I’m a hopeless gadget guy. Always have been, and likely always will be. I grew up playing with the latest nifty gadget, and as an adult with disposable income it takes all my willpower not to snatch up every fun little electronic that gets released.
But then on the opposite side of the spectrum, I’m also a book guy, a lover of the simplicity and limitless possibilities of printed ink on bound paper. I have several bookshelves absolutely crammed with physical books, and I find the smell of an old paperback to be one of the best in the world.
Imagine how conflicted I was, when the Kindle first came out in 2007. Here was this gadget that never got bigger or heavier even when you stuffed thousands of books onto it. Initially, I resisted. It had no character, every Kindle looking more or less the same as every other, and personalizing your gadget by slapping stickers on it felt like blasphemy to me. I want my gadgets clean and sleek, but also appreciate books for their unique cover art. I liked to see what strangers were reading on the train, and I liked it when I noticed others glimpsing the title that I held. I was an unbeliever, too much a bibliophile to appreciate the power of a digital reading device.
Everyone has a different idea of what organization or productivity means to them. Mostly, it becomes pressing as we get older and the days pass faster, to take some time to breathe.
Years passed and my brother upgraded his Kindle, then gave me the old one as a hand-me-down. Reluctantly, I started tinkering. And that’s when the allure of this particular gadget began to make sense.
The Promise of E-Ink
At the time, I was writing a lot of screenplays and thought I should probably read more of them, and it turned out to be simple to load lengthy PDFs onto the Kindle and read them wherever I went.
It was a delight to read on, primarily because of its screen. E Ink is actually a company, and their screen technology essentially moves around charged black pigments of ink according to whatever is told to display on the screen. A page turn refreshes the page with a whole new page of text, and once the pigments have loaded then they just sit there. There is no active refresh, unlike LCD screens, and that means that reading an e-ink screen is much more like reading a printed page. It also means that battery life is ridiculously good with these devices, on the order of weeks or even months in between charges. You can think of an e-ink screen as a pool of ink just waiting to be told what shapes to arrange itself into.
I loved the technology, partially because of its single-minded nature. The limitations of an e-reader almost seemed like the point. Much like a good camera or an iPod, an e-reader aims to do one thing exceptionally well. You can’t scroll social media on it, and you can’t get lost on YouTube. You can only read.
Because of the slow refresh and the monochrome design, it couldn’t be used for much of anything outside of reading, but a man can dream. I started to wonder: What if you could write on this thing?
Oh hey, you can write on this thing
Fast forward to 2020ish, when suddenly a few small companies somehow tapped into my dreams and decided to make them a reality. E-ink tech moves really slow, which is why Amazon updates Kindles only every other year or so (totally unlike our inescapable annual phone updates), but it was suddenly possible to write on these e-readers.
ReMarkable was perhaps the first (or at least best known) company to make a tablet roughly the size of an iPad with an e-ink screen, and they put a ton of money into marketing to people exactly like me. I’m a sucker for good marketing, and their excellent ads got me to click a few hundred different times. The thing was, they were expensive single-minded gadgets, and I already had an iPad that did a great job being portable and usable for about a thousand different things.
I managed to keep my gadgetphilia at bay until last year, when there were suddenly several more of these tablets out in the world. People were talking about them, showing up on Wirecutter and my usual gadget review sites. There’s even a slew of YouTubers who primarily post about these things, one of which (Kit Betts-Masters) has over 50k subscribers. The product category had suddenly exploded, but I would quickly find out that each one is flawed in various ways.
So – what’s the point?
Before I get into actually telling you about the e-ink tablets as they stand today, I want to dissect what the hell you would use this for.
E-readers have been around for close to two decades and certainly aren’t a new idea, but they also haven’t changed much since their inception. Using this same tried-and-true reading technology and making it possible to write on it, you may be wondering what doors that actually opens.
There are many variations, but in general each of these has a 10″ screen which you can use a stylus on. To varying degrees, you can take notes and read on them. They’re a replacement for paper, they’ll help you get organized, they’re the antidote for your scattered, messy life.
