> Cyrillic scripts like Russian and Ukrainian are supported via GNU Unifont, along with Arabic and Hebrew.

So much for proper typography...

I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.

> There are no physical buttons on the front

That's too bad. For whatever reason I find swipe gestures on e-ink annoying. I currently use a Kobo Clara BW and miss dedicated page-turning buttons.

I see they're offering the print files for the case, maybe there will be some pins on the ESP32 exposed somewhere for adding buttons

I almost bought an xteink the other week but held off due to lack of a frontlight option.

I instead resurrected my nook simple touch (2011) with this project [1] from XDA forums, its made it infinitely more usable and still has good battery life.

[1] https://xdaforums.com/t/nst-g-the-phoenix-project.4673934/

4.3” screen, that’s a dealbreaker. That is a real shame.

Looks nice. Personally I don't know I can go back to 220ppi, but if I did I would definitely pay for the touchscreen and light over the X4!

Maybe you already have this, but I'd encourage you to put a "pure" reading mode in there, with no status bars top or bottom. That would probably allow for an extra line.

I wonder if there's also room in the case spec to slot in a magnet here or there. Could make for some creative solutions for covers or stands. Personally I use a Clara BW with a folding cover-stand and it's incredibly convenient.

I really like the thinking of openness behind this device. Could be great as a pocketable "notice board" getting info on a schedule from mobile and "posting" to a pub on device for me to look at when I feel like it and react to messages on my schedule.

Looks like it's a well thought project. I might consider it to replace my old Kobo. There are only two things I don't see in the description:

1. A dictionary

2. A flash card creation functionality

I was thinking about getting a xteink x4 and run biscuit on it. Does anyone know how it compares to open Book touch?

I really liked their comparison matrix, it's honest about what it does and what it doesn't do. I'll probably go with Kobo + Koreader when my current ereader gives up the ghost, but given that 4" ereaders seem to be all the rage these days, I wish them success.

The screen seems a little small. And buttons would be good too.

6 inches is the bare minimum for an e-reader lol

Some LLM-assisted guesstimating tells me that in terms of raw cost of manufacturing and delivery, given an average (non-voracious) rate of consumption, supplying paper books is still several times cheaper than supplying usable E-Ink devices in non-price-rigged markets.

Supplying kids textbooks in India in paperback, for instance, is at least 5-6x cheaper than supplying them the same in an E-Ink reader despite the ginormous (10-12x assuming 6-7 books each year) difference in freight volume.

Nice. I wish it had a bigger screen and buttons, though. Kindle Oasis was the sweet spot for me.

This is 10 year old ebook technology for the sake of being "open", when one can just install KOreader on a Kobo.

KOreader fixes nearly all of the annoying bullshit in Kobo's firmware, which frankly, is terrible. The UI is poorly organized (why the hell is night mode so hard to get to!?), crashed routinely (just like it did ~10+ years ago...), and page changes are painfully slow, barely any improvement from the much older Kobos. It also provides support for remote libraries and a slew of other features. The UI isn't very clean, but it has a ton more features.

I've never understood how my much newer Kobo is just as slow as my first Kobo reader which was 10+ years ago, or why both of them rather frequently hang and have to be power-cycled.

> Open Book Touch is the device I’ve been trying to build for six years: a small, beautiful, completely open source e-book reader that does one thing and does it well

What makes this beautiful?