Both the Remarkable and the Scribe are only 10" devices. If you are going to read and markup PDFs, a 13" screen makes so much more sense because it's very close to letter/A4 size.
Sony Digital Paper was such a product but very few outside of Academia and some Japanese business customers bought it.
I’ve had one for many years and found it to be the perfect device to read and take notes on PDFs: 13” screen, super lightweight, easy to send PDFs to it and from it through the app and writing on it feels similar to writing on paper. Unfortunately the pen’s tip broke off and there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix it or buy new ones. It is mostly useless without it.
Those are replacement tips. I broke the head, leaving the shaft inside the pen and thats what I'm not able to get out. It seems to be a common problem if you look at the reviews:
The A4 goes in and out of stock. It’s a popular product in Japan and it seems like demand is higher than supply.
The retail channel is probably constrained as this seems mostly marketed toward businesses which might purchase along with a support contract. The retail market for these devices seems strictly supplementary to the main market (at least for Japanese brands).
Some say Papyr is same device as Quaderno (and Sony's one), let's check out
Papyr is based on the same hardware as the Quaderno Gen 1. The hardware platform is licensed from a company called Linfiny. It's been rumored for a while that Quirklogic will release a Papyr based on the Gen 2 hardware, but it hasn't materialized yet. The Gen 2 hardware is worth it if you're doing a lot of handwriting because the Wacom digitizer is way, way better, but Papyr does have some additional software that could tip the scales in its direction.
remarkable has very capable software, as such the "microfaiche / pinch-to-zoom" style operation is pretty effective. It can compensate somewhat without too much hassle for reading and annotating double-column works without eye strain.