right-hand page. It's surrounded by commentary on three sides instead of four sides, but that is a minor difference.
The left-hand page is obviously different, but it's not clear to me how much I should think of it as text and how much I should think of it as artwork / talismans.
Anyway, I agree that the commentary is presented as being at least as important as the text, but I don't see that as contradicting what I was describing above.
> So one "page" of text might be 100% Tanakh and the next might be 10% Tanakh and 90% commentary.
This style is also common in contemporary legal documents. (I searched briefly earlier for a good example and didn't find one.) A page will usually not be 90% footnotes, but it's not so rare for a page to be more than 50% footnotes. I think this is a pretty natural outcome of the fact that some parts of any text attract much more commentary than other parts. Despite the very high volume of footnote material in these documents, though, they are always presented in a manner that suggests the text comes first and the footnotes come second in importance. For example, the footnote to a particular bit of text may not all occur on the same page as the text it footnotes.
I would argue that the difference between the religious texts and contemporary legal briefs is that the commentary really is more important than the text in the first case, and really isn't in the second case. The religious texts have been preserved for so long that they don't have much meaning left independent of the interpretive tradition that the commentary provides.
But your own personal notes on something you've read are unlikely to be as centrally important as the accumulated interpretive tradition associated with a multi-thousand-year-old text. If you wrote it in the margin initially, keeping it in the margin seems fairly safe. That commentary you see printed around the scripture on the right-hand page didn't come from the book owner.
Honestly, for marginalia I would love it if you could just insert blank notes pages within pdfs and write on them! Also that you could read the pdf with those notes pages enabled/disabled, and easily copy/move them to a separate document later.
hmm I found the eBook functionality to be passable. I read ebooks and PDF's on my Remarkable 2 all the time
>It absolutely sucks as a general purpose device because everything except the very core experience is flat-out missing.
As is intended, I do not want a general purpose device, I want an electronic notebook, to replace what used to be many many paper notebooks I used to keep meeting notes, daily activity logs, quick todo lists, etc.
I do not want email on it, I do not want notifications on it, I wanted to replace my paper notebook, and be able to read ebooks
The Remarkable 2 replaced my Paper-white and all physical notebooks for me.
I am completely on your side, that's the same reason I bought mine.
But damm I sure wish I had a way to take a note on my iPhone and have it show up on my Remarkable. That would mean when I pick up the Remarkable it has all my notes on it.
This is one area I agree they should look to improve or have offical API's so the community could improve.
I am not in the Apple echosystem but I would love a way to better sync with OneNote, and/or have my Task list manageable by ToDo, ToDoist, or some other task manager, but appear on the Remarkable to check things off.
Maybe keep an eye out on the PineNote. It's bound to be much worse than the reMarkable as a writing tablet, but it should also be general purpose in a lot of ways the rm isn't.
I find my Boox Note Air pretty good. It runs Android basically every app I've thrown at it works although the fact that's eInk means stuff like Netflix, games etc. is obviously not a good experience. Some apps take a little fiddling to get working well on eInk like filtering out page turn animations or page refresh settings but once that's done it works well. The stock reader is very good at PDFs and passable at ePubs but you can just download another app so it's no big deal.
Remarkable seems like it's still a little better at writing feel/writing latency but the Boox line is very good as eInk tablets.
No that is one other caveat I forgot to mention. Apps need to use Boox's API to refresh the screen properly but as far as I am aware no 3rd party apps do. I think the API is available on their github page. I find the built in one is at least decent.
What do you mean a real pdf reader? The pdf reader displays pdfs, allows you to navigate the document and to scribble on it. Sure, it could do some things better, but it's perfectly functional as it is.
The Onyx Boox series is really good. The writing experience is almost as good as a Remarkable. The reading experience is excellent, and it's runs Android.
If you have ebooks in a number of different ecosystems, perhaps kobo, comixology, kindle, adobe digital editions, pdf, actual epubs, microsoft word documents, then it's amazing having access to the official apps to read those file formats and connect to the online services.
In the event you're not a fan of prorprietary Android apps, the BOOX also does F-Droid quite well.
(I use a mix of F-Droid and APK-Mirror sources.)