And all of that totally makes sense, right? The modern tech worker lives on Zoom, is bombarded with AI tools, and stares at screens all day. Handwritten notes still feel good in a human way, but the concept of using pen and paper feels somehow archaic in the age of smart glasses. These tablets promise to marry the joy and satisfaction of writing by hand with the organizational superpowers provided by digital tools. It’s the best of both worlds.
And I do find it fitting that I went down this rabbithole in January. The start of a new year weighs on each of us in different ways, and “be more productive” is one of those vague goals just admirable enough to tell people it’s your New Years Resolution without having to actually do much to accomplish it. You could buy a notebook or sign up for a new notetaking app! You could buy an e-ink tablet with the intention of taking better notes, whatever that means!
Everyone has a different idea of what organization or productivity means to them. Mostly, it becomes pressing as we get older and the days pass faster, to take some time to breathe. Work gets busy, personal life gets crazy, and the lines between them blur a lot more than most people would like. It can feel like you’re treading water instead of making calculated choices.
And because we live in a capitalist society, putting money down on something gives the illusion that you’re taking a meaningful step toward actualizing that perfect version of you. It’s the reason gym memberships spike every January; if I spend some money toward this goal, maybe I’ll feel more obligated to follow through with it.
Is this what led me to dive deep into this nascent new device category? Likely yes, but also there’s the fact that they’re really cool.
Meet the Tablets
Okay, so the devices themselves.
Kindle Scribe
Last summer, Amazon ran a big sale (which they tend to do) and their writable e-ink tablet, at that point 2 years old (again, this tech moves slow) was suddenly quite cheap. Like, $250. So I bought it, played with it, enjoyed it, and used it a bit.
Months passed, and I couldn’t knock the feeling that the grass was greener elsewhere. You see, the Scribe is a superb reading tablet (Amazon has perfected the Kindle experience in order to sell you more books) but it’s pretty lacking for notes. It includes a stylus, which magnetically snaps onto the side with a satisfying click, and the whole package felt very premium with a metal case. It’s got a frontlight, which I would learn is exceedingly rare. Its screen is monochrome but displays 300 ppi, which is as good as it gets for e-ink so far. The screen is beautiful, and you can peep all you want but you won’t spot the individual pixels.
But the notes! You essentially just scribble on an endless notebook. There are no tags, and there are no keywords to later sort by. You can’t search your handwriting, but recently they did add some AI features that are moderately useful sometimes. To search your own notes, it makes sense to send them off device and store them somewhere else, but that felt kind of silly to me.
I put my novel on the Scribe, and I went through the entire thing and made notes and edits. It was a fantastic experience, hand writing notes in margins and circling bits I intended to reword. At the end though, I couldn’t get the marked-up version of my book off the Scribe. It was great for being productive with edits, but it didn’t play nice with virtually anything outside of the Kindle app.
So at the beginning of 2025, I listed my Scribe for sale on Swappa and decided to branch out.
Supernote Manta
I moved from the limited Scribe experience to Supernote, a small company that’s been making their own e-ink tablet ecosystem for a few years now. They had just announced the Manta, their latest tablet, and even though I was new to this world I quickly became entrenched in their rabid fanbase. The Manta, it turns out, had been “coming soon” for roughly a full year. And even though it had been released in December, they were so backordered that I wouldn’t even get the device for about two months.
Supernote is known for their “self-healing” screen. You write on it with a ceramic nib pen and you can actually see the lines you’re drawing on the screen fill themselves in after each stroke. They’re known for having the best writing feel, like a gel pen gliding across fancy paper. And their software really accentuates the notetaking experience, with useful organization built right in with headers, keywords, and a Table of Contents.
The more I read, the more I liked it. But there was that issue that it would take about two months to actually get to me, and in addition to being an unabashed lover of gadgets I’m also an exceptionally impatient person. Supernote did have a smaller version available, the Nomad, but I couldn’t quite convince myself it would be worth it. The screen was roughly 2″ smaller, and as a left-handed freak I needed all the screen space available so that my claw-like writing stance didn’t inadvertently trigger menus.
Furthermore, Supernote doesn’t include a frontlight. This felt like an odd omission to me, since a primary benefit of using a digital device instead of regular paper was that the device could illuminate itself and make you less dependent on boring overhead lights. Supernote says they left it out so that your writing could happen closer to the screen, but the Scribe had a great frontlight and I never felt much writing lag whatsoever.
