The Remarkable “community” is full of people like this — especially on Reddit.
99% of the time they have some comically unique workflow that Remarkable “needs” to support or they want to read ebooks on the thing and have it be better than a Kindle (which they also hate) or something else that if they did any research before buying would have (hopefully) dissuaded them.
An eink device not being great at reading books is silly. These devices are especially compelling for academics, but Remarkable has no links to reference managers like Zotero. It also is radically dependent on your computer or phone for getting material on/off, when an integration with Readwise for instance would fit naturally into people’s flow and not require cluttering up the filesysten with temporary material like news articles. Search over handwriting is bad to impossible, and there’s no mechanism to link to another note or another page, a now standard feature on all competitors except the Kindle Scribe that helps solve the “I can’t flip back and forth in my notebook” problem common to all electronic notebooks.
People’s frustration is that it could do radically more that way would really enhance functionality and utility for a lot of people, without hurting its distraction free nature, but they refuse to do so. The thing doesn’t even support comic book archives, and the new one has a great color screen!
It's a processor and a screen. There's nothing about the physical device that prevents it from doing well at reading ebooks or comics. It's purely software. Forcing me to carry both a tablet for reading and a tablet for writing is ridiculous, especially at an ~$800 price point.
I can't mark up documents in a paper notebook, but it's marketed as one of the chief uses for Remarkable. Why? Because it's not "a paper notebook" it's electronic paper -- ie it's meant to do everything paper does. If I can print it out, I should be able to read it without much trouble, and would expect a good experience doing so for such an expensive device.
You don't have to go full Boox with the entire Android ecosystem to do that if you don't want to. But as an example of what a great reading experience on epaper can be, I'd refer you to Neoreader from Boox, the default reading app on their platform, which has excellent support for epub, comic books/manga, and PDFs.
99% of the time they have some comically unique workflow that Remarkable “needs” to support or they want to read ebooks on the thing and have it be better than a Kindle (which they also hate) or something else that if they did any research before buying would have (hopefully) dissuaded them.