Got the X4. Put CrossPoint on it. Works like a charm. The http server accessible over wifi makes transferring books extremely simple. (Shame on the Kindle for locking everything down.) This is proof-of-concept that a microcontroller is more than enough for something like an e-reader.
I have a Kindle and a Kobo. They are sturdy devices. But the X4 is the one that is a genuine e-reader. Would not get it as my one and only e-reader though as you tend to miss the size and backlight of the larger ones.
What would I want from future iterations?
- backlight even if it compromises on battery a bit
Question to X4 owners - what is the benefit over a smartphone?
I have a kindle for beach and travel as a good compromise size; I use my 10" tablet when I really settle in for reading, or when I read technical books with graphs or books with photographs etc. For my adhoc reader I use kindle app on my phone. What is the unique selling point of something like X4? I notice it attaches to the phone which seems bizarre, phone feels like a functional superset, so I must be missing something - is it battery life or less distractions or something else?
I carry my phone and my X4 in the same pocket. Whenever I feel like doom-scrolling, I take out the X4 and read a chapter in a book instead. It is excellent for taking back time to read that I lose to my phone.
Sure I could read the same book on my phone, but it takes multiple steps to open the e-reader app on my phone. On top of that, there are half a dozen other things I could open on my way to opening up my e-reader app. With X4, I press the button on the side and I'm reading.
Is it the best ereader? Not at all. Reading whitepapers or programming books on it is a fools errand. It is great for anything that is mostly text. Novels are amazing on it. I've keep up with my read it later backlog by saving URLs with the Obsidian ReadItLater plugin and then using pan to convert the collection of markdown into an epub file.
The battery life is amazing. I've charged it once since getting on 3/27. I've read about 1500 pages (5 novels) since I got it (albeit I've stalled out in June by trying to finish a book I'm not too into).
It is a great compliment to a 10" tablet. Whereas a 7" reader tends to stay at home due to its size, the X4 gets tossed in my pocket and comes everywhere with me.
I'm specifically wondering about the X4, which is the size of a phone, meant to be attached to the phone, but it's not a phone and crucially no backlight. Does it specifically fill a situation for people who don't want to carry a phone but will carry this? Or, for people who might carry x4 and a smart phone, why read on the x4?
(having it right there mostly serves as a physical token/reminder that I don't want to get sucked in to my social media and other phone apps as much, so if I'm just using it to fill "politely waiting" time I can just grab the x4 instead. I also have a trivial pandoc-generated epub todo list as the first document, though that would work better as a crosspoint fork/feature really...)
You read on a phone and on a tablet, so the X4 probably isn't for you. I hate reading for long periods on LCD screens. I have to do it all day at work and I don't want to do it at home. I read on a kindle unless I really need a computer screen for photos or graphs. I am just not going to pull out my phone to read a book, so an X4 sized device makes it easier to have a book with me. Since phone reading doesn't bother you, I doubt you would get much out of an X4.
It's way smaller than modern phones, though - I clip mine to the back of my Samsung (magsafe case) and it only blocks one of the five cameras. (phone: 288g xtelink x4: 75g.)
(also: hasn't the x4-v2 already been announced that is supposed to have a frontlight?)
- The e-ink screen is great for reading. The feeling of ink on paper it produces cannot be replicated on any other screen. Not to my satisfaction.
- The microcontroller is so weak that you cannot add crappy features like more powerful e-readers are wont to do. This produces minimal distraction-free UIs. No messaging, no browsing.
- The form factor is the biggest win. It fits in a pocket and is great for the 5-10m you find when traveling or waiting somewhere. I cannot carry e-readers that way.
- It is great for fiction, and text-heavy non-fiction: history, philosophy etc. Stuff with a lot of images, tables, code blocks etc ... nope.
I love my X4 as well, and would love a backlight. Crosspoint and its downline forks are great.
the only funny thing about the X4 is reading it in bright sunlight. it will corrupt the image on the screen on page turn unless you shade it? something to do w/ older eInk screens and not having a UV Filter. weird, slightly annoying.
I'm with you on every bit. I love my Kobo Libra 2 and it lives on my nightstand table. It's an excellent reader. The X4 with CrossPoint is an alright reader, but I've been chewing through books on my morning commute because it fits in my jacket pocket and I can have it out on the train without bumping into other people.
It's not the best reader I own, but it's the best reader I have on me at any given moment when I'm not laying in bed.
> It's not the best reader I own, but it's the best reader I have on me at any given moment
This. The form factor is almost the right one for an e-reader. The battery lasts for weeks. It is so open that you could probably write your own firmware for it based on CrossPoint or similar for your own needs.
Needs some iterative development while ruthlessly culling requests for random features.
> The form factor is almost the right one for an e-reader.
It truly is. It fits perfectly in one hand without stretching uncomfortably, so I can hold it for longer than any reading session I've had without making my hand get stiff. While holding it in the normal way, my thumb naturally rests on one of the side buttons, which I've mapped to "next page".
If I were to hold out my hand, and someone put an X4 in it, I wouldn't have to move a muscle and it'd be in the right position for me to read for hours with just the periodic button tap.
Everyone's different, of course. It's guaranteed to be too big or too small for others, and that's cool. For me it feels like someone custom designed it based on a model of my hand.
crosspoint has started developing a little slower now that its in a really usable state.
I've merged some working PRs onto my device and it's working great. I really needed a dictionary option because I like to quickly know the meaning of words as I read.
its fine. theres a few more things that could be nice (reading statistics for example) that other forks do have.
I bought it because it was comparatively dirt cheap and was hackable. I was delighted at how nice it actually was to use. I figured it'd be crappy in some ways, but, you know, at least it was cheap. To the contrary, it's perfectly fine and does a great job at letting me flip through ebooks.
What it's not good at it showing any kind of diagrams, because even if the software was decent, it's a relatively tiny screen. I haven't even bothered trying to view a PDF on it and don't know if that's supported. For epubs I've uploaded to it through Calibre, it's utterly adequate.
If you install koreader on the kobo, crosspoint on the x4 and create a free koreader sync account (or host your own sync sever): yes - but on the x4 you need to manually trigger syncs
Alternatively if you wish to stick with the stock Kobo reader app it is possible to sync via a https://grimmory.org/ instance
As someone who also juggles multiple readers, I find it easier to have a different book per device. Otherwise I would waste too much time trying to sync between the two.
Yes. I read multiple books in parallel. Each on a different reader. So syncing is not something I usually need though I did build myself a local sync server for fun.
Not the commenter you were replying to, but I have both a Kindle and a X4. No, it does not, but searching for a unique enough phrase (just two or three words) on the current page gets you there fast enough.
Yeah I really like not having a touchscreen that I have to worry about bumping while I'm reading, a backlight is the only addition I would enjoy to the current x4
if its still as open, I'm pretty sure the touchscreen can be worked out to work well.
but I really agree with you, I'd love to have a frontlight on it. That's literally all I'd wanted over the current device. No touchscreen necessary.
but between touchscreen + frontlight and neither, perhaps I'd be willing to have a touchscreen so long as the software is good (which something like crosspoint I'm sure would nail)
Every item you add to the device adds a failure mode. Light is fine. Touch ... I don't know. I like the tactile feel of buttons.
And Android means the device no longer runs on a microcontroller which has consequences for battery life etc. As long as they keep the original, minimal model active with minor QoL improvements, I guess it is fine.
It was probably a decade ago, but I used to have this extremely cheap e-reader that ran off AA batteries, used a monochrome LCD screen (no lighting) and was based on a microcontroller. If you let the batteries die and waited too long to replace them, you had to reflash the software on it. I think it only handled mobi format, but it might have been epub.
Not being lighted is what has kept me from trying it. If they do add lighting I hope it is a front light and not a back light. Hard to beat a front lit e-ink display for reading. Bonus points for warmth settings.
I have the X4 and the X3 (newer smaller one). I will get whatever the next version is if it has a backlight or more DPI / support for smaller font.
X4 is great - has usb-c charger and with the cover feels like an easy to pocket and bring everywhere reader. Does not fit on the back of an iphone. I assume the magnet layout works with popular android phones though.
X3 is also great, actually fits on the back of the phone with the magsafe - magnet is a _bit_ too weak. It does fall off in my pocket frequently but I haven't lost it yet. Does not have usb-c - has weird little magnetic 4 pin charger.
I will gift my X4 to my brother once I've loaded some more content to it.
the next version will unfortunately be a generic Android reader. This device is good because, by chance, out of a thousand devices, one of them has to be better than all the rest. This product is not good by design or merit, but by chance. Same goes for lots of popular cheap Chinese tech, like the Miyoo Mini+ for example. Better than it has any right to be, and the people making it don't have a clue; every change to such a device can only be for the worse.
Good catch. I have the Miyoo Mini+ and that's exactly my feeling : it's not good, it _happen_ to be good because somehow, they made it the good form factor and especially, they put a 640x480 screen which allows you to play most retro consoles at native resolution or at integer (x2) scaling.
And the firmware is shitty but the community firmware is good.
