GoKawiilOpen 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. There are no physical buttons on the front; the device is a single, perfectly symmetrical 4.26-inch front-lit e-paper touchscreen, one centimeter thin in its enclosure. Open Book Touch slips into a pocket and disappears until you unlock it to read.
It’s taken a while to get here, but the TL;DR is this: it’s real now. Earlier Open Books could show you a wall of plain text. This one shows your book covers in a gorgeous, deeply designed interface, reads EPUB files (finally!), and renders dozens of writing systems. There’s Wi-Fi too, but mostly for getting books on, not for living online. And the whole thing is open source, both hardware and software, so you can hack it, fork it, tear it down, and build it back up.
It’s a liberated book for the people.
Open Book Touch isn’t trying to be a tablet. Like all of the objects I design, it makes a deliberate set of tradeoffs to do its one job beautifully:
It's for reading, not for everything. No notifications, no browser, no feed to scroll. The Wi-Fi is there to sync the time and download books, nothing more. There's a soft keyboard for simple tasks, but it's not meant for note-taking or vibe coding.
No notifications, no browser, no feed to scroll. The Wi-Fi is there to sync the time and download books, nothing more. There's a soft keyboard for simple tasks, but it's not meant for note-taking or vibe coding. It's a microcontroller, not a Linux box. As it turns out, less can be more: Open Book Touch boots straight into the book you're reading, sips power at under a milliampere, and runs readable C++ firmware (on ESP-IDF/FreeRTOS) that you can understand and hack on.
As it turns out, less can be more: Open Book Touch boots straight into the book you're reading, sips power at under a milliampere, and runs readable C++ firmware (on ESP-IDF/FreeRTOS) that you can understand and hack on. It's small, not big. It's small enough to forget you're carrying it in a jacket pocket, and light enough to fit in an ultralight backpacker's kit. Open Book Touch is more "mass market paperback" than "leather-bound hardcover" — but it'll go places a 10-inch tablet won't.
Spoilers: It’s a Book
The whole point of an e-reader is the reading, so that’s where most of the work has gone. Open Book Touch reads EPUB and plain text files straight off its microSD card: drop in your books, and they show up on the shelf.
But "it shows text" is table stakes. Open Book Touch implements a real typesetting engine, alongside gorgeous fonts in multiple weights and sizes to truly up the ante:
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