Unveiling eWritable’s E-Ink Tablet Question and Answer community.
Because eWritable has become so popular over the last 15 months, I am receiving emails from users on an almost daily basis to ask specific questions about e-ink tablets.
Whilst I don’t mind replying to these emails (and I do reply to every single correspondence I get), it’s not always possible for me to reply swiftly due to other commitments – it can take several days, and, on a few occasions, over a week.
I also often find that I am repeating myself because some questions are very similar. I have previously turned common questions into blog posts that I can link to in order to save time (e.g. ‘Will Boox release a colour 13.3″ tablet?‘ and ‘Colour vs Monochrome E-Ink Tablets‘.)
But, of course, it is not feasible to write a blog post for every single question I get.
In addition, sometimes I don’t know the answer to a question and am unable to help – for example, I’ve not yet had hands-on experience with the Huawei Matepad or Lenovo Smart Paper, so I’m not the best person to be asking about these particular tablets.
So I thought it would be useful to create a database or knowledgebase of common questions along with their answers.
What’s more, other users can answer questions and the person that originally submitted the questions can select what they feel is the best answer.
I felt that this would give the e-ink community an opportunity to help and learn from one another.
I will try to answer as many questions as I can. I have lots of e-ink tablets (Boox, Supernote, reMarkable, Kindle Scribe, Meebook etc. and have used several others that I no longer own) so I can check things out as needed.
But for questions that I don’t know the answer to, questions that are subjective and could have several perspectives, and questions that I do not have time to answer quickly, the community will (hopefully) be able to help.
You can find the Question & Answer community forum here.
In all honesty, I was in two minds about whether to launch this service for several reasons.
Firstly, there are already several e-ink related forums (e.g. Reddit, Facebook etc.) and I felt that something similar might be surplus to requirements. However (and this may be because I’m not as young as I used to be), I do find these websites very cumbersome to navigate and find what I’m looking for.
eWritable’s Q&A website is very fast, has an easy-to-use search feature, and questions are categorised by the brand/manufacturer to make navigation easier. There are also no ads to interrupt your flow. You can post anonymously and don’t even need to register to ask or answer a question (although if you do register, you can collect points and customise your signature).
And for me personally, I don’t particularly like social media websites – the algorithms are designed to keep you browsing and scrolling and I very often get hooked reading inane posts. But I only tend to log on to them to help others with their e-ink questions so if I can do this away from the social media website, the better it will be for me 🙂
I was also concerned that moderating the community would take up too much of my time. However, I’m hoping that the community will moderate itself, particularly with questioners able to flag their own accepted answers. And if there’s anything I’ve learned about the e-ink community, it’s that we’re generally a decent bunch of people. Of course, there will be a few bad apples, so I’ve put in some anti-spam measure (e.g. Captcha, firewall etc.) and I can manually block users that abuse the system, if necessary.
And there was also the concern that nobody would use it. Or, people would use it only for asking their own questions without helping others.
Unfortunately, these are things that I can’t easily predict without some real-life data.
So, after a weekend of contemplating whether I want to release eWritable’s Q&A into the wild, I decided to go ahead with it and see what happens. And hopefully get some feedback about how useful it is (or even if it is total crap and needs a rethink).
So, if you have a question about e-ink tablets, or have the knowledge and time answer the questions of others, please check out eWritable’s Question & Answer webpage. I might even look into giving prizes to the most valuable contributors.
I’m hoping we can build a nice little community of passionate e-ink tablet users that can help one another get the most from their devices 🙂
About the author
Dan Dutton is passionate about E-ink writing tablets, which bring together the pleasure of writing on paper with the power of digital technology. When he bought his first tablet, he realised that there wasn't a lot of unbiased information available for people that were considering buying an E-ink tablet, and so he built eWritable.