Xteink X4
When I was younger, I was a voracious reader. I always had a book. I had a job at UPS years ago and hitting my head while walking the package center with my face in a book a very real danger most days. Since then, though, reading as a thing I do for enjoyment became less common. I'm not sure when it changed. As with most things, it was very slow and then all at once.
Recently, though, I have been reading like that again. Partly this is a reaction to the misery of social media. When you don't doom-scroll Reddit and TikTok, you have a whole lot more time on your hands and you need something to fill bathroom and waiting in line times. I think I also have to thank an excellent e-reader I picked up called the Xteink X4.
The reader itself is great. It runs on an ESP32 microcontroller so the tiny 650 mAh battery lasts forever. The interface is simple and easy to use. The real joy of it, though, is the size. I have a long history of buying ever larger and more expensive e-readers trying to get myself reading more. It turns out I just needed something so tiny that I always have it with me.
The one downside is that the firmware is kind of awful out of the box. I was delighted, therefore, to find the Crosspoint firmware for it which makes everything very easy and configurable. You can flash it from your browser here. Development is wonderfully active.
Then I discovered the custom format for e-books that Xteink developed called XTC. It sounds like it would never be useful for books as it is just an image format for 1 or 2 bit bitmaps. The genius of it is clear when you find the converters that convert whole epubs to XTC with custom fonts and niceties like progress bars, it raises the whole thing to a new level.