I honestly don't understand how nobody has made a fast e-reader. I can scroll a PDF super fast in a web browser on a complete potato of a computer. an e-reader is using a format specifically designed for use with it, and is still horrendously slow. the display is plenty fast enough at refreshing, it's the SoC powering it that's garbage.
@mkoek there's no reason that they can't put the SoC into a sleep state between interactions, and a deep sleep state after a certain delay of no interactions. the battery life on e-readers is weeks, I can live with charging 30% more often if it's pretty fast instead of uselessly slow.
@gsuberland honestly that is my feeling for every touch-screen device I've seen except phones and maybe laptops. Household appliances, vending machines, cars - they all suck when it comes to latency…
@gsuberland i was under the impression that not the CPU is the limiting the factor but the eInk display. Which is cool if you wanna preserve battery but has no ability to be backlit at night
@gsuberland Agreed, I started reading on my laptop years ago, so much better in practice. Kinda sad, but thats enshittification of the ebook market for you, I guess.
@seb I'm not sure "enshittification" is the right term for it though. they were always shit. even the really expensive ones are pretty horrible to actually use.
@gsuberland Yeah fair point, it feels kinda similar though, right? Lots of DRM and a big monopoly claw, and somehow we end up with terrible user experience despite the underlying technology being fairly trivial and well-understood. Perhaps it's more like enshittification of the publishing market? But that doesn't feel entirely right, either. Anyways, it's stupid. I wonder how hard/expensive it would be to build an e-reader out of an old phone, a screen and some 3d printer parts.
@seb I've got an Inkplate 10" which at some point I plan to try to make an e-reader with, but since it's powered by an ESP32 (might even be an ESP8266 now I think about it) it's not got a lot of processing power. There's FOSS e-reader firmware for it but it's very slow.
I'm thinking it might be workable if I preconvert the pages to QOIs at native resolution, so all it has to do is load page images. But it's not waterproof so that kinda sucks.
heck, I'd be happy enough converting everything to raster images (e.g. QOI) and only having fulltext search jump me to the right page instead of highlighting the specific word position if it meant the UX was snappy. microSD cards are huge these days, big files are not a problem.
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