Is there an e-ink reader with a 8.5"x11"/A4 screen that'll display PDFs? All I want is to be able to bring all my tech ebooks with me to work and be able to look things up/brush up on things on the commute/flight etc.
If you can find an Entourage Edge 10" on ebay or somewhere, you would probably be set. I had the pocket edge version. These were very solid android dual-screen tablets - an e-ink and lcd display. The e-ink was also a digitizer, so you could use a stylus to take notes.
Sadly, being a hardware company is tough and the product line became unprofitable. The android version ended at 2.3, but it was sufficient to put on several readers. If your books were in a standard format, the built in reader worked fine. There was also community effort to either mirror the screens or force other reader apps onto the e-ink panel.
It's actually quite good if you "root" the device and install koreader[1](the original developer is the same guy who wrote the vnc viewer for kindle, that was mentioned in this thread), or its librerator fork[2]. In contrast to Amazon's practically unusable PDF reader, these open source projects support custom zoom levels, 2-column mode for academic articles etc.
Another option is to use k2pdfopt[3].
Horrible. The screen refresh was fast enough, but the actual PDF rendering was grossly underpowered. I was reading technical articles with embedded plots that would take quite literally minutes to render.
I sold my DX (the "current" gen) and bought a 3rd Gen iPad the minute the retina display was released. I still pine for the eInk display though. I've half considered a hobby hack project that involves a Kindle DX brain transplant.
No. That product is years old and has been removed entirely from the market twice now. Amazon deliberately does not market them and only makes them available intermittently.
The PocketBook 912 (and I think a few other models) had a 9.7" (diagonal) display size, with the usual 16 shades of grey, and a reasonable, if not over-powered, CPU.
I have one, and use it for good purpose with a variety of text books. The ability (or constraint?) to not be distracted by colourful networky things is grossly underestimated, but even more so is the ability to stare at the thing for several hours, in a variety of lighting conditions, and not feel any type of eye-strain.
Horribly expensive at the time it came out, and probably rare as rocking horse poo now. Looking at the other responses to your question there is slim pickings for contemporary devices with these specs, sadly.
You probably don't need 8.5x11". There's no reason to display the (usually blank) margins in an e-reader. 6.5x9" should suffice.
I have an old Kindle 3G that I use for reading papers. Its screen is 4.8" in height, which is just about the default column width of LaTeX (= 8.5" - 3.75" margin = 4.75"), meaning I could comfortably read papers in landscape with only scrolling up & down.
PDF reading was okay. It was rather slow, and you couldn't highlight/markup anything, but the rendering was gorgeous.