And when you follow what the company does, you understand that the biggest selling point (the screen) is just there for reasons that are totally unrelated to creating a great product. It happened to be there because they randomly (economically, I guess) choose this screen and it happened to be good and have the right resolution for retro gaming.
None of their previous models had this advantage but more than that, none of the models that followed kept the advantages that made this device a banger.
It's exactly like if the company behind the device never understood how and why they created a community behind their devices.
For the xteink, I wouldn't be surprised for the next ones to be shittier, closed, and bloated, and probably for no reason.
The best thing about these fly-by-night Chinese tech companies that manage to shit out something actually good is that they rarely lock the device down so it's relatively easy to flash some new firmware when they inevitably disappear from the market.
I love my X3. I glued its magnetic folio to the back of my Apple Wallet. It turned out perfectly, for me. Pictures below. I've read The Odyssey and several other shorter books on it and have yet to recharge it.
Was just looking at this. What keeps me from buying is the screen is just too small. I'd love to slap this magnetically on the back of my iPhone and have it on the go as a focused reading device but eyes after 40 aren't so happy about reading super tiny characters.
My two wishes are: to size it up so it is roughly the width of a modern smartphone (2.72" -> 2.8") and decrease bezel size. At these small sizes, even 1/2 to 3/4" screen size increase is a big deal in area gained, which leads to more comfort reading and less line scanning.
Hope they'll ship one with the size up 4.7" ED047TC1 display [1] instead.
The screen size isn't really an issue for font sizes. Just put fewer words on the screen.
There are e-readers that put a single word on the screen, this can fit plenty in a decent font size, you'll have to switch pages more often, but I haven't found that to be an issue, the button is very light to press and the page transition (with Crosspoint) is fast.
Agree, for me less words on screen is a feature not a bug. At least for the shape of my brain, it stops me from getting lost in the text or skipping up/down the page accidentally. The side/front page turn button redundancy means the act of page turning just fades into reflexiveness and I end up reading faster and retaining more
I've read an entire book on the X3 attached to the back of my phone and it hasn't been an issue. Reading horizontally I get close enough to the 80 chars per line ideal that it doesn't bother me at all.
Phone screens are larger, higher res, pinch zoomable, and have backlighting that creates uniform contrast and readability in nearly all lighting conditions.
I ordered the X4 this past Christmas and received it sometime in January. I have it running Crosspoint. I like it a lot but I do wish it was a bit larger, like a 7-8" display so more text could fit on the screen. The thing I love about the X4 is that I can flash different firmware on it and it's dead simple. It's not an Android tablet with an e-ink screen, it doesn't download ads from Amazon servers, it's just an e-reader.
I've had an x3 with crosspoint for a couple of months. Overall I love the device, it's making it easy to pull up the phone and read a couple of pages instead of doom scrolling. But a huge drawback is that it's unusable in direct sunlight since the screen fades away. Here is how it looks: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1q5fhwf/dire...
I contacted support and they answered
"We would like to clarify that on e ink displays, text may appear lighter under very strong direct sunlight. Once the screen refreshes or you return to normal lighting conditions and turn a few pages, the text will fully recover. This behavior is related to the low power design of the display and does not cause any damage to the screen."
Personally, I've found that just moving the screen out of the sun (for example by turning it upside-down, or holding my hand in front of it) when refreshing a page is enough to prevent it.
Oof... I just ordered the x3 and plan to add CrossPoint on it. If hesitating to cancel my ordered as it didn't ship yet. I have plenty of other e-ink screens and it has never happened. I specifically enjoy e-ink in directly sunlight or at least outdoors ... so I'm not sure if that's still a good usecase for me anymore.
I got one, it's pretty cool that it's small enough to just magnet to the back of your phone. If your someone who needs to use a large font on their ereader to read its certainly not for you, but the screen size is good enough for regular sized text.
I would like to see a phone case which this inserts into --- bonus points if there's a way to use it as a status display for the phone for use in bright/direct sunlight.
The obvious innovation is to just make the back of the phone case an eInk display. No need for all the bulk when you can merely have an app on your phone that controls the case-display and the phone can output whatever reader app you want to it like a companion/IoT device.
Or it can be a little bit bulkier and just be a dedicated ereader that is shaped like a phone case. Either way works.
Yeah but I’ve seen color e-ink fridge magnets that are like $30. I don’t think it ends up being more expensive or substantially worse for the environment than people buying cases made of fancy leather. Presumably the display module could also be cut out of it for DIY uses.
My question is, where do people buy epubs for these? Are you buying them off of Kindle or similar and stripping the DRM? My biggest withholding is that I can get used paper books for quite cheep (ie, from thriftbooks or similar), but there's not really a similar marketplace for digital versions (understandably so). Maybe I'm just cheap, but I have a hard time justifying near-full-price for books that I can get the physical version for much cheaper, or I already have sitting on my shelf at home.
That eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving, it's quite galling that the price isn't favorably differentiated. And I don't think the author gets to keep the difference.
Much of the cost of even a print book is in fixed factors: authorship, editing, proofreading, marketing, cover design, and the like. These may vary by title and it's quite possible to skimp on elements, but for a highly-produced work (references, fact-checking, illustrations, data tables, etc.) can be significant. Those costs are amortised over the print run and sales, which for most books is quite small, perhaps a few thousands of copies.
Digital publishing bypasses print, distribution, warehousing, and materials, but still includes those fixed costs.
Keep in mind that many publishers effectively act a bit like investors or VC, seeding a large number of publications in the hopes that a small number succeed. The name "Random House" was said by its founding publisher, Bennet Cerf to be "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random". As in music and cinema, a few "tentpole" projects support much of the rest of the enterprise.
> eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving
But they do need editing, layout, design, marketing, etc, which are a significant part of the cost of a book. A book is never a solo endeavor by an author.
Presumably, though, those are also things that you'd need for a physical print book, and you could share some of that effort / cost between the two? Maybe this is a naive assumption, but I would assume that the total cost per unit of ebook is still a decent amount less than a print book, even when factoring for the publishing costs, purely due to the fact that you are dealing with a digital version compared with a print version that needs real materials and labor.
You put it well and presbyterian is right in that point, but eBooks don't have the financial risk of retail merchandise planning and merchandising, and that cost saving isn't differentiated.
I've looked at this device and I wonder how good the layout engine is. Screenshots never show text with any hyphenation going on which makes me wonder if it even supports hyphenation.
One of the images on the Amazon page for the reader has somebody holding one beside their laptop and if you look at the screen, it looks terrible. There are even words jammed together ("would be most suitable forthe job").
I love that it has physical buttons though. My reader is the Kindle Oasis and the buttons are one of my favorite features of the device. The Oasis layout engine and typography are both pretty good and I wonder if the X4 would end up feeling like a big downgrade.
The layout engine is limited. It does flow text quite well, but when I had mine (the screen broke a few months ago) I was working on adding more features to the rendering engine.
It's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec, but hard to do it well on such a constrained chip. Even things like nested lists and inline code snippets are a challenge.
That must be why Amazon does a lot of pre-processing on their server. They know what device they are sending to and can tailor the file for that device.
Maybe expecting the X4 to look great is asking too much. It took Amazon years to get it right on Kindle. Hyphenation is a difficult task.
I've been using it for about 6 months. Very, very good - especially paired with anna's archive.
IT IS VERY FRAGILE! The eink screen on my first broke while in my backpack. The company is generous, I bought a new one and they gave 35% off and included all accessories (reading light, case, extra protectors). Highly recommend.
I've bought a X3 and I loved it (with crosspoint). However, the screen broke after just a week, even if I used the official cover all the time. It's a cute gadget but it's too fragile for the intended use: its strength is the form factor, you want to bring it with yourself to read a page in any mobility setting, but its fragility is a critical issue.
I love the X3, light enough I can carry it around without noticing it. Battery lasts forever. I don't feel the need for a backlight at all, I love how simple this is.
I know people favor the X4 for the usb-c, and I'm all for universal charging cables. But in my experience the usb port is often the first component to fail in something like this. And that seems super annoying to replace. The pogo pins on the other hand are unlikely to fail. And the cable is not proprietary, you can get compatible cables on Amazon/etc.
I skimmed over the project a bit. It seems quite ambitious to aim to reimplement epub, considering that means supporting HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript.
Is there a ebook format that isn't just build arround the concept of a webbrowser?
While I agree in terms of modern browser expectations (and books absolutely should not need JavaScript), I think books in HTML makes a lot of sense. HTML was meant for sharing text documents, after all.
I've had the X3 for a month and I love it. It's so small I forget it's in my pocket and have almost washed it a couple times. I'm working on custom firmware for it, so I ordered an X4 when they had the 20% off sale to test on there too.
I'm a noob so I haven't got very far yet. Currently working on a bootloader then going to do flashcards and a very basic word processor. I'd like to be able to switch firmwares almost like switching applications. I'll share everything on GitHub once I'm sure it won't brick people's devices, but right now the code is just sitting on my PC.
