The Open Book Project has been designed and engineered from the ground up to be everything devices like the Amazon Kindle or Rakuten Kobo are not. There are no secrets inside the Open Book, no hidden chips designed to track and share your reading habits and preferences with a faceless corporation. With enough know-how, you could theoretically build and program your own Open Book from scratch, but as a result of winning the Take Flight With Feather contest, Digi-Key will be producing a small manufacturing run of the ereader, with pricing and availability still to be revealed.
It’s not going to have the resolution that current Kindles have, nor the quick and easy selection of books, but freedom does bring other advantages like being able to program it to turn pages when you say "next". But price (and weight) may be its deciding factor as the Kobo reader does indeed read open ePub, Mobi, and Txt formats. But always wise to consider where you source your books as it can determine what you’ll use to read them.
#opensource #hardware
#^An Open Source E-Reader That’s Free Of Corporate Restrictions Is Exactly What I Want Right Now
I get it. The Kindle and its ability to shop for and instantly buy books anywhere using wifi or Whispernet are incredibly convenient, and it’s what’s made Amazon’s hardware the obvious choice for consuming ebooks. But supporting awful companies like Amazon is getting harder and harder if you were born with a…