Boox Page: A Review

I love words, and have as far back as I can remember. Mom says I started reading the newspaper religiously in kindergarten, I proudly show off a small percentage of my books in my videoconferencing background, and of course the web is (still) junk straight into my veins.

So I’ve long wanted an e-ink device that could do multi-vendor ebooks, pdfs, and a feed reader. (I still consume a lot of RSS, mostly via the excellent feedbin.) But my 8yo Kindle kept not dying, and my last shot at this (a Sony) was expensive and frustrating.

Late last year, though, I found out about the Boox Page. It is… pretty great? Some notes and tips:

• My use case: I don’t write or take notes on this, so I can’t advise on whether it is a good Remarkable (or similar) competitor. Also don’t use the music player or audiobooks.
• Price: Pretty reasonable for something I use this much. Open question how long they do Android support, unfortunately—Reddit users report five years for older models, which isn’t great but (unlike a phone) not as hugely active a security risk.
• Screen and body: screen, lighting, size, and weight are easily on par with my old Kindle, which is to say “comfortable on eyes and hands for a lot of long-term reading”.
• Battery life: This is not an OG Kindle, but I have gone multiple plane flights without recharging, and it is USB-C, so (unlike my micro-USB Kindle) easy to charge while traveling.
• Other hardware: Meh.
  • The hardware volume buttons are… fine? But small. I would not miss them if I had to rely on the screen.
  • The cover is a fine cover, but it is not an effective stand – something I miss from my Kindle.
  • I suspect repairability is terrible. Sorry, iFixit :(
• Core operating system
  • UX: Android modded to use e-ink is… surprisingly fine? I use the Android layer essentially to (1) install apps and (2) launch them. And those work well, though the default launcher screen has some clutter that can’t be removed. Some of the alternate Android launchers apparently work, but I haven’t tried any of them yet.
  • performance: Boot time is very long, and for unknown reasons it seems to default to a full shutdown when you close the cover, which really destroys the “open up the book and immediately start reading” experience. Strongly recommend Power → Power-off Timeout → “never” to avoid this problem.
  • Security: There is no thumbprint or face scan here, and the e-ink keyboard is as good as possible but still slow to enter a high-strength password. So I’ve chosen to put as little private information on this as possible. Has motivated me to update some passwords to “xkcd-style” four-word, lower-case, strings in order to make them easier to read from my phone and type in on the Boox.
  • Openness: it looks like Onyx violates the GPL. Folks have successfully rooted older Boox devices, but I have not seen any evidence of anyone doing that with the Page yet.
• UX “improvements”: There are so many; most aren’t great but the worst ones can all be turned off.
  • “Naviball”: a weird dot-as-UI thing that I turned off nearly immediately.
  • Gestures: To save screen real-estate, standard Android back and home buttons are by default replaced with gestures (documentation). I found the gestures a bit unreliable and so turned the bottom toolbar back on. Not great but fine.
  • E-ink settings: There are a lot of different settings for e-ink refresh strategies (eg do you want it faster but lossy, slower but clearer, etc.), which are adjustable both overall and on a per-app basis. The default settings seem to work pretty well for me, but I suspect at least some apps would benefit from tweaking. Docs here for more details.
• App stores:
  • Google Play: pre-installed, and can be used to install Kindle, Libby, and Hoopla. It works fine, with two caveats: I don’t love giving this device my Google password; and it is clear that the best iOS apps have noticeably better UX than the best Android apps.
  • F-Droid: Works great! Used it to install the Wikipedia app, KOReader, and Tusky, among others.
• Getting books:
  • Kindle app works great. You will not lose access to your existing e-book library by moving away from a Kindle.
  • Libby and Hoopla: Both of the apps used by my library (San Francisco Public) to make e-books available install fine from the Google Play App Store and work great. Have happily read long books in both of them.
  • Standard Ebooks: Their website and “advanced epub” work great on the Boox, so I’ve been plowing through a bunch of old public domain stuff. This has been maybe the single most satisfying part of the device, to be honest—it’s been great to refocus my reading that way instead of being guided by Amazon’s recommendations.
