What an E-Ink Tablet Is (and Isn’t) Useful For

I've had an e-ink tablet—specifically, the reMarkable 2—for a couple of years now. There are a few products like it on the market: devices with black and white, Kindle-like e-ink screens and some sort of stylus that gives you the ability to take notes and mark up existing PDFs and e-books. They exist somewhere between an iPad and a pad of paper.

Most of the time when I use the reMarkable in public, people don't realize, or don't care, that it isn't just a pad of paper. I love that—part of the appeal is that this sort of device comes between me and the people around me less than an iPad or laptop would. Those who are familiar with the e-ink tablet category, however, often do notice, and want to know: How do you like it? What do you use it for? Can it completely replace something like an iPad? And that's what I want to talk about today.

My answer to such questions, typically, is that e-ink tablets are very good at replacing paper-based workflows, and very bad at replacing computer-based ones. On some level you have to think about it less as a computing device and more as a pad of paper with infinite pages. It's not quite that simple, of course; most e-ink tablets sync your notes with other devices and convert your handwriting into plain text. Some can even run apps. But in my experience, an e-ink tablet works best when you treat it as virtual paper.

That limited functionality doesn't mean they cost less than a tablet. The reMarkable 2 starts at $400, which isn't cheap. The Chinese company Only BOOX is well known in the space, and sells e-ink tablets starting at around $400 (for the Note Air 3). The Kindle Scribe is a little cheaper, at $240. Meanwhile, the iPad starts at $350 and is arguably more capable. All of this to say, if you're buying an e-ink tablet, it needs to be for a specific reason.

What e-ink tablets do well

People who love paper know that lined, blank, and gridded paper all have different uses. So do dedicated notebooks and day planners. My favorite part of the Remarkable is that this single device offers all of these types of paper, in one place, and that I can add even more flexibility by finding purpose-built PDFs. With that in mind, here are the things I tend to use my e-ink tablet for the most.

Brainstorming

Almost all of my writing workflow happens on my computer, with one main exception: brainstorming. Whether it's trying to come up with new article ideas or thinking through the way an article should flow, I find that sitting down at a table with a pen and paper works better than sitting at my laptop.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, it's too easy to be distracted at my computer. Another, though, is that brainstorming is less linear than writing, and non-linear thinking is easier for me to do with a pen. I can write things wherever I want on the page, draw little arrows connecting them, and generally just make a mess. It's this combination of focus and open-ended writing that works for me, and e-ink is perfect for it.

Reading and marking up documents

Every once in a while something I'm working on requires that I parse an academic text or a dense article. There's nothing stopping me from doing such reading on a computer, but I find I grasp the content better if I read away from my laptop. At one point in my life I would print out documents out for exactly this reason, but now I just use my e-ink tablet. I send the PDF to the device and switch between the highlighter and pen to mark it up. When I get to my computer all my annotations are synced over.

Taking notes during a meeting

Once upon a time I was the person in the corner of the meeting constantly typing away. I'm a loud typer, so that was distracting for everyone, and it also meant there was a screen between me and the other people in the room. A e-ink tablet doesn't feel tas obtrusive. I can occasionally jot things down while also feeling fully present in the room. My notes are waiting for me when I get back to my computer, and I can even convert them quickly to text.

Planning my day

Don't get me wrong: I love digital to-do list and calendar apps, and couldn't live without them. When it comes to blocking out the current day's and week's projects, however, they never really click. That's why I love the day planner templates in the Remarkable—they allow me to quickly block out what I'm going to work on and when. There is something about physically writing this on a calendar that works for me. This process got even better when I found this PDF day planner, which uses the link functionality in PDFs to make it easy to jump between days, weeks, and months, and even notes that are tied to a particular day.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons

I love playing DND and hate every smartphone-, tablet-, and laptop-based system for managing a character. Try as they may, none are quite as flexible as a paper character sheet. But paper has some clear downsides, mostly because I tend to scuff them up so much I need to replace them every few sessions. My Remarkable doesn't have this problem, and also makes it easy to quickly add more pages when I want to write something else down. I even created a separate document with all of my character's race, class, and spell information, saving me the trouble of digging through the Player's Handbook constantly during the play session.

What e-ink tablets don't do well

If you want to do anything else—all the stuff you'd usually use your tablet for—e-ink tablets range from adequate to incapable. There are a few obvious downsides: There's no color (unless you pay through the nose color a color e-ink tablet, but the tech definitely isn't quite there yet, producing colors that look muddy and dull). You generally can't watch videos or play games on them (though newer tablets with higher refresh rates make this technically possible, it's never pleasant). But they also aren't a full replacement for a note-taking application.

Anything you want search or indexing for

I journal every day, but I don't use the reMarkable to create my entries. Part of this is habit: I've been using Obsidian as my journal for years, and I don't want to switch. But I also really enjoy being able to search, and index, my journal, and I haven't found a great way to do that with an e-ink journal—none that I know of can index handwriting by default. You can work around this by converting your handwriting to text every day, granted, but at that point you might as well just type things out in the first place.

Integrating with other apps

Many e-ink tablets can't open apps or even browse the web. There are some exceptions that can run apps—the Boox Note Air 3, which runs Android, is among them—but even in these cases, the experience is going to be lessened by the inherent limitations of e-ink. Put simply, scrolling and browsing isn't exactly sleek on these devices, and you'll experience problems like grainy images, lag, and ghosting. They work best when they're being used like a sheet of paper.

Now, limited app support isn't all bad—a big part of the appeal of e-ink, for me, is that the distractions of the internet aren't as readily accessible. But if you're trying to decide between an e-ink tablet and an iPad, and access to your usual applications is a priority, you should get the iPad.

Quickly sharing your files

If you type something in a document, you can quickly email or text it to someone, or even post it in a Google Doc. You can kind of do this with an e-ink tablet, but you've got got to use one of two workarounds. There's the built-in optical character recognition (which, you are going to need to clean up whatever it outputs first—typos are common) or you can just send an image of your handwritten text. Neither is ideal, and in both cases, you're probably going to need to do so from a computer. It's probably easier just to start on a computer.

None of these cons are to suggest e-ink tablets aren't useful or that the downsides I've noted are universal. It's more that they're only useful in particular context, and that these are the contexts I keep in mind. Your experience may vary. But hopefully reading my thoughts give you the context you need before dropping big bucks on a device that may not do what you dream of it doing.