In January, I spent all day every day for a week with a reMarkable. The plan: sit on the beach; read; write; think. Being able to use my whole library outside in the sand—with digital ink!—was so freeing.
Alas it has many flaws, so I returned it…but the price just dropped 45%!
Conversation
It's now $279 for a refurb first-gen model. Even with rough edges, I'm happy with that price to enable me to do this type of work outside, in sandy environments where I might not like to bring books / my nice notebook. remarkable.com/store/remarkab
Some reflections on the device:
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The hardware is solid. Good materials; light; good industrial design; decent battery. The stylus is fine. The inking is tolerable.
The software's pretty miserable. A new model is shipping this summer, but apparently with the same software—which is where the problems are.
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The main issue is that the device doesn't take itself seriously as either a digital reader or a digital notebook, at the book level. It takes the micro, page level quite seriously. One-page sketching, drafting, etc—that's all fine. But the levels above that are basically absent.
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If you sketch or hand-write ideas across dozens of pages, good luck finding or arranging them or doing basically anything with them after the fact. Few real affordances.
It's the same with reading—the fixation is on the single page you're looking at. Everything else is onerous.
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Stepping up a level from that, to a broader professional workflow, it's extremely unserious. A device like this doesn't exist in isolation—it wants to ingest documents from some living source and produce work to be consumed by other tools. It's truly awful at this.
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The Kindle is also bad at all these things. Kindle has *slightly* better high-level affordances as an e-reader. But what makes the reMarkable *so much* better than the Kindle is that you can read books—in their original layout—as PDFs (which is good bc rM's EPUB reader is awful).
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Here's that photo again. This is the actual, professionally-typeset page from the original print edition! I can write in the margins! In fact, the margin's bigger than in the print book (& I can make it bigger)!
EPUBs are a terrible reading experience. Give me typesetting!
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I'd love to take notes in the margins by hand but I fear they become hard to access and process.
How do you get your handwritten marginalia to a more useful place like or , if at all?
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They don't live there; it's a temporary step. As to how, this is what I do:
Ah, interesting, so if I understand correctly, you don't have a typed transcription of your marginalia anywhere, you synthesize them directly as evergreen notes?
And presumably, you process many marginalia all at once to not interrupt the flow of reading?
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Correct.
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I was trying to find a reMarkable-friendly way of doing transient notes on the device and feeding it to writing inbox. Would be interested to know if your capturing workflow changed?
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The workflow's very poor. Once I've annotated a book, I put the PDF in my writing inbox. Then I manually flip through to grab the annotations. Some improvements are possible with end-user enhancements, since the inking is stored procedurally.
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In regards to step 3, a linear operation, it occurs to me that as the number of past notes scales up, a heuristic(s) may be required to reduce the number of them considered for linking to the new note in order to keep the practice sustainable. How do you approach this problem?
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Yes, this is an issue. My approach is incremental and stochastic: I link the notes I think of at the time, then over time more connections are added as I notice more. This is a place where ML might help.
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