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I had one of the early generation kindles for a while. There was a straighrtforward jailbreak to make it more sociable. The set it up with Calibre which was smooth once properly set up. There was (likely still is) a cool plugin that would get RSS feeds, generate an ebook and sync automatically over wifi per schedule. So then when I went out I would have everything to read fresh with zero effort. Which at the time was pretty impressive. Phone batteries sucked so they were not really viable for reading unless you could have them plugged in all the time. The kindle was magic in comparison.
Anyone who wants to dive into e readers should go to the E-Book Readers section of MobileRead Forums. There people are very serious about ebooks.
I was thinking of buying another ereader a couple years ago. I sort of assumed there would be some open-ish type options. But I didn’t find anything that suited me. I really liked eink and wish it was more widely used. I would love one of the phones with dual ekin/LCD displays.
All this to say I hope there is community uptake and participation in the project. I myself do not have a soldering iron and don’t really need an ereader. But I think it’s a cool contribution.
Kobo ereaders are very freedom respecting. You can run koreader or plato on it very easily if you are a little bit tech savvy. Just involves plugging in the reader to a computer and running a shell or powershell script.
it’s really ugly. form over fashion is a thing, but that looks like they took allllll the shortcuts just to get a product
If you have access to a 3D printer, ugly part is nothing to worry about.
Upgrade the screen resolution with your magical printer…
I didn’t mean that for the screen and I’m sure you know it, so never mind…
4.2 inch, 400 x 300 pixel ePaper display
That sounds a bit basic.
It’s brutal.
I like the idea, but you need a touch screen and support and you need a far, far better screen before it’s in the neighborhood of actually realistic to use. It’s not their fault that you can’t just go buy a 300 PPI screen, but the end result is just not enough to actually be usable.
What kindle? I’d guess the one that doesn’t require a soldering iron to build…
I would love to have an alternative for kindle, but this is not it; not yet at least
There are plenty of alternatives to the Kindle, several years ago I used the Kobo Glo, worked fine with PDFs, though I remeber having to hack it’s local database to make it work without an account.
Surprisingly, Remarkable tablets, despite not being open source, you can do just about anything with. They allow root SSH access and the backend is a heavily stripped down version of Linux.
I’ve been writing an application to allow customizing splash screens over SSH/SFTP and it’s actually been super easy to work with. The “jailbreak” scene is also super active, and the company has gone the opposite direction of most. They retroactively removed the need for a subscription to cloud sync on all devices, and seem to very much embrace the ridiculous things people have done with their tablets.
The device is also no nonsense and does exactly what it’s designed to do extremely well and no more. No ads, no bloat, no constant internet connection. You could never connect the thing to the internet if you really wanted. Honestly one of the few devices I’ve bought in recent memory that I feel like I wholely own.
Two big downsides are no Bluetooth, and you need a modified hardware device to unbrick the device if you fuck up (jumping type C pins to put the device into recovery). Overall really solid and would recommend.