I got the X4 and liked it enough that I used it a ton even though it turned out to be too big to Magsafe onto my phone. In fact, I liked it enough that I also got the X3 on sale so I can use it the way I originally intended to use the X4.
eBay seems to have the X4 new and delivered for around £52 here in the UK - and AliExpress is a little cheaper - but I was put of AE by the warnings that the firmware could not be updated... Not sure if that is true, I've resisted looking into it too much.
I already have a standard and a backlit Nook Simple touch, so I really should just use them more before I buy another device
Go for the X4. Neither supports USB file transfer, so having USB-C charging is convenient without additional things to worry about. Bigger screen is also better if you're a fast reader. The faster you read, the more your reading speed is limited by the page turn speed.
I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.
I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.
I got the X4 Reader recently as well. I really worried that it was going to be a gadget I used for a while then just toss into a drawer but it really has been a useful device. I liken it to the phrase "The best camera is the one that's with you.", having this attached to my phone, so I near always have it with me, just means when I have a tiny bit of downtime say waiting for the bus, or waiting for a food order, I just pull it out, read a few pages then carry on my day.
Only challenges I have are, I wish the MagSafe was a little stronger, it does come off when I put my phone in my pocket which, 9 times out of 10, means I just have 2 separate devices in my pocket.
I love this thing and I use it a lot more than my kindle and my kobo (with koreader). I really like the form factor and the fact that goes out of sleep almost instantly and goes to sleep equally as fast. It seeps battery. It is perfect the way it is.
I've got the X3 (not having a usb-c hasn't been a problem at all for me). And I'll probably buy whatever they release next if the price keeps being in that range. The only thing I want is probably a better display (as in whiter, more DPI, colors), yeah and the battery life is awesome, I barely have to charge it at all, I don't want this to change! I really wish they just keep improving on quality of what's already there and not add new things like touch screen, android and whatnot.
Oh it comes with custom firmware? This is very interesting. I would love to be able to modify some UX and I am sorry, but I need to get the following out of my head. All the e-readers I have had have made it impossible to turn off features like:
1. Selection highlighting... I never use highlighting when reading fiction, but whenever I am not careful enough when turning a page, it'll go crazy with highlighting. Flashing screen, need to close the popup that has added the highlight, removing the highlight again etc.
2. Most of the time I don't want to click on a word to find out its meaning. It's sometimes useful, but I'd rather have it under menu to temporarily enable it. Same reason as before. My e-readers tend to prefer this often enough rather than taking the "next page" action.
3. Make "previous page" be small and not-under-my-finger. Ideally let me choose its position in a fairly precise way.
4. Easy access to accidental "scroll to page 900". I generally don't want it to happen and to be honest, I struggle to think of anybody who does. It can live in a single tiny faraway menu that is impossible to accidentally tap.
5. Swipe-left for previous page. It almost never happens when I want it to happen, so I'd rather turn it off.
In fact, I would love my e-book reader to have no gestures at all. Pretty please let me turn them off! All I want is a tiny button top-right or top-left corner for "open menu", a "previous page" in the other corner and otherwise "tap anywhere" is "next page".
Personal request to any e-book reader software engineers. Please save the position in the book to persistent storage on each page change or every few. At least if the e-reader has any chance of crashing at all, which has been the case with all the ones I have ever had. Yes, not all of them save it...
That's not to say that all the above things are universally bad UX. I think many of these are very useful, if reading non-fiction or having a different goal when reading such as learning a new language. It's just that they are less than brilliant if the goal is to read a book for entertainment in the most comfortable way possible with the fewest things going wrong by accidental taps.
It doesn't not come with custom firmware and xteink tried to block it citing hardware issues. Key word is tried and it's still very easy to install custom firmware.
The X4 doesn't have a touch screen, so you're safe on those points. The next iteration will do though, although I think you will be able to turn it off in the reader view.
Proof of what is possible with stripped down/optimized software. Imagine the battery life if they built one of these around something with better sleep power (e.g. an nrf52).
I recently bought an X4, put crosspoint on it, and have been loving it. I've been reading so much more than before, just because it's always available on the back of my phone.
I've seen multiple people talking about it, but personally I can't see the appeal beyond novelty. I can't imagine wanting to read a book on a device this small
Edit: I'm also always sceptical of when so many people post "I Just bought <x>, and I love it". It makes me wonder what they'll think after the honeymoon period is over
I’ve had mine for months and I still use it far more than my kindle for the sole reason that it fits in my pocket. It’s still a conscious choice to pull it out over doomscrolling TikTok on my phone though.
I've been eyeing the Xteink devices for a while now. They fit all the boxes - small, cheap, physical buttons - a basic reading utility. However, since there's no support for DRM, I'm worried either I won't be able to find books I want to read (what if I want the latest from my favourite author?), or I'll eventually run out.
Might be a tiny tinsy bit of purchase-anxiety as well - it'll be my first e-ink device after all, but what do I know...
Damned... I already have few e-readers, some e-ink screens (for IoT), some reMarkables and a PineNote. When I saw the new reMarkable Pro Move I was very tempted by the form factor.
Now that I see the X3 and X4 with unlocked firmware it's very VERY tempting.
Before I do buy it, did anybody manage to use it for phone mirroring? Get input e.g. BT keyboard? Does it fit and snap on the back on a Pixel 8?
Picked one up a few weeks ago, I read blog posts on my commute now that an automation downloads at 5:30am every morning and uploads them to my OPDS server. The form factor really shapes how I use it. I put it in the pocket where I used to keep my thin wallet (wallet now stays in my bag if anyone here wants to rob me)
I got it last week and I absolutely love it. There are just a two devices I've got in my life that I think are perfect. This is one of them, other being my Steam Deck. It is so small that I can actually carry it in my pocket all the time and read a few paragraphs whenever I have a minute or two. My scrolling time went down dramatically.
The brand recently got caught up in controversy over falsely advertising the RAM it used. Soon after, people found out that although the founder claimed to be a self-made entrepreneur, he was actually behind several companies and had previously refused to return a large deposit.
I do wish I'd gotten the X4 not the X3. I was very scared off by the magnetic charger (which is apparently quasi standard?). I kind of want to muck with using the gyrometer (only on the x4) as an input device though. Allegedly the magnetic charger is somewhat common/interoperable, which de-risks the situation a lot.
For those who can afford it, I can recommend the Boox Note for the ebook reader. It comes with full Android, so you are not limited to books but can read news, Hacker News, and other doomscrolling that fills the Internet.
In a pinch, you can also connect it to a Bluetooth keyboard and use it as a development terminal. SSH terminal looks gorgeous on e-ink.
> It comes with full Android, so you are not limited to books but can read news, Hacker News, and other doomscrolling that fills the Internet.
That sounds like an anti-feature. When I first bought an ereader over 15 years ago, I intentionally chose one that didn't support Wifi for this very reason. I want it primarily for reading documents.
But then again, I guess Boox is meant more to be a tablet than an ereader.
Also, genuinely curious - does having Android reduce the time between recharges? As an example, I read a whole book over 7 days, and didn't need to charge my Kobo (and modern Kobo battery life is not great).
I want Kobo to release an 8" color, but don't know if they ever will. I was considering Boox as an alternative, but I worry about battery life and Android. I wonder if my worry is misplaced.
I have a boox device (go Color 7 gen 2) and the battery life is not good for an ereader. For a tablet, it's fine I guess but I actually get more battery life from my actual tablet than this little ereader.
it lasts a day if youre reading all day, a couple days with lighter use. I couldn't finish a whole book on a single charge even if its a small book. Not at my reading speed anyway.
As a comparison, I've already read 3 books on the xteink x4 and still have 60% of battery left. So yeah, android is good but these things need much better batteries to compete.
Boox devices vary on battery life. The thin ones usually have ~12h of reading time per charge and don't lose as much charge while sleeping as android phones do, but a bit more than a kobo. The batteries size is optimized to be just big enough that charging is not particularly burdensome in practice. My only complaint is the flat bezels which are no good for fragile eink screens.
A problem with Boox that some here care about is their non-compliance with the GPL. Their devices run modified GPL software and they have (AFAIK) refused to release their modifications.
the point of having an e-ink reader (at least for me and anybody I know who actively use such device), is to read things, so keeping doomscrolling options is *not* an advantage..
Android is nice because it expands the reading options somewhat with the existing app ecosystem. A browser with reader-friendly features like einkBro is something that other devices don't have, but is available easily with no cross-compiling or other tedious activities on android. Reading articles and blog posts page-by-page without the visual interrupt of scrolling is a much better experience for me. Doing everything on-device saves me from having to run various daemons and webservers and browser plugins and constantly switch between machines to keep things in sync.
If you are looking for a more affordable option, I have a Musnap Ocean C. It's a little bare bones, but still pretty good. It's a color e-ink display and you can get an optional pen that lets you take notes. I only use it for books and documents, though. It's the best option under $300 that I have found if you want something that is color and can take hand written notes.
