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#EinkBro

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fans out there: note that the project is no longer being updated on Google Play:

github.com/plateaukao/einkbro/

(And possibly, not on F-Droid either. The project's a few releases stale there, I've asked what's up on the GH link above.)

The announcement (in Mandarin Chinese) is here:

medium.com/einkbro/einkbro-app

Lede pull / DeepL translation:

In December 2023, it suddenly occurred to me that I could add a more convenient app update mechanism to EinkBro. In my own usage habit, I always install the newly developed version, so I don't install the relatively stable version on Google Play Store which may be updated once every 2-3 weeks.

FWIW, I'd recently tried installing from the GitHub release zip with no joy.

And if you're confused by all this: Einkbro is an eink-optimised Web browser for Android which I quite like most of the time.

GitHubeinkbro no longer on Google Play store · Issue #357 · plateaukao/einkbroBy uqs
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I'm using #Obsidian on my #ebook reader and am wondering whether it'd be possible to develop a community plugin that allows me to tap instead of scroll through notes, turning them into pages in the way that the e-ink browser #EinkBro handles websites. It would make Obsidian on e-ink devices so much more enjoyable! Possible?

github.com/plateaukao/einkbro

A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices. - plateaukao/einkbro
GitHubGitHub - plateaukao/einkbro: A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices.A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices. - plateaukao/einkbro
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@riley E-ink tablet, FYI.

It has no SIM capability, no camera, though there are a mic and speakers. I keep authenticated apps to an absolute minimum (Pocket is that exception), though I'm thinking of adding email to it. Jitsi meet might be a voice comms option.

TL;DR: excellent for reading, good for Web (use Einkbro: github.com/plateaukao/einkbro), quite good for podcasts, notetaking suprisingly good, multiple firmware upgrades over the past 2.5 years, which I consider good support (exceeds any prior Android device). Reasonably un-googled (no Google Play or Google registration), though still Android. Heavy use of F-Droid and Aurora Stores.

More recent releases double onboard storage. I'd still prefer to see ~512 GB (it's cheap). Document management is a major weakness.

I've written a few reviews and reflections mostly at Hacker News. Meta-review linking others: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3

From that:

For more on what e-ink delivers vs. tablets generally, see "The Case Against Tablets" (and specifically the long comment with the big table):

diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/

The Long Comment: diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/

Related topic, E-Ink Design Principles for Web and Applications:

  • Persistence is free
  • Paints are expensive
  • Refreshes are slow
  • Colours are very limited or nonexistent
  • Line art displays beautifully. Raster images not so much
  • Pagination navigation is strongly preferred to scroll
  • Graphics are reflective rather than emissive
  • Touch / Wacom may exist
  • Feature detection capabilities are limited, particularly for HTML/Web (via media queries).

diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/

@mutkitta

A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices. - plateaukao/einkbro
GitHubGitHub - plateaukao/einkbro: A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices.A small, fast web browser based on Android WebView. It's tailored for E-Ink devices but also works great on normal android devices. - plateaukao/einkbro
#eink#onyx#boox
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@RussSharek Ayup. I'm headed that way.

One of my recent finds that's been game-changing has been "Save as ePub", a feature of the browser (Android). That's a fork of the FOSS Browser, which might have similar functionality.

Effectively, you can save a Web article as an ePub, or append it to an existing ePub, which means you can effectively "build your own book" of relevant content (a project, good articles over a specific time period, work-related project, stuff to share with someone else). For tablets / mobile devices this is about the best option I've found, preferable to saving PDFs, with the one exception that most metadata concerning the saved content is lost. I'm not sure the source URL is kept, the date is certainly lost.

The and tags in my first toot above refer to a project I've been kicking around for managing documents and articles, both Web and otherwise. I'm tending strongly toward a plain-text baseline format (with markup languages such as Markdown, LaTeX, djot, etc., being ways of extending basic structure and capabilities), also with extensive bibliographic metadata. It's all pretty much vapourware but it's fun to think about.

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@cobalt I've raved on this particular feature of before.

Einkbro itself is just a mobile web browser, based on the FOSS browser (also a mobile device web browser), but with specific optimisations for e-ink devices. You can run it on any Android device.

What's truly inspired though is its save-to-epub feature. Unlike save-to-PDF which creates a new document each time, the ePub docs can be concatenated in a single file. If you're working on a specific project of other unified theme, it's brilliant. See: toot.cat/@dredmorbius/10795870 for more on this.

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Online reading is deceptively large

, "best of the interval", is a concept I'd come up with a ways back, the idea being to capture the best / most significant content I'm running across (online or off) and keeping something of a round-robin file of the ten or so best items.

With it's possible to save Web articles to EPUB format. And to append multiple articles to the same document.

I've been building a BOTI doc over the course of this year, currently at twelve articles. And it's ... large. With comfortable font and margin settings, over 400 pages. A not-inconsiderable book. (I'm chewing my way through it slowly, distraction and focus are perennial challenges. But at least it's in one place.)