  • Onyx: the folks behind Boox have a book store, which can be turned off but not removed from the home-screen UX. I have not used it.
• Reading books:
  • All of the apps above have worked fine, with the minor detail that in some of them (notably Kindle) you have to find a setting to enable “use volume control as page up/down” in order to use the page turning buttons.
  • KOReader, from F-Droid, was recommended to me. Its default text presentations are, IMHO, not ideal. But once I spent some time experimenting to get proper margins and line spacing, it became very pleasant. I use it to read the “advanced” formatted epubs from Standard Ebooks, and it handles those very well.
• Managing books:
  • KO Reader and the built-in book reader mostly default to “just expose the file system” as a book management view, which is… not great.
  • KO Reader does not sync reading positions, so if you’re used to going back and forth between your e-ink device and your phone, you may need to do more work, either to just remember your positions, or to set up something like calibre-web.
  • I’m using Story Graph as my main “what did I read lately” repository and it works great as a progressive web app.
• The web
  • The basics: the Page has a reasonably modern Chrome (called “Neobrowser”). Mostly just works, none of the “experimental” web browser stuff from Kindle.
  • Scrolling: can be painful; e-ink and scrolling don’t mix too well. Much depends on the nature of the web page (fine) or web app (grimace) you’re using – some are fine, others are not so much.
  • Progressive Web Apps: The browser often prompts you to install web sites as app icons on the main launcher page and they generally work great. Really nice alternative to app stores, just like we always hoped they’d be. Maybe just a few years too late :(
• Other sources of text
  • Feeds: Feedbin.com in the browser is… fine. Refresh is sort of wonky, though. I’ve tried both Android apps listed on the feedbin site, but don’t love either. (I like the experience enough that I have resurrected my dream of a more newspaper-like app to read on this in the morning.)
  • Fediverse: Tusky is the most-recommended open Android Mastodon app, and it is fine, but I have found that I prefer Phanpy in-browser (despite some performance challenges) to the better performance but rough UX edges of Tusky. There are quite a few other options; I have not explored them deeply.
  • PDFs. The couple of PDFs I’ve tried to read have been fine, but I have not pushed it and I suspect they won’t be great given the smaller-screen; either a larger Boox or a Remarkable seem more the right thing if that is your primary use case. I really need to set up some sort of syncing and prioritizing system; many of them are reputed to work (again, basically stock-ish Android).
  • Wikipedia: App works great. Haven’t tried editing yet though ;)
• Things I’d like to explore more:
  • Security: can I move entirely to F-Droid-sourced apps so I don’t need this to have my Google password? Can I replace most Onyx-provided apps next?
  • “Find my”: Is there a “find this device” (and/or “remote wipe this”) service that would help me track it down in case of loss, but that doesn’t require trusting the device very much (see Google password above)? No idea but given that I’ve already nearly lost it once, I need to look into it.
  • Sharing out: I like sharing out links, quotes, snippets, etc. but typing on this is a bit of a mess. I’d like to figure out some sort of central output flow, where I can use the Android share feature to dump into a stream that I can then surf and resurface from other devices. Not sure what the right service is to host that, though.
• Bottom line: I am really enjoying this, and it is enough under my control that I suspect I can make it even better. It certainly isn’t a dream device from a freedom and privacy perspective, but for my limited use case that’s fine.

Added, Feb. 15: An old friend reading this said it surprised him, because my software aesthetics at this point are very much “it had better work out of the box, I have no time or patience for DIY”, and this sounded… pretty DIY.

It’s a great observation. For lots of other devices, I have no patience for something that doesn’t Just Work. But apparently (surprising me as much as anyone!) I have a lot of patience for getting my e-reading experience just so. So this did (still does) take patience, but also so far has rewarded that patience. We’ll see if it sticks.