Why e-ink isn’t ready for prime time

The technology I love should remain niche

E-ink has been around for years. It was first patented in the late 1990s and has become synonymous with Amazon’s Kindle range of e-readers. It’s pleasing to the eye, can show text with fabulous clarity and is frugal with batteries. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been on a bit of a journey with e-ink and I think it’s about to come to an end.

The current range of small e-ink readers from the likes of Kobo and Amazon work well. They use 300ppi screens, have good enough contrast that they do, indeed, look paperwhite and have even frontlights allowing reading in suboptimal lighting. The battery life on these things is outrageously good: one can pick up a Kindle that hasn’t been used for weeks and find it happily sitting there with enough charge to get you through a chapter or two of the trashiest of novels.

The benefits of e-ink (battery, text clarity and the like) have served to catalyse the creation of a subclass of products in recent years: e-note devices. You may have see ads online for the ReMarkable tablet, but there are others from brands based in China such as SuperNote, Onyx Boox and Bigme. They all tend to follow the same sort of promotional tagline: relaxing, eyefriendly, good for productivity. Even Kindle and Kobo have gotten in on the act of creating these e-note devices. The…