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 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/

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.

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/

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

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.

1. A dictionary

2. A flash card creation functionality

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!

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.

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.

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.

What makes this beautiful?