| Source: RM2 owner I think you’re vastly overstating how hackable it is. Yes you have root, and yes that’s notable and praiseworthy. However, it’s not “dead simple,” practically speaking. The parts you actually care about (the display/touch logic, library management, annotations, etc.) are all inside a single, proprietary binary. A group of dedicated and extremely impressive hackers has done excellent work reverse engineering and packaging their work for others to readily use. But they’re always swimming upstream, having to work around the myriad issues surrounding this vital, proprietary blob. Case in point: the hacker community’s work on RM2 v3.4+ has been stalled for 6+ months now because of changes that Remarkable made to their proprietary system. Another example of how not-open the core functionality is: you can’t hack in your own two-way ebook sync logic because the remarkable’s blob one-way-converts all books to a custom binary format before the user can read and annotate them. Sure, you can hook into some of the sync logic by mocking their API (iirc) and doing some custom one-way-sync stuff (using tools from the truly impressive hacker community). But two-way sync? I’m not aware of anything. And it’s definitely not as easy as mounting some fuse filesystem that does two-way sync with some service that you can load with books. So yeah, the RM2 is just a simple Linux system only if you ignore the actual reading and writing functionality. It’s good to have root (I _never_ would have bought mine otherwise), but that’s not enough. |