Hijacking … i have some random e-ink displays (from a bought product)… there seem to be 6 lines to the mcu (or 7, havent measured). Any 2026 tips on approaches to reverse engineer this to run on an arbitrary hobby mcu like esp32? Oh the mcu seems to be a WinnerMicro W100 Series MCU (arm m3)
I have been trying to move away from doom scrolling, and the vice I've replaced it with is online webnovels and webcomics.
Reading from RoyalRoad or WebToons is hardly mentally stimulating, but I feel it's at least better than random tweets or vertical short form content. There are quite a few stories that I've come to really enjoy and look forward to reading when the new chapter comes out.
It's not like I've stopped reading books, but there is a lot of time between releases of a book series and each book requires quite a lot of time commitment, whereas a single web chapter require much less time to read.
Also, kinda sad but... tbh as I get older I've gotten a bit calcified in my literary habits; I'm now a bit reticent and less eager to discover new book series and have decided to stick to a few authors I'm more comfortable with (time requirement to discover if I like a new one is just too much). With web stories, just a few chapters let me know if I like the vibe, and picking/dropping stories has much less friction.
A device like the X4 would be ok for epubs downloaded from the internet, but for stuff like what I read now, due to its lack of internet connectivity [1] would mean I'd be reading LESS.
I'm not saying it SHOULD have internet... its purpose as a doomscroll-killer makes it obvious why it won't... just that these things have unintended consequences.
[1]: afaik, it has wifi but not an internet browser or app support that would allow constant linking/updating from such web sources.
i bought a pocketbook era lite recently, and it's a bit too locked down for my tastes - though usable. i kinda just want a dumb appliance. actually, i want a linux appliance. this probably sounds very "not productized" to a PM, but 99% of what's on there i don't want: a book store, games, etc.
i wish there was just an SDK for building apps (i'll vibe code towards a great epub experience, i'm fine with that). and, i'm fine plugging it in via USB or even SCPing files over wifi. but, it sends my reading progress to a server every time i use it which is highly annoying and concerning. however, the form factor is sufficient.
i guess i was hoping it'd be more aligned with steam's direction with their steam machine.
As someone who has resisted buying an e-reader for years because I "prefer physical books", I finally purchased a Kobo Clara BW and love it. Even though I usually only read one book at a time, having my whole library in a small form factor is really wonderful.
Does anyone know where you can buy an HDMI-compatible e-ink display, which is about the size of an A5 notebook? The idea is that you could have a screen, keyboard, and a small computer zippered up in a case, and could write/code outside in the sun.
That's a phone - I am looking for essentially an HDMI-compatible e-ink monitor, with a small enough size to fit within an A5 size (https://papersizes.io/a/a5)
I have one of these and they're great. If you get one though, you really do need to convert to XTC for not terribly jagged glyphs -- https://x4converter.rho.sh/
I’ve been looking at these for a while, hoping the custom firmwares for it will become more popular, as I was considering getting this for my six-year-old.
The disabled usb is certainly a bummer. I wonder how they disabled it though – is there a hardware difference?
To flash a new firmware on those devices you just need to place the firmware image of crosspoint on the memory card and then press UP+POWER to reboot and install the new firmware.
My device was the China edition that was locked (USB firmware upload disabled), the memory card method worked fast and easy.
Have the X4, the size is perfect - I always have it in my pocket and can read a view pages whenever I am waiting for something. Reduced my phone usage / doom scrolling nonsense with it. Best 50€ spent in a long time.
Separation of contexts. You can use or dedicated e-book reader, and/or leave your phone behind / disable it when you want to focus on reading specifically.
If the Kompact works for you, no need. Different strokes and all that.
Just picked up an x3 from prime day sale (yeah, Amazon, sigh, I know). Super stoked to see how it is in practice. I’ve always espoused to my kids to be mindful about what they do during the “between” moments, but I increasingly find myself defaulting to HN/reddit for those little 5-10min chunks of waiting and I dislike that reflex. Looking forward to trying to build a habit around a pocketable e-reader. If nothing else, looking forward to attaching to a pocket notebook when traveling.
I would love if a device like this, combined with the zines of old would produce some really creative and interesting shortform content to get folks off smartphones.
I'm trying to think in terms of small wins more and 1 minute spent creating something dumb or doing something not on a phone is 1 less minute creepy, greedy tech bros can extract your data for profit.
Got the X4. Put CrossPoint on it. Works like a charm. The http server accessible over wifi makes transferring books extremely simple. (Shame on the Kindle for locking everything down.) This is proof-of-concept that a microcontroller is more than enough for something like an e-reader.
I have a Kindle and a Kobo. They are sturdy devices. But the X4 is the one that is a genuine e-reader. Would not get it as my one and only e-reader though as you tend to miss the size and backlight of the larger ones.
What would I want from future iterations?
- backlight even if it compromises on battery a bit
- a bit more DPI
Everything else is good enough.
Question to X4 owners - what is the benefit over a smartphone?
I have a kindle for beach and travel as a good compromise size; I use my 10" tablet when I really settle in for reading, or when I read technical books with graphs or books with photographs etc. For my adhoc reader I use kindle app on my phone. What is the unique selling point of something like X4? I notice it attaches to the phone which seems bizarre, phone feels like a functional superset, so I must be missing something - is it battery life or less distractions or something else?
Thx! :)
A single-function book is your window to the world. A phone is the world's window to you.
I carry my phone and my X4 in the same pocket. Whenever I feel like doom-scrolling, I take out the X4 and read a chapter in a book instead. It is excellent for taking back time to read that I lose to my phone.
Sure I could read the same book on my phone, but it takes multiple steps to open the e-reader app on my phone. On top of that, there are half a dozen other things I could open on my way to opening up my e-reader app. With X4, I press the button on the side and I'm reading.
Is it the best ereader? Not at all. Reading whitepapers or programming books on it is a fools errand. It is great for anything that is mostly text. Novels are amazing on it. I've keep up with my read it later backlog by saving URLs with the Obsidian ReadItLater plugin and then using pan to convert the collection of markdown into an epub file.
The battery life is amazing. I've charged it once since getting on 3/27. I've read about 1500 pages (5 novels) since I got it (albeit I've stalled out in June by trying to finish a book I'm not too into).
It is a great compliment to a 10" tablet. Whereas a 7" reader tends to stay at home due to its size, the X4 gets tossed in my pocket and comes everywhere with me.
I thought the same thing until I got a kindle. It just feels different. The eink display is really nice to look at.
As I said, I have a kindle :).
I'm specifically wondering about the X4, which is the size of a phone, meant to be attached to the phone, but it's not a phone and crucially no backlight. Does it specifically fill a situation for people who don't want to carry a phone but will carry this? Or, for people who might carry x4 and a smart phone, why read on the x4?
Thx!
(having it right there mostly serves as a physical token/reminder that I don't want to get sucked in to my social media and other phone apps as much, so if I'm just using it to fill "politely waiting" time I can just grab the x4 instead. I also have a trivial pandoc-generated epub todo list as the first document, though that would work better as a crosspoint fork/feature really...)
You read on a phone and on a tablet, so the X4 probably isn't for you. I hate reading for long periods on LCD screens. I have to do it all day at work and I don't want to do it at home. I read on a kindle unless I really need a computer screen for photos or graphs. I am just not going to pull out my phone to read a book, so an X4 sized device makes it easier to have a book with me. Since phone reading doesn't bother you, I doubt you would get much out of an X4.
It's way smaller than modern phones, though - I clip mine to the back of my Samsung (magsafe case) and it only blocks one of the five cameras. (phone: 288g xtelink x4: 75g.)
(also: hasn't the x4-v2 already been announced that is supposed to have a frontlight?)
it's pocketable!
that's the main for me: i also have a kobo and bringing it around with me is just too damn annoying.
being able to pocket this thing and read anywhere one handed is so nice.
it is small, has absolutely no possibility to distractions like phone. none.
Less distractions, yes, but mainly it's the size and e-ink display.
I won't hesitate to give this to my children, in a year or two when they are reading more fluently and don't need lots of pictures.
Price is also a factor here!
I kinda prefer oled screens so for me a foldable phone is much nicer than a kindle. Especially at night.
- The e-ink screen is great for reading. The feeling of ink on paper it produces cannot be replicated on any other screen. Not to my satisfaction.
- The microcontroller is so weak that you cannot add crappy features like more powerful e-readers are wont to do. This produces minimal distraction-free UIs. No messaging, no browsing.
- The form factor is the biggest win. It fits in a pocket and is great for the 5-10m you find when traveling or waiting somewhere. I cannot carry e-readers that way.
- It is great for fiction, and text-heavy non-fiction: history, philosophy etc. Stuff with a lot of images, tables, code blocks etc ... nope.
I love my X4 as well, and would love a backlight. Crosspoint and its downline forks are great.
the only funny thing about the X4 is reading it in bright sunlight. it will corrupt the image on the screen on page turn unless you shade it? something to do w/ older eInk screens and not having a UV Filter. weird, slightly annoying.
Its increased my reading 2-3x though!
FYI you might be using an older version of crosspoint. It now has a software fix for the fading issue built in
https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/issue...
