[svat]

> But I'm taking "notes" to mean commentary.

In the context of the reMarkable / this conversation, “notes” means whatever the user draws on the device with the stylus: underlining or circling or crossing-out words or drawing lines between them, drawing pictures or hand-writing in the margin or between lines or on the words, etc: whatever you would or could do with a physical book and a pen/pencil.

(A primary design goal of the reMarkable tablet is to be as similar to paper as possible, so (if I understood your suggestion correctly) telling users that their "notes" will be treated as images to be re-rendered to the side of the text, instead of where they put it—anywhere—would break the similarity, and apply only to a small subset of possible "notes", namely "commentary", as you said.)

[thaumasiotes]

It's a small subset of possible notes, but it's a very large subset of notes that are likely to come into existence.

[svat]

I guess the affordances of the device influence what notes/annotations are likely to come into existence. On the Kindle, where IIRC input is through a keyboard (apart from highlighting), textual notes would be more common. On printed books and on the reMarkable (I'm even more "trigger-happy" on a reMarkable than on paper, probably because of undo and perfect erasing), annotation tends to be more free-form and varied, with more marks, scribbles, arrows etc, and a bit less text. Some of these annotations could also be understood and associated with corresponding text in principle, but it's not trivial. (Some examples of annotations from printed books: https://entropymag.org/writers-their-margin-notes/ )

[rowanG077]

I don't think so. The entire point of remarkable is to interact with the text. That is also How I have seen people use them at Uni. It's more like 99% of notes are tightly coupled to the text.

[thaumasiotes]

> The entire point of remarkable is to interact with the text.

You might be surprised. I just ordered one, and for me the point is to read scanned PDFs of large books.

[rowanG077]

I don't see why you would buy a reMarkable for that. There are e-readers that can do that that are both much cheaper and more fully featured.