Looks nice. Personally I don't know I can go back to 220ppi, but if I did I would definitely pay for the touchscreen and light over the X4!
Maybe you already have this, but I'd encourage you to put a "pure" reading mode in there, with no status bars top or bottom. That would probably allow for an extra line.
I wonder if there's also room in the case spec to slot in a magnet here or there. Could make for some creative solutions for covers or stands. Personally I use a Clara BW with a folding cover-stand and it's incredibly convenient.
I really liked their comparison matrix, it's honest about what it does and what it doesn't do. I'll probably go with Kobo + Koreader when my current ereader gives up the ghost, but given that 4" ereaders seem to be all the rage these days, I wish them success.
> Open Book Touch is the device I’ve been trying to build for six years: a small, beautiful, completely open source e-book reader that does one thing and does it well
I almost bought an xteink the other week but held off due to lack of a frontlight option.
I instead resurrected my nook simple touch (2011) with this project [1] from XDA forums, its made it infinitely more usable and still has good battery life.
I really like the thinking of openness behind this device. Could be great as a pocketable "notice board" getting info on a schedule from mobile and "posting" to a pub on device for me to look at when I feel like it and react to messages on my schedule.
Some LLM-assisted guesstimating tells me that in terms of raw cost of manufacturing and delivery, given an average (non-voracious) rate of consumption, supplying paper books is still several times cheaper than supplying usable E-Ink devices in non-price-rigged markets.
Supplying kids textbooks in India in paperback, for instance, is at least 5-6x cheaper than supplying them the same in an E-Ink reader despite the ginormous (10-12x assuming 6-7 books each year) difference in freight volume.
This is 10 year old ebook technology for the sake of being "open", when one can just install KOreader on a Kobo.
KOreader fixes nearly all of the annoying bullshit in Kobo's firmware, which frankly, is terrible. The UI is poorly organized (why the hell is night mode so hard to get to!?), crashed routinely (just like it did ~10+ years ago...), and page changes are painfully slow, barely any improvement from the much older Kobos. It also provides support for remote libraries and a slew of other features. The UI isn't very clean, but it has a ton more features.
I've never understood how my much newer Kobo is just as slow as my first Kobo reader which was 10+ years ago, or why both of them rather frequently hang and have to be power-cycled.
> Cyrillic scripts like Russian and Ukrainian are supported via GNU Unifont, along with Arabic and Hebrew.
So much for proper typography...
I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.
This looks nice - I think ‘small enough to be pocketable’ is an important form factor. Reading preferences are a very personal thing, and for people like me - who feel they internalize more effectively when reading from a physical book better than when reading from a screen - this form factor makes owning one more worthwhile.
I have always wondered why the form factor that has been settled on for e-readers was ‘book-like’, other than the obvious screen-size advantages. I wonder if there is a better form-factor out there and if anyone has any ideas. Electronic devices don’t need to resemble the thing they are replacing, and it’s sometimes better that they don’t.
I know a lot of people lust after the clamshell e-reader imagined in the film It Follows. [1]
The haptics of a physical book are, I think, what helps me better remember them, because memory is intrinsically linked non-digital sensory information like touch, and smell.
I’ve personally tried a few prototypes to try to bring unique sensory inputs to individual books read digitally to help me remember each one better: converting an AliExpress Game Boy into one to enable more haptic and visual differentiation; generative ambient & binaural music that is automatically created based on the text shown.
Each did help, to an extent, in preventing the way everything I read on an e-reader slightly blurs into indistinct memories of ‘reading generally’, rather than ‘reading this specific book’.
Maybe the e-reader has to be as personally customizable as a cyberdeck for those of us who kind of need the other sensory inputs. So it’s good that the firmware on this one seems to be open-source, but I haven’t yet read through it to understand the extent of that.
Personally, having a book-like form factor is a property that moves it into it's own tactile/haptic experience. These small newspaper-column width readers seem to just take you further down the 'reading generally' path.
While I appreciate the sentiment of physical books, I simply don't have the physical space for my book collection, and it seemed frivolous to make that a meaningful requirement of my living space. On top of that, my reading-distance eyesight has started to go, and it's so much simpler to bump the text on a book-sized reader than it is to manage reading glasses.
Disappointed to see how many of the comments here are fairly negative. Especially for a site that so values true open source.
