[redundantly]

From what I can tell, a partial refresh of the display (updating a smaller portion of the screen) performs less wear on the display than a full refresh, but it can still accumulate over time. Additionally some displays will require a full refresh after a certain number of partial refreshes to deal with ghosting.

[wvenable]

I read an article from someone doing a similar project and if you don't do a full refresh every so often then you'll actually wear out the display faster (he burned one out real quick). It actually needs those full refreshes after so many partial updates.

[kstrauser]

Huh, interesting. I don't know anything about it, but my Kobo Libra has settings for how often to refresh the whole screen (e.g. every N pages, at the end of the chapter, etc.).

[kiicia]

it does not matter in practice, let's say you do a full refresh once a second, it would take more than 11 days to do 1 million refreshes, if you do full refresh once a minute, it would take 2 years

[wisenull]

Those numbers don't seem high, at all, for me. Typing would probably cause a refresh more often than every second and even if it's delayed to be once, every second, it's still only 11 days.

[redundantly]

For the usage being discussed here, 1 million is extremely low. For its original intended usage, which might cause one to dozens of refreshes per day, it's more than it'll ever need.

[kiicia]

For eink reader is more than enough, for digital typewriter eink is not good choice for display, there are high contrast lcd displays with in-pixel memory that can be used