An E-Reader Designed for Hacking

Every bookworm has their own unique tastes in literature. Some like to devour pulp sci-fi books before bed, while others like a good mystery when they are stretched out on a chair at the beach. Those personalized preferences also extend to how they like to read. What’s your preference? Paper or plastic? If the ability to carry thousands of books on an e-reader is more important to you than flipping through physical pages, then Joey Castillo's Open Book Touch is an e-reader that you should get acquainted with.

The Open Book Touch will be launching soon on Crowd Supply, and as the name implies, it is open source and comes equipped with a touchscreen interface. Better yet, techies will be interested to know that this e-reader is built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, and it is meant to be hacked. Don’t try that with your Kindle unless you are in the market for an expensive paperweight!

This is not just another DIY gadget cobbled together from spare parts. The Open Book Touch is sleek, modern, and remarkably thin at under a centimeter in thickness, and all of the hardware is housed within a 3D-printable enclosure. Despite its minimalist design, this e-reader is packed with impressive hardware and thoughtful engineering.

The device’s dual-core ESP32-S3 microcontroller offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. That means your Open Book Touch can sync content wirelessly, communicate with other devices, or even act as a platform for entirely new applications. The system also includes 16 MB of flash memory, giving plenty of space for complex firmware and custom fonts, along with 8 MB of high-speed SRAM to handle demanding tasks like parsing EPUB files. There’s also a MicroSD card slot for external storage, ensuring you’ll never run out of space for your digital library.

The 4.26-inch ePaper touchscreen has a 480x800-pixel resolution, packing as many pixels as some larger 7.5-inch displays into a much smaller footprint. The result is a crisp, paper-like reading experience that looks great in both text and image-heavy books. And for reading at night, the device includes front-facing lights powered by ten LEDs — five warm and five cool. These LEDs offer fine-tuned brightness and color temperature control for any environment, from bright daylight to total darkness.

The 1,800 mAh LiPo battery is both rechargeable via USB Type-C and user-replaceable. It has enough juice to last for days or even weeks of active reading and months on standby. Power efficiency comes from leveraging the ESP32’s low-power RISC-V coprocessor, a lesson learned from the developer's previous Sensor Watch project.

Once the design is finalized and shipments begin, all schematics, firmware, and 3D models will be released under an open source license. There is no word on exactly when that will be yet, but you can sign up for notifications if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on an Open Book Touch.