I’ve tried many e-readers since early Kindle but I keep coming back to two fundamental problems with e-ink, both relevant to education.

First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page boundary.

Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book. When reading non-fiction, it’s vital to be able to jump around quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as simple as flipping through a physical book.

Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings.

My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader. (Similar to the “kale phone” concept ie minimal software installed on it … no distractions.) They are much more responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.