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:
Conversation
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:
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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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