I'm with you on every bit. I love my Kobo Libra 2 and it lives on my nightstand table. It's an excellent reader. The X4 with CrossPoint is an alright reader, but I've been chewing through books on my morning commute because it fits in my jacket pocket and I can have it out on the train without bumping into other people.
It's not the best reader I own, but it's the best reader I have on me at any given moment when I'm not laying in bed.
> It's not the best reader I own, but it's the best reader I have on me at any given moment
This. The form factor is almost the right one for an e-reader. The battery lasts for weeks. It is so open that you could probably write your own firmware for it based on CrossPoint or similar for your own needs.
Needs some iterative development while ruthlessly culling requests for random features.
> The form factor is almost the right one for an e-reader.
It truly is. It fits perfectly in one hand without stretching uncomfortably, so I can hold it for longer than any reading session I've had without making my hand get stiff. While holding it in the normal way, my thumb naturally rests on one of the side buttons, which I've mapped to "next page".
If I were to hold out my hand, and someone put an X4 in it, I wouldn't have to move a muscle and it'd be in the right position for me to read for hours with just the periodic button tap.
Everyone's different, of course. It's guaranteed to be too big or too small for others, and that's cool. For me it feels like someone custom designed it based on a model of my hand.
That was the big surprising win for me too, it just fits so comfortably in the hand
crosspoint has started developing a little slower now that its in a really usable state.
I've merged some working PRs onto my device and it's working great. I really needed a dictionary option because I like to quickly know the meaning of words as I read.
its fine. theres a few more things that could be nice (reading statistics for example) that other forks do have.
I also primarily use Kobo e-readers right now but I've been wanting something smaller for an EDC. I think this thread is selling me on it.
I bought it because it was comparatively dirt cheap and was hackable. I was delighted at how nice it actually was to use. I figured it'd be crappy in some ways, but, you know, at least it was cheap. To the contrary, it's perfectly fine and does a great job at letting me flip through ebooks.
What it's not good at it showing any kind of diagrams, because even if the software was decent, it's a relatively tiny screen. I haven't even bothered trying to view a PDF on it and don't know if that's supported. For epubs I've uploaded to it through Calibre, it's utterly adequate.
Does your reading position sync up between the two devices?
If you install koreader on the kobo, crosspoint on the x4 and create a free koreader sync account (or host your own sync sever): yes - but on the x4 you need to manually trigger syncs
Alternatively if you wish to stick with the stock Kobo reader app it is possible to sync via a https://grimmory.org/ instance
As someone who also juggles multiple readers, I find it easier to have a different book per device. Otherwise I would waste too much time trying to sync between the two.
Yes. I read multiple books in parallel. Each on a different reader. So syncing is not something I usually need though I did build myself a local sync server for fun.
Not the commenter you were replying to, but I have both a Kindle and a X4. No, it does not, but searching for a unique enough phrase (just two or three words) on the current page gets you there fast enough.
There are rumors they will release a V2 Pro version with touch and backlight in the second half of this year.
They also have already announced the S4 that is basically the same device, a bit ticker with touch and backlight and running android.
It has perfectly usable buttons. Adding touch feels like straying from the core proposition to have a minimal reader.
Yeah I really like not having a touchscreen that I have to worry about bumping while I'm reading, a backlight is the only addition I would enjoy to the current x4
I love the buttons, would loath a touchscreen on this size format. Just add a backlight!
if its still as open, I'm pretty sure the touchscreen can be worked out to work well.
but I really agree with you, I'd love to have a frontlight on it. That's literally all I'd wanted over the current device. No touchscreen necessary.
but between touchscreen + frontlight and neither, perhaps I'd be willing to have a touchscreen so long as the software is good (which something like crosspoint I'm sure would nail)
Every item you add to the device adds a failure mode. Light is fine. Touch ... I don't know. I like the tactile feel of buttons.
And Android means the device no longer runs on a microcontroller which has consequences for battery life etc. As long as they keep the original, minimal model active with minor QoL improvements, I guess it is fine.
You can always install KOReader on Kindle to get the painless wireless transfer as well. It can even sync wirelessly with Calibre.
I have the Kobo Libra Color and the contrast on the X4 is much much better.
The whole sticking-it-to-the-back-of-your-phone i find a bit useless, but mine came with two metal rings so that I can stick it to other places.
I have one ring on the dashboard of my car so the X4 can hang there until i need to use it. Good for trips with many stops.
It was probably a decade ago, but I used to have this extremely cheap e-reader that ran off AA batteries, used a monochrome LCD screen (no lighting) and was based on a microcontroller. If you let the batteries die and waited too long to replace them, you had to reflash the software on it. I think it only handled mobi format, but it might have been epub.
Do you know what the maximum SD card size that it'll support? I'm especially interested if a 1TB card will work.
How many books do you want to fit on that thing? :o
I thought the compressed size of the LLM book corpus was a mere 100-200GB.
GP has big plans.
Wikipedia is ~60GB!
512 GB according to the manual, but it probably depends on the card.
x4 pro will come with backlight and touch screen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKdjxYtMrI
All of this. It's a solid device. I like it. It won't replace my Kobo, but it has it's place in my tech lineup.
Will buy the next one if it has a light.
Not being lighted is what has kept me from trying it. If they do add lighting I hope it is a front light and not a back light. Hard to beat a front lit e-ink display for reading. Bonus points for warmth settings.
Its not physically possible to have eink (based on inked beads, like the current e-reader has) and backlight.
only frontlight is possible.
Great news, but these are still entirely unlit.
I have the X4 and the X3 (newer smaller one). I will get whatever the next version is if it has a backlight or more DPI / support for smaller font.
X4 is great - has usb-c charger and with the cover feels like an easy to pocket and bring everywhere reader. Does not fit on the back of an iphone. I assume the magnet layout works with popular android phones though.
X3 is also great, actually fits on the back of the phone with the magsafe - magnet is a _bit_ too weak. It does fall off in my pocket frequently but I haven't lost it yet. Does not have usb-c - has weird little magnetic 4 pin charger.
I will gift my X4 to my brother once I've loaded some more content to it.
I recommend this for anyone that wants to save web novels for offline reading https://github.com/lncrawl/lightnovel-crawler - Calibre will sync the epubs to the x4 and x3.
Use the crosspoint OS https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader
All that said... I do still use my kindle as default. More content accessible more easily, better syncing, backlight
the next version will unfortunately be a generic Android reader. This device is good because, by chance, out of a thousand devices, one of them has to be better than all the rest. This product is not good by design or merit, but by chance. Same goes for lots of popular cheap Chinese tech, like the Miyoo Mini+ for example. Better than it has any right to be, and the people making it don't have a clue; every change to such a device can only be for the worse.
Good catch. I have the Miyoo Mini+ and that's exactly my feeling : it's not good, it _happen_ to be good because somehow, they made it the good form factor and especially, they put a 640x480 screen which allows you to play most retro consoles at native resolution or at integer (x2) scaling.
And the firmware is shitty but the community firmware is good.
And when you follow what the company does, you understand that the biggest selling point (the screen) is just there for reasons that are totally unrelated to creating a great product. It happened to be there because they randomly (economically, I guess) choose this screen and it happened to be good and have the right resolution for retro gaming.
None of their previous models had this advantage but more than that, none of the models that followed kept the advantages that made this device a banger.
It's exactly like if the company behind the device never understood how and why they created a community behind their devices.
For the xteink, I wouldn't be surprised for the next ones to be shittier, closed, and bloated, and probably for no reason.
The best thing about these fly-by-night Chinese tech companies that manage to shit out something actually good is that they rarely lock the device down so it's relatively easy to flash some new firmware when they inevitably disappear from the market.
There will be an Android (11, unfortunately) reader, the S4. (This is already visible on xteink.cn and they've teased it in social media.)
There's also going to be an X4 Pro, which is an ESP32 reader too, and this seems to be an X4 with backlight and touch screen.
> There's also going to be an X4 Pro, which is an ESP32 reader too, and this seems to be an X4 with backlight and touch screen.
mite b cute
I got one last April, and love it: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2026/04/04/1800
I also built two quick hacks for it that people might like:
- https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-readlater-epub
- https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-opds-server
I love my X3. I glued its magnetic folio to the back of my Apple Wallet. It turned out perfectly, for me. Pictures below. I've read The Odyssey and several other shorter books on it and have yet to recharge it.
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCStWYAAOj6f?format=jpg&name=...
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCO8WIAASMEn?format=jpg&name=...
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCPEXgAE3O4z?format=jpg&name=...
Was just looking at this. What keeps me from buying is the screen is just too small. I'd love to slap this magnetically on the back of my iPhone and have it on the go as a focused reading device but eyes after 40 aren't so happy about reading super tiny characters.
My two wishes are: to size it up so it is roughly the width of a modern smartphone (2.72" -> 2.8") and decrease bezel size. At these small sizes, even 1/2 to 3/4" screen size increase is a big deal in area gained, which leads to more comfort reading and less line scanning.
Hope they'll ship one with the size up 4.7" ED047TC1 display [1] instead.