And then there’s the rest of the Supernote experience. Unlike other options, they don’t include a stylus but rather offer several of them for you to choose what works for you. Their options each look like regular pens but have ceramic nibs (there is one option that doubles as a regular pen and a stylus, as if you definitely won’t eventually switch that up and write on the tablet with a real pen), but they each add about $90 to your order. And the stylus connects to the side of the tablet with – get this – an elastic pen loop.
This cutting-edge technology, giving you the ability to read and write on the world’s greatest written works with a slick screen that won’t tire your eyes, relies on a loop of fabric to keep your $90 stylus close to hand. The tablet itself isn’t much of a looker either, just a white plastic case with sliders on the left and right that pull up menus with inconsistent accuracy. It feels dumb to care about aesthetics so much, but the Supernotes are kind of ugly with the exception of the translucent crystal case on the Nomad.
But the fact that the pen loop was so core to the Supernote experience honestly gave me pause more than anything else. If pen and paper was an archaic form of taking notes in 2025, then a fabric pen loop on the side of your $500 tablet was absolutely neolithic. It was criminal, and it was a far cry from the satisfying snap of an Apple Pencil clicking into place on the side of an iPad.
reMarkable
Eventually, with the Manta still on backorder, I convinced myself I should go to the closest thing to a name brand there is in this space. ReMarkable was the brand with incredible marketing, and in some sense they had kicked off this party back in 2020 with their reMarkable 2. That monochrome tablet also didn’t have a frontlight, and there was no way I was paying their hefty pricetag for four year-old tech, even if e-ink does progress slowly.
But near the end of 2024, they also announced a new tablet, and it was radically different from their previous flagship. The Paper Pro was bigger, with a whopping 11.8″ of screen space, and it was in color. This, for some reason, was the dream for many fellow e-ink obsessives, since monochrome was great for reading but color would open so many more doors! I would quickly learn I didn’t care at all about color.
After some mental gymnastics, I convinced myself to pay the hefty fee and buy this thing. Unlike Supernote, which only sells devices through their site and is often backordered for months, reMarkable was readily available. I drove to a Best Buy and got it the same day, then cut open its beautiful Apple-like packaging and readied myself to be wowed.
But then I wasn’t.
To my surprise, this extremely premium tablet experience was not all that different from my recently-sold Scribe. The Paper Pro had a frontlight, but it was shockingly weak, and their notetaking had slightly more options than the Scribe, with tags and layer functionality, but there were still no keywords or search functions. They did have a nice feature where you could endlessly scroll down in your notes instead of paginating (it’s digital, so why be limited by pages?), and you could zoom in and out which seemed pretty neat, especially if you were diving into a complicated drawing or schematic. Perhaps most strangely, reMarkable does not make it possible to use a Kindle app at all, so reading ability is fairly limited and you can’t pull up your Kindle library.
The color was nice, but color e-ink is still super limited, so any time you wrote or drew in color then the whole screen would flash to update those pigments. Writing in black resulted in no such flashes (it’s a different layer under the screen), but you were obviously paying a hefty price tag for the inclusion of color, so you might as well use it.
And honestly, the screen is what got me. As you may have realized by now, these devices really are mostly about the screen. The e-ink technology is the one thing that truly sets them apart from phones, laptops, or iPads. It’s easier on the eyes and the battery lasts forever since they refresh so seldom. But with the Paper Pro, an odd thing happened. After playing with it for an hour or two, my eyes actually hurt.
What was going on? The whole point of this tech is that you can leave behind the dreaded blue light and refresh rates of conventional screens and read and write to your heart’s content, and yet here I was with prematurely tired eyes. One issue, I came to realize, was the weak frontlight just didn’t do enough in the dark room I was in, but the other issue was the screen itself.
I showed a PDF to my wife and she immediately recoiled from the “blurry text.” And she was right; the Paper Pro, despite clocking in north of $650 and having been released just a few months ago, sports only a 229 ppi screen. An iPad has 264 ppi, and my Scribe had 300 ppi. Losing 71 ppi doesn’t seem like much, but it changed the entire reading experience.
