Essentially, you’re paying for the screen. The 6-inch display, which is made using E Ink technology, looks surprisingly like paper. It’s very sharp, doesn’t flicker, and can be viewed from any angle, even in bright sunlight. It’s supposed to be easier on the eyes than an LCD, and it definitely was on mine. Because E Ink is “image-stable,” it takes no power to keep an image displayed once it’s on-screen—that means the Reader only eats up battery life when you turn pages. You’re supposed to get 7,500 page turns on a single charge.

E Ink has a lot of potential for low-power applications and, I imagine, signage—since it can be read at every angle. But it also has significant drawbacks relative to LCD screens. We expect our electronics displays to dazzle, but the Reader’s is dull, and its palette is Etch A Sketch gray. There are also problems with “ghosting,” and since it has no backlight, you need a clip-on light to read in bed. Unfortunately, the slightly reflective screen tends to bounce the beam into your eyes. The biggest problem with E Ink is that it has a very slow refresh rate—around a second to turn a page. Though that doesn’t sound like much, it’s quite a pregnant pause: Clicking through the Reader’s menus is tedious, and page turns quickly become a bore.