[1] https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-EPD47/blob/esp32s3/...
The screen size isn't really an issue for font sizes. Just put fewer words on the screen.
There are e-readers that put a single word on the screen, this can fit plenty in a decent font size, you'll have to switch pages more often, but I haven't found that to be an issue, the button is very light to press and the page transition (with Crosspoint) is fast.
Agree, for me less words on screen is a feature not a bug. At least for the shape of my brain, it stops me from getting lost in the text or skipping up/down the page accidentally. The side/front page turn button redundancy means the act of page turning just fades into reflexiveness and I end up reading faster and retaining more
I've read an entire book on the X3 attached to the back of my phone and it hasn't been an issue. Reading horizontally I get close enough to the 80 chars per line ideal that it doesn't bother me at all.
I mean, people read HN articles and discuss them on phones all the time.
Phone screens are larger, higher res, pinch zoomable, and have backlighting that creates uniform contrast and readability in nearly all lighting conditions.
Poorly.
Using a touchscreen easily halves my effective intelligence. The frictions in both reading and typing are huge.
(Written from a desktop.)
I ordered the X4 this past Christmas and received it sometime in January. I have it running Crosspoint. I like it a lot but I do wish it was a bit larger, like a 7-8" display so more text could fit on the screen. The thing I love about the X4 is that I can flash different firmware on it and it's dead simple. It's not an Android tablet with an e-ink screen, it doesn't download ads from Amazon servers, it's just an e-reader.
I've had an x3 with crosspoint for a couple of months. Overall I love the device, it's making it easy to pull up the phone and read a couple of pages instead of doom scrolling. But a huge drawback is that it's unusable in direct sunlight since the screen fades away. Here is how it looks: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1q5fhwf/dire...
I contacted support and they answered
"We would like to clarify that on e ink displays, text may appear lighter under very strong direct sunlight. Once the screen refreshes or you return to normal lighting conditions and turn a few pages, the text will fully recover. This behavior is related to the low power design of the display and does not cause any damage to the screen."
Apparently the cable to the screen is to blame and the workaround is a piece of tape to block UV light reaching that component: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1qlyq3s/this...
Personally, I've found that just moving the screen out of the sun (for example by turning it upside-down, or holding my hand in front of it) when refreshing a page is enough to prevent it.
Crosspoint has a software fix for this in settings. It’s not 100% but it does work. It’s called the Sunlight Fading Fix under Display settings. https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/blob/...
Oof... I just ordered the x3 and plan to add CrossPoint on it. If hesitating to cancel my ordered as it didn't ship yet. I have plenty of other e-ink screens and it has never happened. I specifically enjoy e-ink in directly sunlight or at least outdoors ... so I'm not sure if that's still a good usecase for me anymore.
Thanks for for sharing.
Love my X4. Shameless plug, I also built an iOS/Android app to manage books and also send web articles over to Crosspoint
https://crosspointsync.com/
Thank you. I'm not the biggest fan of the Crosspoint web interface, so I'll definitely give this a try.
I got the X4 a few weeks back and installed https://github.com/uxjulia/CrossInk and it has been a dream.
I got one, it's pretty cool that it's small enough to just magnet to the back of your phone. If your someone who needs to use a large font on their ereader to read its certainly not for you, but the screen size is good enough for regular sized text.
It's also cool that it's chip is just an ESP32.
I would like to see a phone case which this inserts into --- bonus points if there's a way to use it as a status display for the phone for use in bright/direct sunlight.
The obvious innovation is to just make the back of the phone case an eInk display. No need for all the bulk when you can merely have an app on your phone that controls the case-display and the phone can output whatever reader app you want to it like a companion/IoT device.
Or it can be a little bit bulkier and just be a dedicated ereader that is shaped like a phone case. Either way works.
The phone case idea would be nice, but then the device has to be replaced when the phone is replaced.
Yeah but I’ve seen color e-ink fridge magnets that are like $30. I don’t think it ends up being more expensive or substantially worse for the environment than people buying cases made of fancy leather. Presumably the display module could also be cut out of it for DIY uses.
So, Yota phone?
Can someone explain the whole thing about wanting to attach it to your phone? Why? What does this provide over just putting it in your pocket?
I'll never forget it. It's always on the back of my phone, so even if I'm in a hurry and run out I can still read a book on the metro.
My question is, where do people buy epubs for these? Are you buying them off of Kindle or similar and stripping the DRM? My biggest withholding is that I can get used paper books for quite cheep (ie, from thriftbooks or similar), but there's not really a similar marketplace for digital versions (understandably so). Maybe I'm just cheap, but I have a hard time justifying near-full-price for books that I can get the physical version for much cheaper, or I already have sitting on my shelf at home.
Any thoughts?
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/ Is an option
That eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving, it's quite galling that the price isn't favorably differentiated. And I don't think the author gets to keep the difference.
Much of the cost of even a print book is in fixed factors: authorship, editing, proofreading, marketing, cover design, and the like. These may vary by title and it's quite possible to skimp on elements, but for a highly-produced work (references, fact-checking, illustrations, data tables, etc.) can be significant. Those costs are amortised over the print run and sales, which for most books is quite small, perhaps a few thousands of copies.
Digital publishing bypasses print, distribution, warehousing, and materials, but still includes those fixed costs.
Keep in mind that many publishers effectively act a bit like investors or VC, seeding a large number of publications in the hopes that a small number succeed. The name "Random House" was said by its founding publisher, Bennet Cerf to be "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random". As in music and cinema, a few "tentpole" projects support much of the rest of the enterprise.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_House#Company_history>.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentpole>
> eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving
But they do need editing, layout, design, marketing, etc, which are a significant part of the cost of a book. A book is never a solo endeavor by an author.
Presumably, though, those are also things that you'd need for a physical print book, and you could share some of that effort / cost between the two? Maybe this is a naive assumption, but I would assume that the total cost per unit of ebook is still a decent amount less than a print book, even when factoring for the publishing costs, purely due to the fact that you are dealing with a digital version compared with a print version that needs real materials and labor.
You put it well and presbyterian is right in that point, but eBooks don't have the financial risk of retail merchandise planning and merchandising, and that cost saving isn't differentiated.
I've looked at this device and I wonder how good the layout engine is. Screenshots never show text with any hyphenation going on which makes me wonder if it even supports hyphenation.
One of the images on the Amazon page for the reader has somebody holding one beside their laptop and if you look at the screen, it looks terrible. There are even words jammed together ("would be most suitable forthe job").
I love that it has physical buttons though. My reader is the Kindle Oasis and the buttons are one of my favorite features of the device. The Oasis layout engine and typography are both pretty good and I wonder if the X4 would end up feeling like a big downgrade.
The alternative firmwares give you a lot more options in this, stock is OK in layout
The layout engine is limited. It does flow text quite well, but when I had mine (the screen broke a few months ago) I was working on adding more features to the rendering engine.
It's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec, but hard to do it well on such a constrained chip. Even things like nested lists and inline code snippets are a challenge.
Flash Crosspoint. I reflows much better than stock. It also fixes the lack of space between paragraphs.
Sounds like it’s still pretty early days then. I’ll probably hold off for a year or two and check again.
Even a year from now you're still likely to need a custom firmware.
The custom firmware today is more than good enough, and the devices often sell for under $70.
That must be why Amazon does a lot of pre-processing on their server. They know what device they are sending to and can tailor the file for that device.
Maybe expecting the X4 to look great is asking too much. It took Amazon years to get it right on Kindle. Hyphenation is a difficult task.
>t's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec
And yet reading systems fail to do that.
Custom firmwares support hyphenation
I've been using it for about 6 months. Very, very good - especially paired with anna's archive.
IT IS VERY FRAGILE! The eink screen on my first broke while in my backpack. The company is generous, I bought a new one and they gave 35% off and included all accessories (reading light, case, extra protectors). Highly recommend.
I've bought a X3 and I loved it (with crosspoint). However, the screen broke after just a week, even if I used the official cover all the time. It's a cute gadget but it's too fragile for the intended use: its strength is the form factor, you want to bring it with yourself to read a page in any mobility setting, but its fragility is a critical issue.
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I love the X3, light enough I can carry it around without noticing it. Battery lasts forever. I don't feel the need for a backlight at all, I love how simple this is.
I know people favor the X4 for the usb-c, and I'm all for universal charging cables. But in my experience the usb port is often the first component to fail in something like this. And that seems super annoying to replace. The pogo pins on the other hand are unlikely to fail. And the cable is not proprietary, you can get compatible cables on Amazon/etc.
CrossPoint 1.4.0 came out 2 hours ago:
https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/relea...
I skimmed over the project a bit. It seems quite ambitious to aim to reimplement epub, considering that means supporting HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript.
Is there a ebook format that isn't just build arround the concept of a webbrowser?
While I agree in terms of modern browser expectations (and books absolutely should not need JavaScript), I think books in HTML makes a lot of sense. HTML was meant for sharing text documents, after all.
epub is overkill for a vast majority of books.
