I’m someone who uses the web browser on my e-reader. I always have done, from the earliest Amazon Kindle I had, through to the bq Cervantes 4 I use these days. To scratch my own itch, I’ve created a new site: eink.link
As you’d expect, web browsers on e-readers aren’t very capable. As websites get ever more bloated and complex, they render ever more poorly on these kinds of devices.
Simple, text-based websites work well, though. So I thought I’d begin to collect these and make them available for anyone to use. I’m not doing anything complicated: just using GitHub Pages to serve up a basic website that’s styled Simple.css.
Right now, I’ve added one or more links in the following categories:
Search
Ebooks
News
Weather
Social
Technical
It’s pretty awesome that I can download EPUB-formatted books directly from my e-reader’s web browser directly to the device!
In case you’re interested, I did do some very basic research with people who self-reported as users of e-readers. The following polls on Mastodon and Twitter together received 101 votes:
Some may see the above as discouraging, but I disagree: that’s 10-15% of e-reader uses in my sample who are already using an e-reader web browser, and 30-40% who know how to access it.
If this were a ‘product’ rather than a side project, I’d say that there’s a definite niche there to be served. For example, we know that looking at backlit smartphone and tablet screens can cause insomnia. E-ink screens are much better in that regard, plus the simplicity of the websites that work on e-readers are potentially more calming.
For the foreseeable, though, this is just something that’s useful for me and hopefully some other people. The good news is that it works well on every type of web browser. I’m planning to implement a dark mode toggle soon, as well as add a bunch more websites — feel free to suggest some!
