This looks nice - I think ‘small enough to be pocketable’ is an important form factor. Reading preferences are a very personal thing, and for people like me - who feel they internalize more effectively when reading from a physical book better than when reading from a screen - this form factor makes owning one more worthwhile.

I have always wondered why the form factor that has been settled on for e-readers was ‘book-like’, other than the obvious screen-size advantages. I wonder if there is a better form-factor out there and if anyone has any ideas. Electronic devices don’t need to resemble the thing they are replacing, and it’s sometimes better that they don’t.

I know a lot of people lust after the clamshell e-reader imagined in the film It Follows. [1]

The haptics of a physical book are, I think, what helps me better remember them, because memory is intrinsically linked non-digital sensory information like touch, and smell.

I’ve personally tried a few prototypes to try to bring unique sensory inputs to individual books read digitally to help me remember each one better: converting an AliExpress Game Boy into one to enable more haptic and visual differentiation; generative ambient & binaural music that is automatically created based on the text shown.

Each did help, to an extent, in preventing the way everything I read on an e-reader slightly blurs into indistinct memories of ‘reading generally’, rather than ‘reading this specific book’.

Maybe the e-reader has to be as personally customizable as a cyberdeck for those of us who kind of need the other sensory inputs. So it’s good that the firmware on this one seems to be open-source, but I haven’t yet read through it to understand the extent of that.

[1] https://collider.com/it-follows-clam-phone/

Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader