AI Renaissance? E-ink notebooks defy the trend to become premium new tools in the workplace

AI tools push the speed of text generation to the limit, while simultaneously triggering information overload and work anxiety. Many companies are betting on electronic paper notebooks (eNote) to become an outlet for this counterforce, targeting new needs for deep thinking and private information processing.
(Background recap: Anthropic Fable 5 has caught Trump’s attention—who’s secretly smiling from behind the scenes? The media reveals three major beneficiaries.)
(Additional background: Vance supports the U.S. government taking an equity stake in OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI giants, while Musk takes the opposite view: it’s best to just hand out money; in the future, we must fight against deflation.)

A PDF summary takes only 30 seconds, and a weekly report draft takes only one minute—today, the barrier to producing information is approaching zero. But problems are also emerging: in a torrent of automatically generated text, which judgments really belong to people themselves?

The answer the electronic paper industry is betting on is a screen intentionally designed to make people slow down. Electronic paper notebooks (eNote) don’t win by cutting off interference; instead, they redefine what “deep work” means from the perspective of thinking tools.

From e-readers to notebooks: the market’s three-way split

According to Business Insider, electronic paper screens have been dormant in the consumer market for years, mainly existing in the form of e-book readers represented by Kindle. But by 2026, the industry landscape has quietly split into three axes. What used to be a single reading scenario has diversified into three clearly different use cases: reading, note-taking, and smart office. Among them, notebook-style products emphasize handwriting, file annotations, organizing planners/handbooks, and workflow management—not passive reading.

Zhang Zhiming, Deputy General Manager of the Company’s Business Center at BOE Technology, observed:

AI does improve efficiency, but it also brings three side effects: energy consumption, work anxiety, and an information explosion. The reason electronic paper notebooks may benefit is that they provide an interference-free environment—so users can do handwritten note-taking, record meeting notes, handle private information, and engage in deep thinking, instead of yet another screen that pops up notifications.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also previously said publicly that he likes to take notes with spiral notebooks and pens, finishing about one hundred pages of a notebook every two to three weeks. These remarks point to a group of people: the more deeply they use AI tools, the more they tend to deliberately keep analog media in the thinking process.

And this new generation of electronic paper notebooks is filling that gap with technological functions: beautified handwriting, voice drafts, highlighting and search, meeting transcription, and speaker recognition. Some devices place AI functions on the edge—simply put, computation happens on the device itself rather than on cloud servers—paired with physical privacy switches so sensitive meeting materials never leave the device.

The next step for electronic paper

The market size of eNote is still far smaller than that of tablets, but its competitive logic is different: it doesn’t try to do more—it deliberately does less.

No notifications, no social features, no algorithmic push—these are the core promises such devices make to users. In 2026, as AI tools continue to compress the cognitive space, this “deliberate absence” design philosophy becomes a source of differentiation.

Montblanc, reMarkable, Supernote, and iFlyTek all enter the same market from their respective brand logics, showing that this category is attracting different resources and different user segments. Perhaps we will see an alternative literary and cultural renaissance brought by the AI era.