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Jmaa Boox Page Review

From お邪魔:

After a few days of setting up my Boox Page, I'm really enjoying the reading experience compared to my old kindle paperwhite.

Pros

  • Having yomichan + mining is really great experience. Almost all the yomichan features are supported on the Boox, this means you unlock all the power of yomichan.
  • As someone who doesn't have other sources of mining (don't mine from anime and don't read VN's consistently), this experience makes it easy to continually grow my vocabulary.
  • Yomichan's dictionary selection for yomichan is just far superior to what's on kindle right now and there's active development for new dictionaries
  • Wayyy better japanese word parsing than kindle. The kindle work lookup is just hot garbage.
  • distraction-free e-reader form factor is perfect for reading novels. I could not read novels on my laptop because it's too distracting. Despite being an android OS, the Boox Page is actually slow and b/w enough to not want to do anything but read on it.
  • Word lookups take ~1s after tapping. It feels pretty smooth

Cons:

  • The amount of upfront time to setup. It takes maybe like 8-10 hrs to set up with yomichan, mining, and everything else (discoverability of documentation is also hard). Yomibaba saved a lot of time but I still think the setup experience is still not very mature/smooth. I think there could be active development work here
  • From a shutdown state, it takes about 2 mins to get to start reading. Starting takes about 30s, then starting AnkiConnectAndroid (15s), then opening Kiwi browser + ttu loading is about a min.
  • The reading experience is not native to the device. It's a bit clunky to navigate to the reading experience. Ultimately I feel like I bought a $250 e-reader browser and there is some latency that shows up because it's not a native experience
  • Physical page turn button requires a bit more force than what I'm used to. I feel like I have to press to page turn
  • Price: $250 is not cheap but there are not many alternatives that have the feature set

Blind spots:

  • Haven't looked into manga and mokuro reading experience.

tl;dr

Reasons to Buy

  • You get a lot out of the yomichan experience
  • You do a lot of lookups and want lookups to be a superior experience
  • You want to mine from your e-reader

Reasons to Not Buy

  • Price is important to you
  • You barely do any lookups
  • You have other ways to mine enough vocab
  • You can comfortably read on your android (yomichan+mining) or iphone (just reading)