What Frequent
Travellers Actually
Use for Notes
& Deep Reading

When I travel — and I travel constantly — I do not want to carry books. Books are heavy. They take up space. You read three on a trip and have to decide which three to bring. That decision is itself a kind of friction.

The reMarkable solved this completely. Dozens of books, everywhere, weightless. When I am riding my bicycle to a meeting, I can stop and pick up where I left off in a book. When I am on a trail between stages, the reMarkable comes with me. Physical books stay home.

"When you travel, you don't want to carry books. When you ride your bike, you don't want to carry a laptop. When you wake up at 3am with a thought, you don't want to open your phone. For all of that, the reMarkable is the answer."

The paper-like screen matters more than I expected. After hours of reading on a phone or laptop, your eyes pull back. On the reMarkable, I read for two hours without noticing. That is the thing most reviewers understate: it is not just that the screen looks like paper — it is that your brain treats the session like reading a book, not like looking at a device.

If a tool truly works for nomadic use, the proof is the list of places it has shown up. Here is a partial record:

• Aiguille du Midi, 3,842m — Mont Blanc, reading above the clouds
• Quebrada de Humahuaca — Argentina, red Andean canyon at altitude
• Patagonian Ice Field — Circuito Huemul, 4-day expedition
• Atacama Desert — Northern Chile, no wifi, no signal
• Altafulla beach — Spain, handwritten notes in Atlantic sun
• Seattle waterfront — Space Needle visible across the water
• Vienna canal bench — city life, deep focus session
• San Francisco park — golden hour, lying in the grass
• Río de la Plata café — Buenos Aires, morning ritual

The Mont Blanc session stands out. I was at the Aiguille du Midi cable car station before stepping onto the ridge — the highest cable car in the world at 3,842 meters. No wifi. No notifications. The screen said "Listening to Life." That is what the reMarkable promises: altitude, silence, and the book you brought with you everywhere.

Notes at 3am when a thought arrives. Books when I am between cities. Sketching out an idea when thinking in text is too slow. And my personal OKRs — written by hand, struck through as I progress, always with me offline. Not in an app. Not in the cloud. On something I hold.

"All my thoughts are on there. It's always next to my bed. Whenever I have some thoughts, I put them down. That is what it is for."

I also tried the Paper Pro. I returned it. The glass screen is not durable enough for this use pattern. The reMarkable 1 — my original — survives everything. If I were buying fresh today I would get the Paper Pure. But the reMarkable 1 is still running after 8 years and 3,635 pages.

I have no commercial partnership with reMarkable. Everything on this page is from 8 years of real use. I have said this to friends in Austria, in Argentina, in Silicon Valley. I do not know how many of them have bought one because of me. The number is not small. That is the clearest review I can give.