alt.hn

7/17/2026 at 8:47:57 PM

Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

 https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/open-book-touch

by surprisetalk

7/17/2026 at 11:37:53 PM

> 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

by hamdingers

7/18/2026 at 1:40:29 AM

I don't like swiping, but kobo supports just a single touch on the right and left edges of the screen for switching pages, and I don't mind that.

by tiagod

7/18/2026 at 5:51:46 AM

What I love with my pocketbook is that i can hold the thing by placing my right thumb on the "next page" button and my left thumb on the "previous page" button.

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.

by pjerem

7/18/2026 at 6:16:37 AM

Same for the kindles, but the buttons used to be much better. I'll probably buy a used (they are discontinued) oasis some day just to get buttons.

by Semaphor

7/18/2026 at 4:31:05 AM

I don't like that either. Physical buttons with real feedback are so much better.

by wolvoleo

7/18/2026 at 3:54:31 PM

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.

by Ciantic

7/18/2026 at 9:56:41 AM

I guess you can install your own buttons. But yeah, for an e-book reader, this is an unfortunate default.

by InsideOutSanta

7/18/2026 at 1:02:06 AM

Yeah...I stick with my Kindle Oasis for the buttons. I'll wait until/if this gets them; otherwise would have been a no brainer purchase.

by kjs3

7/18/2026 at 5:52:45 AM

The Xteink 4 has button. Else PocketBook are the kings of buttons (and well placed at that).

by pjerem

7/18/2026 at 1:55:44 PM

I haven't pulled the trigger on the Xteink because of the back/front light missing, but probably will when they're back in stock. I'll check out the pocketbook as well...thanks for the tip.

by kjs3

7/18/2026 at 4:32:03 AM

They even kind of admit that themselves and offer a remote page turning accessory with buttons for Kobo readers)

by neoden

7/18/2026 at 7:12:06 AM

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.

[1] https://collider.com/it-follows-clam-phone/

by gabriel666smith

7/18/2026 at 8:45:01 PM

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.

by 1shooner

7/19/2026 at 12:35:23 PM

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.

by gabriel666smith

7/18/2026 at 7:05:08 AM

> 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.

by demetrius

7/18/2026 at 12:14:56 PM

Kickstarter gadgets aren't meant to be useful, they're meant to tick boxes and look good on Kickstarter.

by functionmouse

7/18/2026 at 1:24:39 AM

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/

by holysoles

7/18/2026 at 4:32:42 AM

Xteink is coming with a backlit option soon.

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.

by wolvoleo

7/18/2026 at 6:11:08 AM

They're working with the crosspoint team.

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).

by jerojero

7/18/2026 at 6:34:01 AM

Oh ok but why do they block the Ali ones then? I don't think they're on Amazon here in Spain. And if I have to order from China I'd greatly prefer Ali express because they have good consumer protection.

And yes I meant front light sorry. I didn't know that one won't have buttons.

by wolvoleo

7/18/2026 at 6:56:56 AM

They're just blocked from OTA updates, you can flash whatever you want on the sdcard and then unlock OTA. (I did this yesterday with an aliexpress version x4)

by rkachowski

7/18/2026 at 7:33:20 AM

You can. But if you build your own stuff, you can also easily lock yourself out. That whole mechanism that tells the software to look for a new bin file on the SD card and to use that to update is something that needs to be contained in your software. If you forget it, or you get it wrong, the thing will be bricked.

by leobg

7/18/2026 at 7:56:22 AM

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] https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader#usb-l...

by jwrallie

7/18/2026 at 2:17:57 PM

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.

by wolvoleo

7/18/2026 at 11:02:46 PM

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.

by jwrallie

7/18/2026 at 6:35:05 AM

(As far as I understood those from AliExpress can also be unblocked.)

by Mikhail_Edoshin

7/18/2026 at 9:55:38 AM

You can install custom firmware from the SD card, but you can't enable USB flashing. And the SD card installation depends on the installed firmware; in other words, if you end up with the wrong firmware installed, you may be stuck with it.

by InsideOutSanta

7/18/2026 at 3:36:19 PM

I have one. Do not bother. It is too small. I did write my own software for it which was a fun exercise but it remains idle because it is just too small to enjoy reading from.

