I have an old kobo e-reader that's been in flight mode since day 1.
It's amazing the difference I feel between reading on a tablet and an ereader. The ereader doesn't really feel like a "device," more like a book. On a tablet, I'm googling (Can you really ride from Winterfell to Kings Landing in a week? How fast do ravens fly? Lets see what the internet thinks.). They might be related to the book. They might not. Emails, HN, news…
Watching TV before bed keeps me up. Roaming the internet for half a Saturday on it makes me feel crap. Doing those with a book relaxes me, improves my sleep and my energy levels. Tablet reading is more like TV than like a book.
Anyway… I wonder if bringing that to a writing device could be some sort of improvement, at least for a subset of uses. Something that's designed to write. Editing as a secondary. Something that will feel different when you sit down to write on it. It's not research or email time. It's writing time. Change the pace. Focus.
As a second screen running your normal software… I'm iffy. As a purpose built device that is significantly different than our laptop, but possibly superior at certain tasks, I'd like to see one of these.
I've been daydreaming of a typewriter that appends to a file on a USB stick so when you're done writing you can take it to a computer to edit.
There's also the Hemingwrite https://hemingwrite.com/ which is like an eInk typewriter. I prefer having immediate physical output which is why I'd rather have a mechanical typewriter that also saves to digital. But it might be what you're looking for.
These are along the lines of what I've been dreaming, but I'm afraid the screen is far too small. I'm not plagued by LCDs either. My MacBook Pro screen is perfect. However, I want a digital experience completely without distractions, like the one I have with my Kindle (but for writing).
I have an idea that I call TypewriterOS. An USB bootable OS (probably based on Linux) that goes directly into a full screen text editor, which is in fact its only feature or software. No WiFi, no multitasking, no ability to save the plain text UTF-8 files to anywhere else but the USB that I booted from.
When I'm ready writing I reboot in to OS X and I can upload the result to wherever I need to.
The feature that's important for me is having immediate physical output. I don't like reading what I just wrote off a small LCD display. And I like having the paper result right away, but it would be nice to have a digital copy if I wanted to edit the document further. But thanks for the lead!
You're missing the digital part. And I don't mean editing typos, I mean real editing. And things like being able to turn it into a blog post, for example.
Yeah, they've made some design decisions I don't agree with but it is pretty nice all the same. I think you can turn off the wireless with a switch but haven't looked into it as I'm more into paper-output typewriters than reading a small display.
It's close, and it's the first thing I found that made me think it would be possible someday. My first attempt would probably be to take one of those kits and a RbPi and figure out how to have it constantly record keystrokes. Or use a keylogger.
The use case for me is being able to carry a typewriter around and write on it without thinking about plugging it in to something, then taking a USB key off it later. Whereas that kit is more oriented to using with another computer.
It's also a project that I've accepted I'll tackle some year in the future as my list of fun projects is long and limited by a full time job and a side business. Thank you for the links!
seriously? You look at that thing and think it's beautiful? I haven't seen anything look that ugly since the first kindle. It in no way, shape, or form resembles any typewriter hemingway used.
It looks like a the kind of thing you'd find in a baby store. Does it honk a horn when you hit the big red button?
Well ... beautiful in function and usability for a certain audience. To that audience, there are few to no choices, so this is beautiful in comparison. It's all relative :)
I want data to go the other direction: a physical typewriter that can impact letters onto a page from a digital text file. Seen anything like this in your searches? I'd bought one on eBay that could type from floppy disk but it arrived broken.
(What I really want is a USB-driven daisywheel printer.)
Hmm, hadn't thought of that use case so I haven't really looked for it. I feel like you could hack that together relatively easily if you're a hardware/electronics type, since that's basically what electric typewriters are.
I just bought an old Sears electric off Kijiji and it buffers keystrokes as you type - if you keep typing when it hits end of line, it will type them for you on the next line. Also has a "demo" function where you hit a special key combo and it will type out a feature list from memory. Reminds me of a player piano.
