They are used in some outdoor applications - I have one on my wrist right now (Garmin Fenix smartwatch). But conventional LCD displays look much better indoors. And most tablets are used mostly indoors.
I have to agree with this. I will read my paperwhite in bed or on vacation as sort of a dedicated device. But since it’s synched to my phone, I tend to read on my phone a little more right now as I have had a lot of unscheduled and unanticipated time away from home. Works fine. As long as I’m not outside.
I have an 8 inch Fire tablet. it is indeed quite tiring to hold it up for long periods of time. I got one of these hand straps. It makes it much easier to hold up the tablet with one hand.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B071R5HMYP
Yeah, I have an old Garmin Recreational GPS unit that has one. I wrote up a comparison to a smartphone display at one time:
(Yeah, I know the links in the article don’t work anymore)
OMG! I have been working with PCs and Mainframe computers ever since 1968 but … yet … I had to Google “what is an E reader” to understand your post.
I have heard of “Kindle” and “Kindle Readers” and had some vague idea they were a device that would take a printed page and read it so that people could close their eyes and listen to a human voice speak the English text.
I’m sorry. But I was never excited or attracted to the idea of getting such a device. Even if someone offered it to me for free, I would decline because I would not want to have to spend a lot of time learning how to use it. It’s almost always a pain to learn how to use some new tech. I think that is why seniors tend to avoid answering machines or other new kinds of tech (I know answering machines are not really “new tech”). But it often takes time to learn how to use them plus people often seem to feel they are made to feel foolish when young children get to use these things - seemingly with no problems - yet when adults or seniors try to learn how to use them, they experience plenty of difficulties.
I try to welcome new tech - but only if I can see some useful component to it. I just can’t seem to muster up the energy to get interested in many new tech devices.
For example, when telephone answering machines first came out circa 1979, I bought one for $500 and felt like a complete idiot because I soon learned there were perfectly good machines available for less than $100. The slick sales person who sold me the $500 machine gave me a real hard sale about how wonderful this machine performed. I think they repeated the phrase, “built like a real Mac Truck” several times. I never realized that I had no interest in a telephone answering machine that was built like a Mac Truck. I would have been perfectly happy with a machine that was built like a transistor radio. After that experience, I tended to avoid new tech - except for new PCs.
So, to answer your question, I would just say that IMO, a large segment of the population just has little need or little interest in a machine that will read English text for them. Another primary reason may be that people feel they just have no need for a machine to read to them because they can read English text perfectly well by themselves. They just do not perceive any need for such a machine.
I think it comes down to a matter of volume. Orders of magnitude more square inches of LCD display are manufactures each year compared to e-ink displays. Enormous improvements in yield for LCD displays allow for the ginormous TVs you can buy for pretty low prices. All that manufacturing development filters down to smaller displays like tablets and smart phones.
There just isn’t enough market pressure to to improve manufacturing processes for e-ink displays, and there is less volume for a particular e-ink display (vs. an LCD for a tablet) to amortize the development cost.
That’s not what a Kindle does.
I think you are misunderstanding the OP. The question is about dedicated e-book reading devices with e-ink displays vs. reading the same e-book on a tablet or smart phone. Not about a text-to-speech converter.
Um, I think you still don’t understand what an e-reader is. Its primary purpose is to display text on a screen that you read with your eyes, not to have text read to you audibly.
Some such devices have this capability as a “bonus feature” (not reading a literal printed page, but reading text in electronic form); but the main purpose of a Kindle is to display text on a screen so the users can read it themselves (like a book).
Your research on the topic of e-book readers (checks, not The Pit) um…leaves much to be desired. E-book readers are not devices for reading books aloud (though some do that) but a dedicated device for reading text-based books on. They predate the mainstream acceptance of tablet computers (Sony Librie EBR-1000EP–2004) and typically (but not always) use a slow to refresh but stable screen technology involving electrically-charged colored balls moving through a fluid between the front and back of the screen to display greyscales. Advantages include reflective lighting (like with paper) and days or weeks of reading time between recharges.
E-ink is fascinating! I highly recommend Technology Connection’s video on it. It kinda but not really like an etch a sketch. The E-ink screen is black liquid with titanium dioxide (which is white) suspended in it. The charge any specific point on the screen gets determines whether the titanium dioxide ions move forward (point gets white because the TiO[sub]2[/sub] ions are on top of the black stuff) or move back (point goes black because the ions are underneath the black stuff).
I remember hearing it would be paired with LCD screens for best of both worlds functionality. Turn the LCD off or down and read text on your phone outside in the sun while using very little battery. Turn the LCD up for full color, dynamic web pages that can be read at night, or for video, or whatever. That idea never got off the ground, apparently.
And not a video, the wiki.
I heard the suggestion (or perhaps someone was selling this) that a smartphone could have the conventional LCD screen on the front but a low-power e-ink screen on the back, which could display info like the time of day, number of messages waiting to be read and so forth (and the e-ink screen could be on constantly).
There was something sort of like an e-ink/LCD hybrid, but it was a flop. You can’t actually layer an e-ink display and an LCD because e-ink can’t be transparent and a backlit LCD needs…um…a backlight. There lies the possibility of overlaying a (self-lighting) transparent OLED panel on top of an e-ink display though. (But nobody has done it.)
And yes, there was a phone with an LCD on one side and an e-ink display on the other. Emphasis on “was.”
Transflective displays, which is what a few of you may be thinking of:
The TicWatch Pro has an LCD display over an AMOLED display giving a battery life of ~30 days.
Why would you comment on something you have no understanding of and experience with?
An e-reader is basically just a form of tablet computer dedicated to displaying printed material (e.g. books/magazines/etc.) They have a little more functionality than that, but they are just essentially a screen for reading books on.
My Kindle Gen 1 (originally purchased for my wife who now has a new one) just died, and I am very sad about it.
I have a new tablet that is great for watching TV shows and reading comics on the train, and a phone, but I cannot read books easily on those devices.
Having a paperbacked sized device loaded with old and new books sitting in my bag for months on end ready to go if I need something to read is just awesome.
So I will be getting my wife a new Kindle Paperwhite sometime this year, and I’ll grab the old one.