The correct size is 6" or so diagonally.

by pizzafeelsright

7/18/2026 at 2:18:03 AM

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 could easily go with it for all compute.

5k cycles would be nice.

by eth0up

7/19/2026 at 4:10:57 AM

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.

by holysoles

7/18/2026 at 2:42:38 AM

4.3” screen, that’s a dealbreaker. That is a real shame.

by Grombobulous

7/18/2026 at 1:45:44 PM

Agreed. Half the thickness and ~2x the screen size and it would've been an instant buy. 2x the screen size and same thickness and I'd have to think about it.

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

by amarant

7/17/2026 at 10:59:54 PM

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.

by devindotcom

7/18/2026 at 4:46:48 AM

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.

by KennyBlanken

7/18/2026 at 5:06:46 PM

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.

by nekooooo

7/18/2026 at 1:01:39 PM

>There are no physical buttons on the front

Not a selling point. You shouldn't be aloowed to call it an e-reader if it doesn't have physical turn page buttons..

by thazework

7/18/2026 at 12:03:12 AM

Looks like it's a well thought project. I might consider it to replace my old Kobo. There are only two things I don't see in the description:

1. A dictionary

2. A flash card creation functionality

by mimo84

7/18/2026 at 1:09:21 AM

Flash card creation? Talk about scope creep for a dedicated reader.

by kjs3

7/18/2026 at 1:14:51 AM

The YT video shows the dictionary (among features).

by lossyalgo

7/18/2026 at 7:39:13 AM

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.

Huge congrats getting it to this point!

by condwanaland

7/17/2026 at 11:36:19 PM

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.

by aidenn0

7/18/2026 at 12:05:14 AM

I'd like to see some corrections to the matrix, Kobo can run custom code and does not require an account. Also "DRM: yes" feels misleading - you can read DRM-free files on one just fine.

by crtasm

7/18/2026 at 10:47:08 AM

I imagine it’s going to be a negative for them but dimensions comparisons would be interesting

by HaloZero

7/18/2026 at 4:30:41 AM

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.

by dartharva

7/18/2026 at 10:25:51 AM

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.

by jackb4040

7/18/2026 at 12:50:39 AM

> 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

What makes this beautiful?

by paulcole

7/19/2026 at 5:08:18 AM

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.

by gsnedders

7/18/2026 at 2:22:37 AM

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.

by zoom6628

7/17/2026 at 11:30:23 PM

Nice. I wish it had a bigger screen and buttons, though. Kindle Oasis was the sweet spot for me.

by cyberax

7/18/2026 at 3:06:25 AM

I was thinking about getting a xteink x4 and run biscuit on it. Does anyone know how it compares to open Book touch?

by onemoresoop

7/18/2026 at 12:41:02 PM

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 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.

by chewmieser

7/18/2026 at 2:56:41 PM

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?

by onemoresoop

7/18/2026 at 6:45:11 PM

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.

by chewmieser

7/19/2026 at 4:13:55 PM

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.

by Valord

7/18/2026 at 4:20:59 AM

The screen seems a little small. And buttons would be good too.

by vjvjvjvjghv

7/18/2026 at 6:42:57 AM

6 inches is the bare minimum for an e-reader lol

by goodpoint

7/18/2026 at 12:56:51 PM

I had this opinion before I actually used a smaller device. I now have xteink x3 which is 3.7” and it’s just awesome. After a couple of minutes it disappears in my hand like I forget I’m even holding a device. I wouldn’t use it for graphical novels but for regular books it’s just perfect

by iammjm