I have been hoping for an open e-reader to be built, and it appears someone is building one: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/14/open-book-touch-makes-crowd-... (Joey Castillo’s Open Book project, no affiliation, I just like open/sovereign tech stacks)

> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.

Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.

I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.