And whereas Supernote omitted a frontlight so that your penstrokes were right on top of the e-ink screen, reMarkable had to do some true magic to fit not only a frontlight and black ink, but also color ink under their screen. Impressive though that feat is (you can read a lot more about that nutso screen tech here), it had a very notable downside: It made the screen blurry. It was nowhere near as crisp as the Scribe, and coupled with that paltry 229 ppi, this thing felt worse than just staring at my iPad.
On the reMarkable subreddit, you get people admitting that this expensive and large tablet was pretty bad for reading. Some of them even say to buy both this and a Kindle, so that each device sticks to what it does best. “This is for writing,” many of them say, exhibiting a kind of Stockholm Syndrome while they limit their expensive device to a singular task.
I returned it.
Boox
There does exist another notable company in this category, which is hard to avoid if you start digging around with as much fervor as I did. Boox tablets have been around for a few years, but they take a radically different approach from everyone else. Instead of making their own software and painstakingly curating the experience to give their hardware the best chance to shine, Boox just throws a full Android OS on there.
That means you can effectively use an e-ink screen for all the stuff you would use an iPad for. You can read on it with your app of choice, you can pair a Bluetooth keyboard and write on it, you can read the NYT app, and you can even watch videos (although the experience surely isn’t great). Do whatever you want, just do it with an e-ink screen.
This goes so far against what Supernote and reMarkable preach about that it was a bit jarring at first. Those two smaller companies advertise simplicity and a distraction-free experience, pitching themselves as the solution for modern society’s frenetic obsession with doing everything and always being entertained. No, they seemed to say, just sit down with this tablet and write.
Once I got over my shock that Boox would just give you the world, I started uncovering some unsavory facts. Firstly, they pump out a new product roughly every 6 months and show no interest in updating older ones (and consistent updates aren’t exactly a strength of any Android device). Secondly, their Go 10.3 tablet lacked a frontlight and there seemed to be a lot of complaints about how dim the screen was overall. It also had the dumbest name of any of these devices.
And then – perhaps most oddly – Boox was a Chinese company, and users had reported seeing their tablet activity being uploaded to mysterious Chinese servers. When some redditors voiced concerns, other Boox owners told them to just turn off wifi if they were so concerned.
I stopped looking into Boox.
Back to the Scribe
At this point in my journey, with my wife rolling her eyes at a near constant velocity, I knew I’d gone too far. I could tell you everything about every one of these devices (I spared you some details, believe it or not), and yet I still felt paralyzed by indecision.
Every device was flawed. It seems like such a simple proposition: Take an e-ink screen and make it work with a stylus so you can take notes. But digging in, it was unbelievable how differently each device approached the assignment. It became clear that, at this point in our tech evolution as a society, hardware was a lot easier to master than software.
After squinting at the Paper Pro, I decided I actually did need a frontlight. I wanted to read on this device as well as write on it, and even though I was still months away from my Supernote Manta even shipping, I felt doubtful that its plasticky exterior would ever feel great to hold.
And so I was right back to the Scribe.
I bought another one, slightly updated since the 2022 model I had bought and sold, and I think it’s better for everyone if I stop looking into these devices. The Scribe’s glorious screen and premium feel fit me just fine, and I’m learning to adapt to the limited note organization.
The Productivity Dream
Does it fulfill the dream I’d had, back in 2012 playing with my first Kindle? Not quite, but it’s certainly a much more usable device for me than any of the other available options turned out to be.
The Kindle product line has always seemed a uniquely simple one amongst the Amazon devices. The OS hasn’t changed much over the years, and it’s mostly because it doesn’t need to. It’s good for reading, and periodic updates have given better screens. While Amazon has needlessly complicated the hell out of their Fire devices and shoved Alexa into every conceivable form factor, the Kindle line remains uniquely focused on reading.
And now there’s the Scribe, putting that experience on a bigger screen and adding some simplistic writing features.
And so I managed to go in a giant circle, exploring this relatively new product category. It wasn’t quite the obsession I thought I would kick off 2025 with, but it was a great reminder that the grass may not be greener but just different, and maybe the productivity tools already at your disposal will work just fine if you give them a chance.
Jonathan Forisha 