A format that only supported
- headings
- paragraphs
- emphasis (bold/italics)
- bullets
- inline images
is good enough. A simple container with a TOC pointing to text blocks/files within it that can be processed very cheaply.
Unfortunately, with something like epub, you lose all the simplicity because you want to support every single feature even if rarely used.
HTML and CSS is enough for 99% percent of epubs, and that's the only subset of epub standards that Crosspoint tries to support
Isn't HTML and CSS already a huge surface to support, unless you are happy with a subset?
I've had the X3 for a month and I love it. It's so small I forget it's in my pocket and have almost washed it a couple times. I'm working on custom firmware for it, so I ordered an X4 when they had the 20% off sale to test on there too.
As a crazy person with both, I have mixed feelings between them.
In favor of the X3:
- Crisper text
- Whiter display
- Slightly better battery life
- Top-mounted power button (subjective)
In favor of the X4:
- Larger display
- Plain USB-C charging
- Slightly better custom firmware support
- Backward and forward button on the same side (subjective)
link the custom firmware!
I'm a noob so I haven't got very far yet. Currently working on a bootloader then going to do flashcards and a very basic word processor. I'd like to be able to switch firmwares almost like switching applications. I'll share everything on GitHub once I'm sure it won't brick people's devices, but right now the code is just sitting on my PC.
I got the X4 and liked it enough that I used it a ton even though it turned out to be too big to Magsafe onto my phone. In fact, I liked it enough that I also got the X3 on sale so I can use it the way I originally intended to use the X4.
Would like to get it if I knew where he'd got it for £40! Its twice that including delivery to UK from the maker.
I'm guessing Ali-Express with the hope you get a genuine one.
eBay seems to have the X4 new and delivered for around £52 here in the UK - and AliExpress is a little cheaper - but I was put of AE by the warnings that the firmware could not be updated... Not sure if that is true, I've resisted looking into it too much.
I already have a standard and a backlit Nook Simple touch, so I really should just use them more before I buy another device
I've been eyeing the Xteink Reader but cannot decide between the X4 (4.7" diag) and X3 (3.7" diag).
FWIW, the X3 requires a pogo pin cable, while the X4 requires a standard USB-C.
Anybody got any recommendations?
Thanks!
Go for the X4. Neither supports USB file transfer, so having USB-C charging is convenient without additional things to worry about. Bigger screen is also better if you're a fast reader. The faster you read, the more your reading speed is limited by the page turn speed.
Thanks, all for the reco.
Looking fwd to my reader soon!
I picked the X4 over X3 because the usb-c is convenient for charging (which you barely need to do)
I love it and use it every day.
precisely, also, if you don't need to charge the device for weeks, months even, you're probably gonna lose the specialised cable.
a usbc is so easy to come by, you're never going to have to wait for amazon to deliver the cable you need to charge this one device you own.
The X4. I always have a USB-C cable handy; so, i can charge it in the bedroom, at y desk, etc.
I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.
I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.
I got the X4 Reader recently as well. I really worried that it was going to be a gadget I used for a while then just toss into a drawer but it really has been a useful device. I liken it to the phrase "The best camera is the one that's with you.", having this attached to my phone, so I near always have it with me, just means when I have a tiny bit of downtime say waiting for the bus, or waiting for a food order, I just pull it out, read a few pages then carry on my day.
Only challenges I have are, I wish the MagSafe was a little stronger, it does come off when I put my phone in my pocket which, 9 times out of 10, means I just have 2 separate devices in my pocket.
The no USB flashing doesn't appear to be the case if you get it straight from OEM. It is a bit pricier than amazon.
https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4
I love this thing and I use it a lot more than my kindle and my kobo (with koreader). I really like the form factor and the fact that goes out of sleep almost instantly and goes to sleep equally as fast. It seeps battery. It is perfect the way it is.
I've got the X3 (not having a usb-c hasn't been a problem at all for me). And I'll probably buy whatever they release next if the price keeps being in that range. The only thing I want is probably a better display (as in whiter, more DPI, colors), yeah and the battery life is awesome, I barely have to charge it at all, I don't want this to change! I really wish they just keep improving on quality of what's already there and not add new things like touch screen, android and whatnot.
Oh it comes with custom firmware? This is very interesting. I would love to be able to modify some UX and I am sorry, but I need to get the following out of my head. All the e-readers I have had have made it impossible to turn off features like:
In fact, I would love my e-book reader to have no gestures at all. Pretty please let me turn them off! All I want is a tiny button top-right or top-left corner for "open menu", a "previous page" in the other corner and otherwise "tap anywhere" is "next page".Personal request to any e-book reader software engineers. Please save the position in the book to persistent storage on each page change or every few. At least if the e-reader has any chance of crashing at all, which has been the case with all the ones I have ever had. Yes, not all of them save it...
That's not to say that all the above things are universally bad UX. I think many of these are very useful, if reading non-fiction or having a different goal when reading such as learning a new language. It's just that they are less than brilliant if the goal is to read a book for entertainment in the most comfortable way possible with the fewest things going wrong by accidental taps.
It doesn't not come with custom firmware and xteink tried to block it citing hardware issues. Key word is tried and it's still very easy to install custom firmware.
The X4 doesn't have a touch screen, so you're safe on those points. The next iteration will do though, although I think you will be able to turn it off in the reader view.
Proof of what is possible with stripped down/optimized software. Imagine the battery life if they built one of these around something with better sleep power (e.g. an nrf52).
I recently bought an X4, put crosspoint on it, and have been loving it. I've been reading so much more than before, just because it's always available on the back of my phone.
I've seen multiple people talking about it, but personally I can't see the appeal beyond novelty. I can't imagine wanting to read a book on a device this small
Edit: I'm also always sceptical of when so many people post "I Just bought <x>, and I love it". It makes me wonder what they'll think after the honeymoon period is over
I’ve had mine for months and I still use it far more than my kindle for the sole reason that it fits in my pocket. It’s still a conscious choice to pull it out over doomscrolling TikTok on my phone though.
I've been eyeing the Xteink devices for a while now. They fit all the boxes - small, cheap, physical buttons - a basic reading utility. However, since there's no support for DRM, I'm worried either I won't be able to find books I want to read (what if I want the latest from my favourite author?), or I'll eventually run out.
Might be a tiny tinsy bit of purchase-anxiety as well - it'll be my first e-ink device after all, but what do I know...
Liberate your e-books, my friend: https://github.com/Satsuoni/DeDRM_tools/discussions
You can get free ebooks from the same place Meta got them.
Damned... I already have few e-readers, some e-ink screens (for IoT), some reMarkables and a PineNote. When I saw the new reMarkable Pro Move I was very tempted by the form factor.
Now that I see the X3 and X4 with unlocked firmware it's very VERY tempting.
Before I do buy it, did anybody manage to use it for phone mirroring? Get input e.g. BT keyboard? Does it fit and snap on the back on a Pixel 8?
Picked one up a few weeks ago, I read blog posts on my commute now that an automation downloads at 5:30am every morning and uploads them to my OPDS server. The form factor really shapes how I use it. I put it in the pocket where I used to keep my thin wallet (wallet now stays in my bag if anyone here wants to rob me)
Thin wallet gang.
I carry four cards in a 3D printed sleeve which is two walls (0.8mm) thick.
When my state implements digital drivers licence I can take that down to three cards.
I just realised an elastic "card sock" would be even easier.
I got it last week and I absolutely love it. There are just a two devices I've got in my life that I think are perfect. This is one of them, other being my Steam Deck. It is so small that I can actually carry it in my pocket all the time and read a few paragraphs whenever I have a minute or two. My scrolling time went down dramatically.
The brand recently got caught up in controversy over falsely advertising the RAM it used. Soon after, people found out that although the founder claimed to be a self-made entrepreneur, he was actually behind several companies and had previously refused to return a large deposit.
I do wish I'd gotten the X4 not the X3. I was very scared off by the magnetic charger (which is apparently quasi standard?). I kind of want to muck with using the gyrometer (only on the x4) as an input device though. Allegedly the magnetic charger is somewhat common/interoperable, which de-risks the situation a lot.
I think you’ve got it backwards - confusingly enough, x3 is the newer, smaller one with magnetic charger and the gyro
For those who can afford it, I can recommend the Boox Note for the ebook reader. It comes with full Android, so you are not limited to books but can read news, Hacker News, and other doomscrolling that fills the Internet.
In a pinch, you can also connect it to a Bluetooth keyboard and use it as a development terminal. SSH terminal looks gorgeous on e-ink.
> It comes with full Android, so you are not limited to books but can read news, Hacker News, and other doomscrolling that fills the Internet.
That sounds like an anti-feature. When I first bought an ereader over 15 years ago, I intentionally chose one that didn't support Wifi for this very reason. I want it primarily for reading documents.
But then again, I guess Boox is meant more to be a tablet than an ereader.
Also, genuinely curious - does having Android reduce the time between recharges? As an example, I read a whole book over 7 days, and didn't need to charge my Kobo (and modern Kobo battery life is not great).
