reMarkable tablets as a chess learning device

Start with the truth: you do not need a tablet to work through chess puzzles. Print any of our puzzle sets on A4, staple the pages, and you have a booklet that will not run out of battery, cannot be misplaced in a cloud account, and works forever.

Print is the baseline. It is also, in most other ways, the best. Chess is a slow game. It rewards media that are slow with it. A pencil, a wooden board, a printed diagram, and enough silence to think.

So why publish for reMarkable at all.

The short answer is that a good e-ink tablet has almost all of paper's virtues and a handful of things paper cannot do. If you already own a reMarkable, or you are considering one, and chess is part of what you want to do with it, the case is easy.

Here is the longer version. It applies to the whole reMarkable line — the Paper Pure, the Paper Pro, the reMarkable 2, the original reMarkable 1 — because they share the same 3:4 screen shape and the same PDF viewer. Everything below works on every one of them.

Unlimited pages, no marginal cost

Each of our sets is 100 puzzles across roughly 200 pages, including interleaved solutions. Printed, that is a small booklet. Ten sets is a stack. Fifty sets is a shelf.

If you are working through several themes at several difficulties, print piles up fast. Paper is renewable and biodegradable, but it is not free. There is the paper itself, the ink or toner, the electricity your printer draws, and, over a long enough horizon, the small environmental cost of all three.

On a reMarkable, the marginal cost of a page is nothing. Load a set, tap through the pages, load another set when you are done. The device draws power only during page refreshes and note-taking. You can hold a hundred sets on a device that weighs less than the printed booklet of one.

This matters more the more you practice. If you do ten puzzles a day for a year, you are not printing a hundred booklets. You are keeping one library.

Bigger boards without waste

A paper puzzle book is constrained by economics. Publishers optimise for the largest number of puzzles per page that a reader can still comfortably solve on. That usually means small boards. Look at any budget puzzle book from a chess publisher and you will see four or six boards per spread, each about six centimetres square, printed on paper light enough to see the reverse side.

We do the opposite. Our default digital format is one puzzle per page, with the board rendered at 153 millimetres square. That is bigger than the board in most printed puzzle books, and it fills a reMarkable's screen edge to edge. The pieces are large enough to read at a glance. The notation grid below has room for real handwriting.

We can afford this because pages, again, are free. A four-boards-per-page layout is a compromise the physical world forces on you. An unlimited-pages medium removes the compromise.

E-ink is easier on the eyes than an iPad

This is not marketing. It is optics.

An LCD or OLED screen is a light source. Its brightness varies with the image but it is emitting photons directly into your eyes. Over a long session, that adds up to real fatigue, particularly in dim rooms and particularly for tasks that require sustained close focus.

E-ink is a reflective display. The device produces no light of its own. It reflects ambient light the same way a printed page does, which is why an e-ink screen looks better in a sunny window and gets harder to read in a dark room, exactly like paper. Some reMarkable devices, like the Paper Pro, have a subtle front light for low-light use, but it works the way a bedside reading lamp works, and it can be turned off entirely.

The practical effect: you can spend an hour with a reMarkable in the same posture and lighting you would use for a book, and your eyes do not know the difference. You cannot do that with a tablet in the traditional sense.

For chess, this matters because puzzles reward long looks at static positions. Fifteen seconds of visual comfort per puzzle, times a hundred puzzles, is worth quite a lot over a year of practice.

The Marker pen, and what it changes

Every reMarkable ships with a pen. The Marker and Marker Plus have a texture close to a soft pencil on rough paper and no perceptible latency.

Our puzzle sets include a bordered scoresheet-style notation grid below each board. On paper you fill it in with a real pencil. On a reMarkable you fill it in with the pen, and the ink stays with the file. If you come back to a puzzle a month later, your working is still there.

The tablet's default PDF viewer supports this out of the box. There is nothing to configure. Open the file, tap a row, write your move.

Environmental tradeoffs, honestly

The most honest thing to say about paper vs. tablet, on environment, is that both have costs and they are different costs.

Paper has a per-use cost that scales linearly with pages. Trees are renewable and paper mills have gotten cleaner, but each printed sheet still involves water, energy, and pulp. Printer ink and toner have their own footprint. If you print heavily, the per-year footprint is real.

A tablet has almost zero per-use cost. Charging an e-ink device draws so little power it disappears in the noise of your household electricity bill. But the manufacturing footprint is significant and front-loaded. If you buy the device and use it for a year and then replace it, the maths does not favour it. If you buy it and use it for five or seven years, which is realistic with e-ink because there is no battery-degradation cliff and no software obsolescence, the maths comes out ahead.

Neither medium is virtuous. Both are workable. The one that makes environmental sense for you depends on how much you would otherwise print, and how long you would keep the device.

Which reMarkable

The reMarkable line has different screen sizes but the same shape.

• Paper Pro — 11.8 inches, the largest current model. Biggest board, most room for notation. Best for extended sessions at a desk.
• Paper Pure — 8 inches, the smallest current model. Pocketable, one-handed reading. The board is smaller but still comfortable.
• reMarkable 2 — 10.3 inches, the previous flagship. Still on sale, still excellent. A middle-ground size that suits most people.
• reMarkable 1 — 10.3 inches, discontinued but still around. Same viewer, same experience.

All four share the 3:4 aspect ratio, so our PDFs render at native size on any of them with no cropping and no letterboxing. Pick whichever suits your reading habits. There is no wrong answer for chess specifically.

Honest downsides

A few things print does better.

Cost. A ream of paper is trivially cheap. A reMarkable is not. If you would print rarely, print is the right choice.

No screen at all. There is something specific about a physical book in your hands that even the best e-ink display does not fully replicate. If you are the sort of person for whom this matters, it matters.

No colour. All of our sets are pure black and white by design, so this is not a limitation for us. But if you are looking to work through an annotated tournament book with coloured arrows, e-ink is not the right medium.

How the puzzle PDFs are set up for it

Our default format is 210 by 280 millimetres, which is a 3:4 aspect ratio. That matches every current reMarkable display exactly. The set fills the screen with no cropping and no letterboxing regardless of which model you use.

Every puzzle has its own page. Boards render at 1600 pixels wide, which any reMarkable's e-ink display handles cleanly. The notation grid uses the soft warm-grey that reads well on e-ink without dominating.

The same PDFs render fine on any other e-ink device that opens standard PDFs. We only design and test on a reMarkable because that is the device the project was built around, but the format is standard and the file is ordinary.

If you already have a reMarkable, browse the sets and drag one in. If you are considering one, chess is not a bad reason. But if you have a printer and a stapler, that is also a fine way to work through a set.

The point is the puzzles, not the medium.