Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader
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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
To me it's the most amazing feature of an e-reader against the real book : you can read comfortably with 0 movement. You just mindlessly press the buttons that are already under your thumbs to navigate the book.
And the bonus is that it's clicky and instant, which, as strange as it sounds, makes it the only device that I own that make me feel it's magic. Which is a shame because in another timeline, all our tech should be well designed and magical-like.
I (now) know why I don't like that, because regular book and magazines, you don't have to think about how you hold it. Your thumb isn't going to magically flick a page by accident if you take a firm grip on it. With gestures only e-ink books, I have to take extra caution how I hold it so that it doesn't trigger something.
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.
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.
The age demographics which read more, broadly speaking, have vastly higher incidences of some kind of sight loss. It's a sizeable portion of the market that goes, it seems, rather underserved in products akin to e-readers, like televisions.
(Televisions specifically being a product where - somewhat off-topic - there are an awful lot of features that would be trivial to implement which would drastically improve the product for the meaningful segments of the market who have some form of sight loss. These features unfortunately seem often to be lower down the roadmap than spyware-adjacent tracking or new kinds of motion smoothing for users to turn off.)
My own IRL library is scattered in storage crates across places I've lived in the past, due to space and travel limitations, so I strongly empathise with you on that.
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 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/
5k cycles would be nice.
The kobos do look pretty nice, I might switch to that whenever my nook kicks it.
Be aware though they're trying to block third party software and their own sucks badly. I don't understand why they try to block this because it makes their hardware actually worth buying.
The official hardware (if you buy through their website or amazon) is not blocked. Only Aliexpress offerings.
But yes, they are coming with a FRONTlit option. Although it'll also have a touchscreen and no front buttons.
I'm hoping maybe in a year or so they make an actual successor with the same button layout, no touchscreen (or with a touchscreen but still with all the buttons) and a better chipset (though nothing major, what the X3 has is enough).
And yes I meant front light sorry. I didn't know that one won't have buttons.
While there is an "unlock" option, it seems it is strongly implied that you should stick to mainstream custom firmware or risk getting stuck with a firmware forever [0].
[0] https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader#usb-l...
The correct size is 6" or so diagonally.
As is I'll keep my eyes peeled for future versions, I really like the concept, and deal-breaker might be fixed in the future
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.
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.
1. A dictionary
2. A flash card creation functionality
Not a selling point. You shouldn't be aloowed to call it an e-reader if it doesn't have physical turn page buttons..
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!
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.
What makes this beautiful?
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.
Xteink is smaller, thinner, and magnetic. It’s cheaper and available today. It has physical buttons. There’s a ton of firmware options and community around it already. Some firmwares have apps and games beyond reading if that interests you. Community firmwares vastly open up available file formats.
Both are some form of open, although Xteink probably less so given some models are locked. Both will require some hunting for DRM free ebooks. Both run ESP32 chips, the Open Book touch running a more powerful dual core one.
I love my X3. The size and magnetic feature means I always have it on me for a quick read whenever a moment strikes.
My wife reads on a kindle with a larger font and since the margins are much smaller and my font size is a bit smaller as well we’re basically reading similar sized pages.