If you want all your book series displayed together, AALU (https://github.com/dawsonfi/aalu) might be worth a look.
And Crosspoint OS itself is still really nice.
I am not sure this is true. Yes, Xteink is investing in small eReader devices to fill a particular niche, but I am not sure any other company also creating small eReaders, and especially from the big known names like Kindle/Kobo/PocketBook the minimum size they generally have is around 6'' to 7''. Also nowadays we have a big market for Note-style eInk devices, like the Kindle Scrible or Remarkable that fills the niche of "I want a really big eInk device".
I have very little respect for DRM, though. Personally, if the author has a patreon, I suggest donating the $20 to the Patreon and pirating the book
To say nothing of Amazon’s ethics.
Ethically it's all completely bunk, but more people should be aware how insane modern copyright laws are so that we can reform them. And this is not new, folks like the FSF and EFF protested the signing of the 1996 WIPO Treaty too.
Ethics-wise, hard agree.
I want to access my books on random devices too, which is why I never bought a frikkn Kindle book.
I did buy a bunch of Audible books, starting way back when there was nothing else, and I knew the deal when buying, so I simply went through the grief on my end to strip them (easy these days) and don't care about the legality (or rather, am willing to fight and defend the legality).
But buying something from Amazon and then complaining to anyone but Amazon that you want something Amazon doesn't provide or even allow, I don't get that.
This wish for this thing that you want should be directed at Amazon, and if you recognize that that would be pointless, well, correct, that's why you shouldn't buy a book from Amazon in the first place.
Or you should decide you don't recognize any legal conflict and help write software to uncrappify your property.
Many books can only be bought this way. Publishers don't want to sell books through platforms that don't have DRM, because they are scared of piracy.
It would be great if we could have open ebook reader software that could display these books.
eReaders like the Xteink X4 are beautiful but lots of books are impossible to legally read on it. Yes, I know that I can break the DRM, but I think its sad that this is the only path for legitimate purchases.
I agree, but it also would be great if DRM wouldn't be use to restrict your device choice. The only reason Kindle DRM "works well" is because Amazon is basically the biggest eBook store in the world and Kindle are the most popular brand. But you can't buy a book in Kindle and use it in a Kobo device, for example.
DRM would be slightly more acceptable if the companies themselves didn't use it to also enforce their device lock-in (e.g., license their DRM to other companies), and so we are in the current situation where there is device lock-in and you are required to buy a eReader from Amazon if you want to read Kindle books, or at minimum buy one of those Android eReader devices since you can install Kindle app on it (but in this case you have all the other issues that you get by running Android in a eReader).
I tried different firmwares too and ended up settling on CrossPoint. So far it's been the most stable and the UI feels more intuitive than the others (for me at least)
Do you use it with a dictionary? I like the full 1 GB English wiktionary loaded in Aard2 on my Boox. It has etymology and can look up Latin and other non-English words. But I imagine it may be too heavy for a ESP32 device..
So far I have only read one book on it. But that is Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (361 chapters, 1300 pages in paper editions), which I'd never managed to read more than a few tens of pages of before.
Which is pretty solid proof of how nice the X4 is.
I know it's not hard to do, but I needed it to work first time before my summer holiday, couldn't wait for a Chinese import, and had no spare time to mess around with putting new firmware on it.
I didn’t imagine how much I’d use a tiny, pocketable reader. I love it.
its an involved process but that's always going to be that way on any e-reader that's not a kindle (or android based, where you can install the kindle app).