While this isn't the ereader for me (I need a larger screen and buttons), I absolutely love the idea and passion behind this project. I will look into supporting, if finances allow, as its something I could easily gift to younger members of the family.
This is so cool, I love seeing more and more epaper projects! I would love some deeper technical blogs like what Eric Migikovsky is doing at Pebble.
It was surprising to see Arduino vs ESP-IDF even mentioned as a real decision to be made for a market product. The battery life would obviously be nowhere near optimal, but I'm surprised if you could even keep a real project of any scale manageable within the Arduino framework.
Being based on a microcontroller and having limited RAM, I do wonder how good its ePub implementation is, especially in terms of CSS, but also in terms of dealing with larger (XHTML) documents.
21 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadMaybe you already have this, but I'd encourage you to put a "pure" reading mode in there, with no status bars top or bottom. That would probably allow for an extra line.
I wonder if there's also room in the case spec to slot in a magnet here or there. Could make for some creative solutions for covers or stands. Personally I use a Clara BW with a folding cover-stand and it's incredibly convenient.
That's too bad. For whatever reason I find swipe gestures on e-ink annoying. I currently use a Kobo Clara BW and miss dedicated page-turning buttons.
I see they're offering the print files for the case, maybe there will be some pins on the ESP32 exposed somewhere for adding buttons
1. A dictionary
2. A flash card creation functionality
What makes this beautiful?
I instead resurrected my nook simple touch (2011) with this project [1] from XDA forums, its made it infinitely more usable and still has good battery life.
[1] https://xdaforums.com/t/nst-g-the-phoenix-project.4673934/
Supplying kids textbooks in India in paperback, for instance, is at least 5-6x cheaper than supplying them the same in an E-Ink reader despite the ginormous (10-12x assuming 6-7 books each year) difference in freight volume.
KOreader fixes nearly all of the annoying bullshit in Kobo's firmware, which frankly, is terrible. The UI is poorly organized (why the hell is night mode so hard to get to!?), crashed routinely (just like it did ~10+ years ago...), and page changes are painfully slow, barely any improvement from the much older Kobos. It also provides support for remote libraries and a slew of other features. The UI isn't very clean, but it has a ton more features.
I've never understood how my much newer Kobo is just as slow as my first Kobo reader which was 10+ years ago, or why both of them rather frequently hang and have to be power-cycled.
So much for proper typography...
I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.
I have always wondered why the form factor that has been settled on for e-readers was ‘book-like’, other than the obvious screen-size advantages. I wonder if there is a better form-factor out there and if anyone has any ideas. Electronic devices don’t need to resemble the thing they are replacing, and it’s sometimes better that they don’t.
I know a lot of people lust after the clamshell e-reader imagined in the film It Follows. [1]
The haptics of a physical book are, I think, what helps me better remember them, because memory is intrinsically linked non-digital sensory information like touch, and smell.
I’ve personally tried a few prototypes to try to bring unique sensory inputs to individual books read digitally to help me remember each one better: converting an AliExpress Game Boy into one to enable more haptic and visual differentiation; generative ambient & binaural music that is automatically created based on the text shown.
Each did help, to an extent, in preventing the way everything I read on an e-reader slightly blurs into indistinct memories of ‘reading generally’, rather than ‘reading this specific book’.
Maybe the e-reader has to be as personally customizable as a cyberdeck for those of us who kind of need the other sensory inputs. So it’s good that the firmware on this one seems to be open-source, but I haven’t yet read through it to understand the extent of that.
[1] https://collider.com/it-follows-clam-phone/
While I appreciate the sentiment of physical books, I simply don't have the physical space for my book collection, and it seemed frivolous to make that a meaningful requirement of my living space. On top of that, my reading-distance eyesight has started to go, and it's so much simpler to bump the text on a book-sized reader than it is to manage reading glasses.
While this isn't the ereader for me (I need a larger screen and buttons), I absolutely love the idea and passion behind this project. I will look into supporting, if finances allow, as its something I could easily gift to younger members of the family.
Huge congrats getting it to this point!
It was surprising to see Arduino vs ESP-IDF even mentioned as a real decision to be made for a market product. The battery life would obviously be nowhere near optimal, but I'm surprised if you could even keep a real project of any scale manageable within the Arduino framework.
Not a selling point. You shouldn't be aloowed to call it an e-reader if it doesn't have physical turn page buttons..