The market works the other way. You want a lot of adoption at the mobile level which will drive development faster and then those developments can be scaled up.

The iPad exists, in part, because of the iPhones specifically and the development of touch screen mobile technology in general.

Bigger e-readers have been around longer and are popular now, particularly the 7" Kindle size. I find it too small but that’s partly because I like to read full page PDF documents rather than just epubs. As it is, I use my laptop and it’s not too bad.

Touch screens aren’t a particular technological challenge nowadays. It’s mostly about screens and the power that they draw, and the PHB’s making product decisions.

Only a little over 10% of Americans have an e-reader and their popularity is declining.

E-ink screens will continue to be niche technology without the advantages of increased development by competing manufacturers.

Way back in the early 2000s cellphones varied greatly. All the designs and models that were available and all pretty distinctive. Today the market is almost exclusively touch screen smart phones; evolutions of the early designs by Apple, HTC, Samsung etc.

Three years later the first iPad was released and that same year Samsung released the Galaxy Tab.

Widespread adoption and competition drives development.

Meh there is some kind of artificial scarcity making e-ink screens expensive as far as I can tell, especially big ones. If e-readers are declining it’s because people are using their phones instead, just like small digital cameras have declined. Small e-readers just don’t have much to offer compared to phones.

I don’t know how the market in tablets is doing. But there are no affordable large e-readers (13" and up) as far as I can tell. I can’t predict whether such a thing would get traction if it existed, but I’d be interested.

lol

artificial scarcity

That’s called “lack of demand”

You may be pleased to learn about he 13. 3" Boox Tab X. I got it’s predecessor (Max Lumi) specifically for PDFs. shop.boox.com/en-ca/products/tabxc

Would this be comparable to a Remarkable?

I don’t know exactly what you mean by “comparable”. They’re both e-ink tablets. If you’d like actual comparison, may I suggest checking out MyDeepGuide: www.mydeepguide.com/articles/…/e-ink-devices (also search for him on youtube).

This dude started reviewing a few e-ink tablets, and then he became THE guy for reviewing e-ink tablets.

$819.99 and requires their proprietary software, not for me. I had heard about it and I guess it’s nice but it’s not what I meant by affordable and I’d want to run FOSS software. Consider that a 13" Chromebook is in the $150(?) range and see what I mean about epaper being expensive.

There’s a 13" Inkplate now that’s closer to what I want, but the screen refresh is too slow for pdf reading. It would be ok as a static display. The TCL Nxtpaper Android tablets are also interesting (the 14.3" one is $470) but again meh. I resisted buying a Lenovo Yoga tablet/laptop a couple years ago (I’d be able to run Linux on that) when it was $500 for a beefy config, and then the AI ram shortage hit so now a box like that is probably $1K. I should have bought it when I could. Oh well. I might get one of those rotateable desktop HDMI displays sometime.