It uses a daisywheel, I can't believe how fast that thing rotates. If you could control the input to the daisywheel you'd be in business. No idea how hard it would be to reverse engineer it, not my area of expertise, but it seems doable.
I did see somebody at a maker faire a few years back who made a typewriter that wrote out tweets, you could tweet at the machine and it would print it out. Pretty cool, but I think it was a long labor of love and not necessarily easily replicated. You should be able to find something about it with a few searches, I think they were out of Kitchener-Waterloo?
I think it's a great idea for secondary information... however, I just don't retain what I read as well on an electronic display (e-ink or lcd) as I do a real, physical book. I have a photographic memory, and it's probably the physical size of a book, and the position of the page in the larger whole just ads a little more context that makes it easier to remember. I don't typically remember the text, so much as an image of the words on a page, and roughly where in the book something was.
As much as I value being able to access things electronically, I tend to spend 2-3 hours a day reading on sites like this, or blogs... just the same, I find a lot of value in a physical book when getting into something new, and hope they don't go away altogether for technology books.
I was thinking this would be fantastic for reading textbooks or code documentation. My eyes get fatigued after reading for any length on a tablet or lcd, but a traditional ebook reader is far too slow and small for scanning through textbooks.
I read textbooks on my Kobo Aura HD all the time. I upgraded from a Kobo Glo exactly for that purpose.
I would like it even bigger so that research papers in PDF could all be full page without panning. Textbooks in epub are good. Allowed me to finally leave all paper books behind.
I completely agree, and that's why you're not getting my old Gen one Kindle DX from my hands any time soon. Dedicated devices that do just one thing to me seem like a great area for somebody to pursue.
I do not want or need everything I own to be an all-purpose, voice-controlled, spend 40 hours on the internet device. I might just want to read, or write, or listen to music. So give me something that does that and stop trying to create another content delivery system or way to push ads in my face.
This is a very simple request. I can't imagine that it's somehow strange or weird. The problem here is that marketplace momentum is going the other way.
"One of this year’s hottest Christmas presents is no longer available in the shops. Two months after Apple announced the demise of its iPod Classic MP3 player, the model is selling secondhand for up to four times its original price as aficionados clamour to get their hands on one."
The super-expensive Sony single-purpose eink PDF reader/annotator is selling to many outside the original target market of legal professionals, much to Sony's surprise. For a while, there was a 50% markup on the device by reimporters.
Hopefully Project Ara succeeds, allowing users to choose different points on the spectrum between single and multi purpose hardware.
I noticed that reading on a tablet with reverse colors (black background) has some of the same effect as e-ink. Since I started doing this I feel it is much easier to concentrate on the book. It is probably the fact that you're less exposed to light, even though you never get a completely black screen on a tablet.
An OLED screen would be a truer black, since the pixels are turned on/off individually, with no backlight. The new Dell "world's thinnest" 8" tablet with 350 PPI OLED for $399 looks promising, http://www.androidcentral.com/dell-venue-8-7840-qhd-display-...
It's amazing the difference I feel between reading on a tablet and an ereader. The ereader doesn't really feel like a "device," more like a book. On a tablet, I'm googling (Can you really ride from Winterfell to Kings Landing in a week? How fast do ravens fly? Lets see what the internet thinks.). They might be related to the book. They might not. Emails, HN, news…
Watching TV before bed keeps me up. Roaming the internet for half a Saturday on it makes me feel crap. Doing those with a book relaxes me, improves my sleep and my energy levels. Tablet reading is more like TV than like a book.
Anyway… I wonder if bringing that to a writing device could be some sort of improvement, at least for a subset of uses. Something that's designed to write. Editing as a secondary. Something that will feel different when you sit down to write on it. It's not research or email time. It's writing time. Change the pace. Focus.
As a second screen running your normal software… I'm iffy. As a purpose built device that is significantly different than our laptop, but possibly superior at certain tasks, I'd like to see one of these.