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Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

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Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#51

Post by Ciantic »

hamdingers wrote: post #5

> There are no physical buttons on the front 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

I also have Kobo Clara BW, and don't like swipe gestures, or any gestures whatsoever.

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.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#52

Post by nekooooo »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #24

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 o…

kind of what i was thinking, but i didn't want to be a buzzkill. if you can get over the terrible usb charging, an old kindle with KOreader and calibre sync is amazing, and will be a much, much nicer hardware than this thing that only an engineer could love.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#53

Post by chewmieser »

onemoresoop wrote: post #49
chewmieser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xteink doesn’t have a front light or touchscreen. It can’t keep time. A lot of people dislike the stock firmware. The battery isn’t user-replaceable. 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 op…

Thanks for the response. I’ve first thought of getting the x3 but then I realized how small it is. What’s your experience? Is it too small? Would you read a whole book on it?

I had similar concerns before I snagged it but I’ve read multiple books on it so far front to back. It’s wonderful. Extremely happy with it. vCodex is a great firmware but even crosspoint is quite good!

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.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#54

Post by 1shooner »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #34

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-…

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.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#55

Post by jwrallie »

wolvoleo wrote: post #48
jwrallie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just looking into it, with coupons and ongoing sale, it is possible to buy the Chinese version for about 7,500 JPY (45 USD) on Aliexpress, while on the official website (and Amazon) it is 13,900 JPY. I am not sure if this applies everywhere. 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…

I understand, I just wonder why they do this. Why lock their stuff down so much? Especially if they offer other channels that don't have this limitation.

My guess is that they identified two different groups of consumers, the ones who want to buy the cheapest product in China and the ones that want it hackable. If they sell it cheaper (and open) they kill the profits coming from the second group.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#56

Post by holysoles »

eth0up wrote: post #15
holysoles wrote: post #13

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. [1] https://xdaforums.com/t/nst-g-the-phoenix-project.4673934/

Thanks for mentioning both of these, the xteink and the nook resurrection. My old nooks are all slimy with the black material liquifying, and unusable just for that, else I'd pursue the XDA option. Looking into the xteink now, else Kobo. The one the post is about seems extremely appealing, but the price is a bit high for me, and the lifePo option makes the lesser one seem even more expensive. I really love e-ink. I c…

My nook was lightly sticky to the touch, I actually wiped it down with some cornstarch on a dish towel, it made a noticeable improvement. I do think if its too far gone though you'd be out of luck.

The kobos do look pretty nice, I might switch to that whenever my nook kicks it.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#58

Post by gabriel666smith »

1shooner wrote: post #54
gabriel666smith wrote: post #34

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-…

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…

It's a product that's so deeply dependent on lifestyle, and on physical needs. My fiancee is technically partially sighted (nystagmus from albinism) and I was surprised to learn when we started dating that the RNIB has 3% of the UK living with some form of sight loss, and ~350,000 people as partially-sighted or blind. I didn't really understand the full and nuanced spectrum of what "sight loss" could mean - I guess I had thought of it in very cartoonish, uninterrogated "no glasses vs wears glasses vs sunglasses-dog-and-cane" terms.

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.

Re: Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

#59

Post by Valord »

onemoresoop wrote: post #49
chewmieser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xteink doesn’t have a front light or touchscreen. It can’t keep time. A lot of people dislike the stock firmware. The battery isn’t user-replaceable. 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 op…

Thanks for the response. I’ve first thought of getting the x3 but then I realized how small it is. What’s your experience? Is it too small? Would you read a whole book on it?

got an X4 and put crosspoint on it. It's not too small, great for carrying in pocket, I've been reading articles on it. I could definitely read an entire book.
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