Yea, the screen makes it an instant turn off for me. Small and low res. Modern e-Readers like the kindle, kobo, etc. have screens basically as sharp as printed paper at a similar size as a book.
And with software like calibre, I don’t really see a reason to switch away from my kindle…

Thats the biggest issue for me.

I would carry around something with the thickness of a textbook and a 7+" screen, but under 6" is a nonstarter for me. I'd end up with text so large I'd be reading one sentence at a time.

This. I don't see why "no buttons" is supposed to be appealing? I'd much prefer only buttons, no touchscreen.

yes and no, I went from a Kindle which has no buttons and was pocketable, to a Kobo Libre Colour, buttons and not pocketable. The Libre screen is also not as crisp as the Libre, it does have e ink colour which is kind of nice but not as useful as a crisp screen.

To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.

I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣

This won't make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.

Yeah, definitely think there are use cases for this (look at how popular the xeink X4 has gotten), but a device smaller in most dimensions than modern smartphones isn't gonna make a good general purpose ereader for many people

Yeah, that killed the idea on the spot for me.

I only vaguely remember hearing nerds debating between the GPL licenses and MIT, way back when...What makes the MIT license libertarian?

At that price you're better off just buying a Kobo and installing KOReader. I like the idea of it being open source, but a 6" screen is pretty standard these days.

while it's nice, i'd argue e-readers use so little battery that even the default should last for at least a decade, but having it is awesome for sure.

Meh. I would say that if anything deserves an exception, it's ereaders.

Im my wife's kindle PW I can replace the battery, and have done that.

But there are simply no new batteries for that kind of device to be found. So then the new battery lasts 20% longer than the old one, and maybe added a year to the device's life.

Replaceable battery isn't worth much if you don't have a reason to believe you'll be able to source a good one a decade from now.

It sounds like most of the price is going towards the screen. Apparently sourcing e-ink screens isn't trivial.

ESP32-S3 seems rather properly sized computing power -wise for this kind of device. And it's quite low-power as well.

Granted there are some tasks where even this kind device could use some computing, like extracting, indexing and rendering pdfs.

I think they mean no buttons on the front. Something lime Kindle Paperwhite 10th gen I have used. You can see power button on the side when you look at the pictures in the article.

KOReader or something different?

i first read bottomless and was even more confused... anyway, i guess it's an esp community (iot) thing where you usually work with momentary switches;)

First steps are still steps. I am more excited about faster e-ink displays that are currently being developed.

This is an ebook reader. You don’t need high refresh rate to read books. It’s a waste of power and money.

holy shit, this is insane!

Yeah, that's $700.