The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works.
The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works.
Wow! Just look at thoses PCB’s….
Literate Hardware Design! One up on Donald Knuth!
I love it!
Actually since I write software for hardware designs where if I’m lucky all I get are obscure numbers and a long long trek through multiple systems to find out what they mean…
I really really mean it.
I looove this PCB!
Interesting. I’d like to note that one can hack around some of the Kobo devices pretty nicely, but of course real open hardware is much more cool. Too bad there isn’t any kind of blog one could subscribe to for this project.
I like the idea of this very much. But I wonder if the chosen hardware will have the oomph to open, paginate, and typeset a large epub. And I also wonder at the goal of implementing an epub reader application specifically for this device, rather than making a platform that it’s easy to port FBReader or KOReader to.
There’s a balance to be struck…I don’t want my ebook reader to be a full-featured tablet running Android or the like, but I do want it to not just be snappy about paging through big epubs and have some way of importing long reads from the web.
I had not heard about KOReader. It looks like it’s an open source reader that works on a lot of existing, closed hardware devices? Kinda like the RockBox of e-Ink readers?
Yes, that’s it exactly. I don’t love everything about it, but I can’t deny that it’s full featured and appears to be widely portable.
This project looks like fun, but the Arduino-based software has a long way to go still. Meanwhile, you could just run Debian on a cheap old Kindle.
A very welcome development. I’ve found that eink-based ereader devices are all proprietary, tied to proprietary software, tied or partially tied to a shop of DRM’d books. It’s disgusting.
This is a good start to what I hope is a fantastic project. It wasn’t all that long ago that e-ink displays for hackers (ones that didn’t come in a complete product like a kindle) couldn’t be had. Nowadays, they’re not even that expensive.
This would be an absolutely ideal use case for a raspberry pi zero, if only it had a sleep mode.