There seem to be a good set of mostly-works-on-eink apps on Android. Onyx's bookreader and note-taking apps (native and with better e-ink support) are also quite good. I've been disappointed by Linux e-book support on desktop, and the even smaller tablet space is quite probably worse.
Another available tool is Termux, and while no Linux replacement, it vastly increases the usefulness of Android devices.
I just ordered a boox max lumi, I noticed that there’s an option to install play services.
I am hesitant to do it, except for the security fixes Google apparently brings to Android via these updates. Boox might not update the device in the future which is my main worry.
The Max Lumi is what I picked up this past March. It's big, but an excellent choice for scientific articles, note-taking (a surprise --- not my intended use but one I'm finding I do make use of extensively), or reading comics at full-size.
Onyx updated the device once shortly after it arrived, but not since.
I've not been able to activate the Google Play Store ... I think because of Google's "you must register an account" bullshit, so I've just stuck with F-Droid and APK-Mirror for a couple of apps (mostly Pocket, as the F-Droid version is badly out of date).
Since I install few apps regardless, this is not much of a handicap, and I consider it a benefit.
There's no vanilla linux version of Libby, Kindle app, Kobo, Marvel Unlimited, Pressreader etc. At best you can maybe use a web browser for those which is a sub-par experience. For reading content Android is IMO better because there is general an app for DRM'd content. Linux doesn't have that and not all content can be made DRM free.
Have you used Linux on a mobile device? It is getting better, but it is not an enviable experience yet for your average user.
Take something like Spotify, for example. There is a desktop Linux client and an Android app. Guess which one works better on a small touch screen with only a bit of power?
Koreader has a lot of options but IMO the UI is perhaps the worst I've ever used. Also has giant use case gaps that will never be fixed like the fact it can't handle vertical Japanese writing.
I have a Boox Note Air that's fantastic and about the same price as the RM2 after import taxes. The built in Epub reader is far better than most off the shelf apps, because it supports E-ink centric features such as "embolden text" and "darken image" that are especially helpful when reading colour PDFs.
Note taking quality is more than good enough for me with the stock pen, although there are fancier options available. Best of all, you can split screen between the note app and the reading app, so you can take notes as you read.
In defense of the Remarkable its primary purpose is a very useful use-case. No iPad or Android tablet could get me to ditch paper and notebooks altogether. The Remarkable did it.
And since it is hackable the community made interesting strides in other use cases as well
Yeah... screw that. reMarkable's crappy UI shouldn't necessitate a bunch of extra work on the grandparent's part. They're completely justified in telling end users to go home to get the MAC.
I have a Hololens 2 on my desk that is the same way, you have to log in and sign in with a Microsoft account to access the MAC. Getting it onto my corporate network was a massive pain. Worse, to log in with our directory service we need to be on the corporate network that is MAC blocked so I ended up having to make a throwaway MS account and tethering it with my phone. Prior to this I didn't even realize you could omit the address, for some reason I thought it was a requirement to have the MAC address printed somewhere on the device/packaging.
I was under the impression that having the MAC address on the device's label was some kind of regulatory requirement for Wifi - I have never seen a wireless device without it.
Oh, true! I thought it was the MAC address in tiny print on iPhones but it's actually the FCC ID and IMEI. On the other hand, all smartphones have the MAC and serial number easily accessible in their settings menu.
You must not have seen an iPhone in quite a while. There is absolutely nothing printed on iPhones these days, all of the regulatory stuff is under the Settings menu.
Huh? You still need the root password which you only get once you open the settings menu. I protect my remarkable with a PIN code, so only I should see the root password.
If you connect the device to a wireless network, you can see the MAC address from the perspective of the network. You can't connect without advertising your address.
I doubt that they are actually using MAC filtering, but probably some kind of captive portal that the Remarkable doesn't have support for (without setting up a SOCKS proxy, which doesn't count as a solution, IMO)[0]. Most of these captive portal systems allow someone with privileges to add a MAC address to the system manually, so that device has access without having to go through the portal itself. In the old days, that was the kosher way to get Xboxes and the like on hotel Wi-Fi (they'd often have a number you could call from the room to get a network admin to put your widget on the list).
In hindsight, we probably could have connected it to the guest network, gotten its IP and then had the networking group look up its MAC on their logs. What we wound up doing is telling the user to go home and check their own router for the MAC, which is obviously less than ideal service.