I want Kobo to release an 8" color, but don't know if they ever will. I was considering Boox as an alternative, but I worry about battery life and Android. I wonder if my worry is misplaced.
I have a boox device (go Color 7 gen 2) and the battery life is not good for an ereader. For a tablet, it's fine I guess but I actually get more battery life from my actual tablet than this little ereader.
it lasts a day if youre reading all day, a couple days with lighter use. I couldn't finish a whole book on a single charge even if its a small book. Not at my reading speed anyway.
As a comparison, I've already read 3 books on the xteink x4 and still have 60% of battery left. So yeah, android is good but these things need much better batteries to compete.
Boox devices vary on battery life. The thin ones usually have ~12h of reading time per charge and don't lose as much charge while sleeping as android phones do, but a bit more than a kobo. The batteries size is optimized to be just big enough that charging is not particularly burdensome in practice. My only complaint is the flat bezels which are no good for fragile eink screens.
A problem with Boox that some here care about is their non-compliance with the GPL. Their devices run modified GPL software and they have (AFAIK) refused to release their modifications.
Sounds like the opposite of what I want for my ebook reader.
the point of having an e-ink reader (at least for me and anybody I know who actively use such device), is to read things, so keeping doomscrolling options is *not* an advantage..
Android is nice because it expands the reading options somewhat with the existing app ecosystem. A browser with reader-friendly features like einkBro is something that other devices don't have, but is available easily with no cross-compiling or other tedious activities on android. Reading articles and blog posts page-by-page without the visual interrupt of scrolling is a much better experience for me. Doing everything on-device saves me from having to run various daemons and webservers and browser plugins and constantly switch between machines to keep things in sync.
If you are looking for a more affordable option, I have a Musnap Ocean C. It's a little bare bones, but still pretty good. It's a color e-ink display and you can get an optional pen that lets you take notes. I only use it for books and documents, though. It's the best option under $300 that I have found if you want something that is color and can take hand written notes.
Hijacking … i have some random e-ink displays (from a bought product)… there seem to be 6 lines to the mcu (or 7, havent measured). Any 2026 tips on approaches to reverse engineer this to run on an arbitrary hobby mcu like esp32? Oh the mcu seems to be a WinnerMicro W100 Series MCU (arm m3)
there are 4 or 5 command sets, you can safely try them all. for that few wires, it'll be spi
Put two in a printed case, crosslink to make page turn work and it's a book reading experience.
I have been trying to move away from doom scrolling, and the vice I've replaced it with is online webnovels and webcomics.
Reading from RoyalRoad or WebToons is hardly mentally stimulating, but I feel it's at least better than random tweets or vertical short form content. There are quite a few stories that I've come to really enjoy and look forward to reading when the new chapter comes out.
It's not like I've stopped reading books, but there is a lot of time between releases of a book series and each book requires quite a lot of time commitment, whereas a single web chapter require much less time to read.
Also, kinda sad but... tbh as I get older I've gotten a bit calcified in my literary habits; I'm now a bit reticent and less eager to discover new book series and have decided to stick to a few authors I'm more comfortable with (time requirement to discover if I like a new one is just too much). With web stories, just a few chapters let me know if I like the vibe, and picking/dropping stories has much less friction.
A device like the X4 would be ok for epubs downloaded from the internet, but for stuff like what I read now, due to its lack of internet connectivity [1] would mean I'd be reading LESS.
I'm not saying it SHOULD have internet... its purpose as a doomscroll-killer makes it obvious why it won't... just that these things have unintended consequences.
[1]: afaik, it has wifi but not an internet browser or app support that would allow constant linking/updating from such web sources.
My reading habits are similar, and yeah I fell out of using my einks for similar reasons.
Even with a web browser, einkbro for Android eink devices, it just never felt as good as epubs or just my phone somehow.
Well ordered the X4 to try anyways.
Please share your review of the device and how you read on it when you get the device. It will be interesting to see how your reading habits change.
i bought a pocketbook era lite recently, and it's a bit too locked down for my tastes - though usable. i kinda just want a dumb appliance. actually, i want a linux appliance. this probably sounds very "not productized" to a PM, but 99% of what's on there i don't want: a book store, games, etc.
i wish there was just an SDK for building apps (i'll vibe code towards a great epub experience, i'm fine with that). and, i'm fine plugging it in via USB or even SCPing files over wifi. but, it sends my reading progress to a server every time i use it which is highly annoying and concerning. however, the form factor is sufficient.
i guess i was hoping it'd be more aligned with steam's direction with their steam machine.
> i wish there was just an SDK for building apps (i'll vibe code towards a great epub experience, i'm fine with that)
That seems to be what crosspoint-reader is: https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader
As someone who has resisted buying an e-reader for years because I "prefer physical books", I finally purchased a Kobo Clara BW and love it. Even though I usually only read one book at a time, having my whole library in a small form factor is really wonderful.
Does anyone know where you can buy an HDMI-compatible e-ink display, which is about the size of an A5 notebook? The idea is that you could have a screen, keyboard, and a small computer zippered up in a case, and could write/code outside in the sun.
Pinenote? Probably have to add the HDMI port yourself though
That's a phone - I am looking for essentially an HDMI-compatible e-ink monitor, with a small enough size to fit within an A5 size (https://papersizes.io/a/a5)
I have one of these and they're great. If you get one though, you really do need to convert to XTC for not terribly jagged glyphs -- https://x4converter.rho.sh/
I’ve been looking at these for a while, hoping the custom firmwares for it will become more popular, as I was considering getting this for my six-year-old.
The disabled usb is certainly a bummer. I wonder how they disabled it though – is there a hardware difference?
To flash a new firmware on those devices you just need to place the firmware image of crosspoint on the memory card and then press UP+POWER to reboot and install the new firmware.
My device was the China edition that was locked (USB firmware upload disabled), the memory card method worked fast and easy.
Crosspoint is very popular and very easy to flash onto the device.
Locking and preventing flashing of firmware only happened in China.
This page mentions international models, but seems it's still possible to flash them in any case
https://crosspointreader.com/#unlock-tool
also: https://crosspointreader.com/unlocker
OMG, e-ink = FRONTlight, not backlight. /pedantry
They have an S4 coming out with frontlight and Android. Would be great if it supports scrolling like a Boox Palma but at 1/6 the price.
Have the X4, the size is perfect - I always have it in my pocket and can read a view pages whenever I am waiting for something. Reduced my phone usage / doom scrolling nonsense with it. Best 50€ spent in a long time.
I bought one of these and I quite like it. Form factor is nice, transfer is a bit rough around the edges but serviceable.
Pretty sure my credit card got harvested from either them or the website purchase though
Does anyone know if reading PDFs are supported on this device? I'd love to try it out for reading music while marching.
Och, if it supports LaTeX, we can also use it for memorizing math formulas while piloting a helicopter!
I don't understand why I would read on this instead of my phone. I use an e-reader for a larger screen.
I'm curious if there's a market for an ultra-small, credit-card sized ereader that can fit in a wallet
"X"-"tee"-"ink" .. ex-tea-ink .. extinct?
BRB, off to set up a "naming things as a service" startup.
I think the rumors about a X4 Pro v2 with frontlight being released in June or July have been confirmed.
I have an X4, though its not small enough to stick onto a phone (or my phone is not gigantic enough), I do love it, simplistic and purposeful
> This thing actually fits in a trouser pocket and disappears.
I miss reading books on my ipod. I love the form factor of it.
I love my X4. I throw it in my backpack or pocket when I take the dog to the park and read a few pages when we sit in the shade.
I would love something as responsive as the Remarkable tablet in this form factor
I have a mudita kompact as my primary phone, is there any value in getting an additional device like this?
Separation of contexts. You can use or dedicated e-book reader, and/or leave your phone behind / disable it when you want to focus on reading specifically.
If the Kompact works for you, no need. Different strokes and all that.
Way to talk about e-ink readers, various models and not mention screen sizes?
been using on the back of my phone for a few months, my most satisfying hardware purchase in a long time
what phone does it fit on? I have the X3 coming today for this very reason. The x4 is just too big and the magnets misplaced to fit on any phone I own
iPhone pro max, fits nicely even with a cover, i also have a x3 but slightly prefer the bigger screen of x4’s but portability on is the read deal
Just seeing it act as a trigger to read for me, especially when book cover as standby background
let's put a SIM card in there and use it as a smartphone ... I'd love that
Just picked up an x3 from prime day sale (yeah, Amazon, sigh, I know). Super stoked to see how it is in practice. I’ve always espoused to my kids to be mindful about what they do during the “between” moments, but I increasingly find myself defaulting to HN/reddit for those little 5-10min chunks of waiting and I dislike that reflex. Looking forward to trying to build a habit around a pocketable e-reader. If nothing else, looking forward to attaching to a pocket notebook when traveling.
I would love if a device like this, combined with the zines of old would produce some really creative and interesting shortform content to get folks off smartphones.
I'm trying to think in terms of small wins more and 1 minute spent creating something dumb or doing something not on a phone is 1 less minute creepy, greedy tech bros can extract your data for profit.
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