Article URL: https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/open-book-touch Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48952135 Points: 16 # Comments: 1

Back this project to help bring it into existence.Funding ends on Aug 20, 2026 at 04:59 PM PDT. 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. 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. 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: 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: Our e-paper panel packs the 480 × 800 pixels you’d normally find on a much larger 7.5-inch display into just 4.26 inches diagonal, so everything is remarkably sharp. It’s a 1-bit display at heart (crisp black on white), and it’s dense enough that even your book covers, dithered to pure black-and-white, look genuinely delightful on the home screen. The best part, though, is the frontlight. With both warm and cool LEDs in the frontlight module, you’re not stuck with one harsh color temperature: you can warm it all the way down for reading in bed, cool it for daylight, or dial in something in between, with fully adjustable brightness. You can read all night without wrecking your night vision (or keeping your partner awake with a reading light).