It's easy to think that an online article isn't very substantial as you scroll through it, but apply pagination and the length becomes apparent.

(I do wish I could get a word count from Onyx's NeoReader, only one of numerous document-management weaknesses of e-readers generally. Onyx is par for the course here.)

And now, that doc isn't all the BOTI organisation I'd had in mind either, but it is a useful tool in the box.

#Eink#WWW#Reading
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@shelenn Also, I did end up purchasing the Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, a 13.3" e-ink tablet, based on Android.

As a bookreader it's excellent. It's also quite good for podcast playback (large flat structures make good speakers, quelle surprise), and I'm finding its handwritten notetaking ability far more useful than expected. I do wish it had more onboard storage (64 GB, updated to 128 GB in the OBML2), and I'd aim for ~512 GB - 1 TB, which would still be quite reasonable (Apple's iPad Pro has up to 2 TB storage). Part of that is for books, but podcasts also suck up considerable space.

Battery life as an Android device is fairly typical: a full day's usage, generally. If used as a book reader, with all other elements off (backlight, WiFi, Bluetooth), the advertised days of battery are attainable. That's not my typical pattern. Web browsing is astoundingly power-hungry.

The display is delicious.

As a general compute device, though, it has all of Android's deficiencies.

Termux remains The One Android App Which Does Not Precisely and Exactly Suck.

EinkBro, an e-ink optimised Web browser, is superior to anything else, though it still has numerous issues (mostly ranging around persistence and content management). My second choice is actually w3m under Termux.

Pocket still gets worse the more you use it. old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/c

redditPocket: It gets worse the more you use itHaving used Pocket's article-archival-and-management tool -- sort of a bookmarks-on-steroids product -- for the past year or two, and with news...
#Tablets#Onyx#Boox
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Einkbro is a seriously good tablet browser

I just need to mention it again.

This is an Android browser aimed at E-Ink devices (though it works for any Android device). It's optimised foir E-Ink's strengths and weaknesses.

That actually makes it a really good browser for reading content online, which ... it turns out a whole hell of a lot of present-generation mobile browsers kind of suck at.

The developer's also highly responsive and I've seen a few of my own issues and requests addressed, which is a breath of fresh air. Oh, and it's FOSS.

github.com/plateaukao/browser

GitHubGitHub - plateaukao/browser: An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device.An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device. - GitHub - plateaukao/browser: An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device.
#Einkbro#FDroid#Android
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EinkBro's save-as-ePub feature is ... uncannily brilliant

I've mentioned this e-ink optimised browser which I'm using increasingly heavily on my Onyx BOOX.

I've just realised it has a "save to ePub" feature. That's something like "save to PDF", but better:

  • ePub strips out even more stock Web formatting. Remember: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.
  • Open documents in any ePub or e-Book reader.
  • Oh yeah: eInkBro reads ePubs.

But the kicker is this: you can save multiple sites to the same document. Each of them ends up as an individual chapter within that document.

That is something that could be quite interesting and useful. Grouping documents by some dimension such as:

  • Random articles you've filed to read later on a given day.
  • Growing article collections on a given topic. For me that might be general news, Covid / Pandemics, software development and systems management, theories of economic and political power, etc., etc.
  • Items you want to forward to an individual or group.

As with most things e-Book-reader, I really wish the organising tools were better --- tagging, search, indexing, and metadata management. I'd also like to capture more information on the origin article --- original title, byline, website, date, and of course, URL. And I'd like to be able to easily repackage the articles later (I'm sure there are ePub doc management utilities similar to, say, Poppler Tools for PDF).

And yes, it's a fairly new browser with quirks and bugs. It remains the best tool for reading long-form Web content on my tablet, bar none.

But this is pretty nifty.

github.com/plateaukao/browser

Available on F-Droid:

f-droid.org/en/packages/info.p

(Repost for URL.)

GitHubGitHub - plateaukao/browser: An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device.An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device. - GitHub - plateaukao/browser: An Android web browser based on webview, which is specialized for E-Ink device.
#einkbro#WebBrowsers#eink
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EinkBro: Web browsing for E-Ink devices

I'd recently run across this via a Reddit post. A web browser designed specifically for e-ink devices. Features:

  • Pagination rather than scroll-based navigation.
  • Reader mode.
  • Font bolding.
  • Font size adjustments.
  • PDF export (missing entirely from Fennec Fox, annoyingly hidden on Chromium).

Base seems to be Chromium/Blink. GNU GPL.

I'm still mostly browsing via Fennec (better privacy and ad controls), but for quick reading or generating printed/PDF copy, EinkBro is quite useful.

fossdroid.com/a/einkbro.html

fossdroid.comEinkBrolightweight, fast, but powerful browser designed for Eink devices.
#EinkBro#EInk#WebBrowsers
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