[1shooner]

Personally, having a book-like form factor is a property that moves it into it's own tactile/haptic experience. These small newspaper-column width readers seem to just take you further down the 'reading generally' path.

While I appreciate the sentiment of physical books, I simply don't have the physical space for my book collection, and it seemed frivolous to make that a meaningful requirement of my living space. On top of that, my reading-distance eyesight has started to go, and it's so much simpler to bump the text on a book-sized reader than it is to manage reading glasses.

[gabriel666smith]

It's a product that's so deeply dependent on lifestyle, and on physical needs. My fiancee is technically partially sighted (nystagmus from albinism) and I was surprised to learn when we started dating that the RNIB has 3% of the UK living with some form of sight loss, and ~350,000 people as partially-sighted or blind. I didn't really understand the full and nuanced spectrum of what "sight loss" could mean - I guess I had thought of it in very cartoonish, uninterrogated "no glasses vs wears glasses vs sunglasses-dog-and-cane" terms.

The age demographics which read more, broadly speaking, have vastly higher incidences of some kind of sight loss. It's a sizeable portion of the market that goes, it seems, rather underserved in products akin to e-readers, like televisions.

(Televisions specifically being a product where - somewhat off-topic - there are an awful lot of features that would be trivial to implement which would drastically improve the product for the meaningful segments of the market who have some form of sight loss. These features unfortunately seem often to be lower down the roadmap than spyware-adjacent tracking or new kinds of motion smoothing for users to turn off.)

My own IRL library is scattered in storage crates across places I've lived in the past, due to space and travel limitations, so I strongly empathise with you on that.