Comment by somethoughts 4 days ago
Not that this would be better but I'm surprised no ebook maker has had success in the educational market. Eink seems like it'd be great for education as it'd really only support text based distractions/bullying which while bad is less bad than the trifecta of video, images and text distractions/bullying. Its also lighter and the battery is longer lasting than a laptop.
Even on slow devices the only problem I have had with PDFs has been when they are rendered using the JS renderer.
The developer of pdf.js replied to my comments on performance somewhere once, and I think it might have been HN, but was quite happy to acknowledge (IIRC) that its not a high performance solution.
I've noticed this with my Kobo ereader (which I love). If I want to go back a few pages, and then return to where I am now, it's a whole ordeal. The UX is there, but I have to learn it and remember it, and it's different for every device (not that I use many different devices). All physical books, miraculously, have the same UX.
The parent post to yours makes me think that a large e-ink display would be useful in a school setting. Rather than carry around a backpack of enormous overpriced textbooks that we might use 30% of in a semester, just have one large ereader that you can use from 1st grade through your PhD.
It's like a book, but lighter! And no internet, no games, no social media, no animations. No private enterprise capturing public education to sell schools a bunch of stupid shit. Just an improvement on a stack of textbooks, which schools or parents have always paid for. Might be nice.
My daughter has a chromebook for school. As a device, it's actually pretty nice and the administration aspects of it are fantastic. It can be wiped and re-imaged easily, her "files" are all stored on the network, and it's snappy. Except for PDF viewing.
When it comes to PDFs, it sometimes really struggles. I think that the device can handle them, but I'm pretty sure that the PDFs themselves are often a collection of scanned images and not text. Once she has more than a few tabs open, it takes longer and longer to switch between them and she ends up using a desktop to complete her work.
In this case, the school provides the tools for her to do her assignments but we have the means to provide better ones at home and not every child will have this advantage.
Personally, I can read data sheets all day on a monitor but I absolutely can not do the same with fiction. I either need a paper book or a Kindle, and I don't know why that is. Perhaps it's because I am looking ahead and not down?