URL for the crowdfunding: https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/open-book-touch
Specs:
- Display: 4.26" e-paper touchscreen, 480 × 800 px, warm + cool frontlight
- Processor: ESP32-S3 dual-core, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth LE
- Memory: 16 MB flash, 8 MB PSRAM
- Formats: EPUB and plain text, no DRM
- Storage: microSD card slot
- Interface: USB-C with integrated LiPo charging
- Dimension: 78 × 120 × 10 mm, about 85 g
- Open source: MIT-licensed firmware, open hardware (to be released at shipping)
It also has a replaceable 800 mAh battery, I found it cool :)
Ugly and small, cool idea tho
The specs vs the price does match up.
MIT licenced firmware… Another bunch of libertarian kids who don’t know better.
Like they don’t know everyone likes buttons, specially page turn buttons,
I only vaguely remember hearing nerds debating between the GPL licenses and MIT, way back when…What makes the MIT license libertarian?
The specs are an absolute joke. Even my Sony PRS from 2008 comes with 64MB RAM and physical buttons.
This thing will choke on epubs with embedded fonts, if it doesn’t just plainly ignore them (which it seems like it will, since they’re talking so much about their own custom font).
Neat idea, but I fear it’s destined to fail. I also think it’s too small. The PRS-505 is six inches and I wouldn’t go any smaller than that for comfortable reading.
4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don’t see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of “just works”. E-ink technology hasn’t progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don’t miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.
Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It’s still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn’t handle it even with the largest font.
To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.
I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣
This won’t make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.
Yeah, definitely think there are use cases for this (look at how popular the xeink X4 has gotten), but a device smaller in most dimensions than modern smartphones isn’t gonna make a good general purpose ereader for many people
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I love physical buttons and switches, I don’t like an e-reader without page buttons.
This. I don’t see why “no buttons” is supposed to be appealing? I’d much prefer only buttons, no touchscreen.
Can’t be cheap being a crowdfunded product, but not expensive either. The biggest turn-away I can see is the small screen. Most e-ink readers nowadays start at 6". A 4.x" screen will lose a considerable chunk of potential backers.
Yea, the screen makes it an instant turn off for me. Small and low res. Modern e-Readers like the kindle, kobo, etc. have screens basically as sharp as printed paper at a similar size as a book.
And with software like calibre, I don’t really see a reason to switch away from my kindle…I switched to kobo only because kindle - I don’t want to be an amazon billboard. I’m 100% calibre too, tho kobo do sell some drm-free ebooks.
My PW 3g was the absolute best ereader ever. Snappy page turns, perfect soft lighting, infinite batteries… funny unlimited worldwide wikipedia. Fuck amazon.
Thats the biggest issue for me.
I would carry around something with the thickness of a textbook and a 7+" screen, but under 6" is a nonstarter for me. I’d end up with text so large I’d be reading one sentence at a time.
4" screen?!
Yeah, that killed the idea on the spot for me.
🏴☠️
It looks like a prototype for a circa-2005 ereader. Why is the frame around the screen SO large? Why does the screen look so lo-res? And why is it $150 for the base model?
At that price you’re better off just buying a Kobo and installing KOReader. I like the idea of it being open source, but a 6" screen is pretty standard these days.
There is a project called Inkbox (renamed to Quill now it appears) which is Linux built with musl libc and Qt on top, that runs on Kobo. Hey, that’s open source too! So why yet another open source project with hardware?
Would I be able to push overdrive/Libby books to this?
The replaceable battery is definitely a requirement for me moving forwards on all new tech I purchase.
Meh. I would say that if anything deserves an exception, it’s ereaders.
Im my wife’s kindle PW I can replace the battery, and have done that.
But there are simply no new batteries for that kind of device to be found. So then the new battery lasts 20% longer than the old one, and maybe added a year to the device’s life.
Replaceable battery isn’t worth much if you don’t have a reason to believe you’ll be able to source a good one a decade from now.
while it’s nice, i’d argue e-readers use so little battery that even the default should last for at least a decade, but having it is awesome for sure.
Mine is over 10 years old and the battery still lasts weeks. I don’t notice any degradation but… probably wouldn’t.
Generally great idea, but the screen size invalidates it for me. Hope they’re successful enough to launch a 2nd round with a 6"+ screen
$150 for ESP32-S3? Are you serious? My first e-book in ~2008 was much more powerful.
ESP32-S3 seems rather properly sized computing power -wise for this kind of device. And it’s quite low-power as well.
Granted there are some tasks where even this kind device could use some computing, like extracting, indexing and rendering pdfs.
If this device supported PDF it would be a no brainer to buy. I understand that the hardware is not good enough for PDFs
