[jmacd]

I have a ReMarkable 1 and II (which I bought for my partner as a gift). They are nice e-readers that are well built. They really do fail on their key promise as a paper replacement however. The one saving grace of having spent so much money on the device is the "Send to ReMarkable" extension in my browser.

I received the email a few days ago telling my that those cloud based services, which were advertised as part of the product when we purchased it, would be switching to a subscription service.

Thew new service appears to be offered for FREE to us because we already purchased the devices. Phew!

That said, I think this is going to tank their sales going forward. The TCO on the device has now increased dramatically.

[cge]

The new service is currently offered for free to people who purchased a device from them before October 12, 2021, if they accept the new terms and conditions. I have to wonder how long that free subscription will last. There is nothing in the notices they sent about how long the subscription will last. There are FAQ entries, which, rather than making any concrete promises, have statements like 'We plan to offer free access to Connect for as long as we're able to. There are things we can't control that might affect this', and 'If we do make any changes, we’ll strive to give you free access for as long as you want it'. This type of change seems vaguely familiar, and I would not be surprised if 'things we can't control' will happen to arise about one or two years from now.

When the change does happen, the new terms of service require you agree that, by them sending you an email with 30 days notice, you'll be deemed to automatically consent to any new charges and fees if you continue to use the service, so you'll probably want to keep a close eye on your inbox:

>reMarkable reserves the right to change the subscription fees or applicable charges and to institute new charges and fees, upon thirty (30) days prior notice (which may be sent by email). Your continued use of reMarkable Connect after the end of the notice period of the aforementioned changes to fees or charges constitute your consent to such fees or charges.

None of this affects me too much, as I've never used their cloud services, use syncthing for synchronization, and bought the device for its (partial) openness, even if that openness appears to have been forced on them by GPLv3 requirements.

[AstroDogCatcher]

I'm in the same boat. I use the rM extensively for meeting notes, but I have never been able to give up on having a paper notebook as well. The problem is mostly the ease of page-flicking; skipping forward and backward on an e-ink device is an O(N) operation, while in a physical book it is O(1). The same problem has basically forced me towards using a Kindle only for fiction where the content is linear - for technical material, I still buy physical books.

[throwanem]

Not that I'm going to buy a reMarkable, but I do wonder what kind of organization tools it provides. Being able to tag a given note with arbitrary categories and have the device produce a date-ordered index on any category seems like it would help with this a lot.

(I use a similar system in my paper notes, with a topic index mapping to page numbers. A few minutes of grooming a day suffices to keep it up to date, and it speeds lookups enormously.)

[dTal]

I think a physical book is something like O(log n), unless you can crack it precisely to the page you want every time.

[fragmede]

norminal case, or worst case? it's nominally O(1+c) - find the right section, turn forwards or back a couple pages (c). Problem is, worst case for an analog journal is something like O(NaN) because you can't find it and then give up, frustrated.

[hoppla]

I have not figured out how to jump directly to chapters yet, and not sure if it’s possible. I uploaded a 900 page ebook, and gave up trying to browse to the page where I left off.

[fsniper]

I gave up on their original ereader the day I bought the device. I install KorReader and get all the features I require for free.