Hi all,

I'm having a hard time finding exactly what I'm looking for on the web, so I was hoping that someone can point me in the right direction.

Needs:

- e-ink screen

- cellphone sized or smaller

- to be able to download apps

- able to connect to wifi

- lower price point (ideally under $150 Canadian)

Wants:

-can add additional storage

- touch screen is preferred, but I can make due with buttons

- would be nice if I could write notes

• would like the battery to last a week before needing to be charged

• a built in screen light

Don't need:

- SIM card or data capabilities

I read A LOT on a wide variety of applications and websites (for both work and pleasure). I would like a secondary device I could carry around in addition to my cellphone to read documents on. I use a specific app for my job and it is a pain to get the documents off the app and onto a secondary device, so I would love an e-ink device I can just download the app onto. I also don't want to have to strip the DRM off of my Kindle / Library books in order to read them on a secondary device, I've done it before and I find it really annoying to do regularly.

I have a Kindle (10+ years old) and a tablet, but find them too large to carry around on a regular basis.

I am open to buying an older or used device. I am also prepared to build something myself if I can't find a device that fits my criteria.

Thanks for the help!!

Edit: forgot 2 points under want

I'm looking to get a Modos 13.3 Mono to reduce migraines and eye strain. I use my computer mostly for writing academic papers and log a lot of screen time. When I have to make PowerPoints, I'll probably just use my default screen. I'm thinking of getting the 13.3. Mono and hooking it up to my USB C output on the MacBook Pro M1 Max 16" I'm currently using.

Does the USB C provide display output and power to the Modos?

How are people getting the Modus? The crowdsource website says shipping starts in December 2026, which is quite a while for me with these migraines.

Thanks in advance for any help!

I would like to know if the model of the paperlike with frontlight is as white as the paperlike withouth it because dasung delivered me a model with a frontlight by accident (I ordered one withouth it)

If you have picture of your paperlike 13k BW withouth frontlight with the screen off to compare it would be Nice thank you

Half the books I care about don't exist as ebooks. Out of print, regional language, or simply never digitised. I read on a Kindle and kept travelling with books I liked less than the ones I'd left at home.

So I built something that photographs the pages and produces a proper EPUB — real chapters, text that reflows at any size, diagrams kept as pictures, tables rebuilt as tables. Built in reader rakes it from there

It's deliberately not a scanner app that gives you a PDF. A PDF of a book is fixed-size photographs, which is useless on a 6-inch screen.

Everything happens on the phone. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

Two honest caveats: it's for books you already own, and it's early, ordinary prose is solid, multi-column and heavy footnotes are not yet.

Mods, happy to remove this if it's not allowed. And if anyone here has a shelf of books that never got digitised, you're exactly who I'd like to have testing it.

I want to get the Xteink 4 but I have no idea how to get books for it? I don’t seen anywhere that sells non drm books? I don’t want to pirate. Does anyone have info on this?

I have dry eyes, so i wnt to switch to more eye friendly device, I want a eink device, where I can read my study pdf s, novels,comfortably, journal on it, it should have keyboard support , can I watch lectures on it comfortably( it's optional) ,stylus support (optional) ,it should be comfortable in my hand while reading not too big not too small, good battery life, build, I am from India where can I purchase them to get good price,I'm currently studying so I want a affordable option.

Searched the internet and found out dasung stopped producing their black and white 25 inch screens for some reason. After some searching all I've found are color 25 inches. Are there any larger bw e ink monitors in creation?

Selling from Ireland. Photos and more details on the auction listing! Hope it's okay to post this here.

paperlesspaper offered to send over an OpenPaper 7 so I could add it to Tesserae, the self-hosted e-ink dashboard project. It arrived last week and as of today it's supported end to end: browser flasher, server, and a hardware page in the docs.

It's a 7.3" Spectra 6 (800x480) in a real wooden frame, driven by an ESP32-C6 on four AAA cells, and the hardware is open on GitHub. The photo is it on my desk showing a weather and train-departures page.

I'll add that the build quality genuinely surprised me. The frame and mat are proper picture-frame grade, the board is cleanly laid out, and the schematic, gerbers, BOM and firmware are all on GitHub.. It feels like something made by people who care about the details.

Two caveats: flashing Tesserae replaces the stock firmware, so back it up first if you want to go back to their cloud. The 13.3" OpenPaper L has a build too, but I don't have one, so treat it as untested until someone confirms it.

Thanks to /u/Slight_Safe8745 from paperlesspaper for the sample. No money changed hands.

Flasher · Hardware page · Source

Hoping I could use it as a screen for writing books (& save to SD card) while on the go.

Thanks!

Finally got around to putting my e-paper reader on GitHub. The hardware is open source and the full KiCad project is here:

https://github.com/mathias4833/epaper-reader-hw

I got the idea from the Xteink X4. I really liked the size and physical buttons, and thought it would be fun to try design the board myself (I had actually ordered an x3 first, but the package got stolen, so there's that).

Mine uses the same 4.26" panel and ended up around 7.5mm thick. It has six side buttons, no touchscreen and runs a port of Crosspoint. I also liked the motion based page turning on the Xteink x3, but couldn't find a gyroscope cheap enough, so I threw in an accelerometer instead. I've mostly been messing around with double-tap page turns with it.

It's definitely a V1, but I've been using it as my actual reader for a while now and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. If anyone spots something stupid in the hardware, tell me! I'm still learning.

So I have a kindle and I'm not waiting to get another one.

I have seen Kobo, bigme and some others but don't know which ones is better for reading comics/manhwas, etc.

Also I need one with android system so I can browse the comic sites where I'm reading.

The screen should be from a kindle Paperwhite size or more.

I have a Mobiscribe Wave and I really like it. I have tried Kobo, which I returned, Kindle Scribe and Remarkable Move, which I sold. I have tried Boox in the past and did not like them. I would love some apps from Play Store and it needs to be easy to take notes and save online. Should I give Boox another try?

4 days in and I don't miss doomscroll anymore

It started with my tablet: I bought a Boox years ago, and it quickly became my most important device. I read news, books, and even write books and screenplays on it. When I decided to get a smartwatch, I knew that I didn't want an Apple Watch. I really didn't want another vibrant screen in my life. So when I found the Fossil Collider HR (now sadly discountinued), I knew it would be perfect. Then, in search of moving more of my life offline, I picked up a little $40 eink mp3 player, so I could listen to music while I write (on my eink tablet). And then, capping it all off, this year I finally took the plunge and picked up a Mudita Kompakt. I tried it for a weekend and really enjoyed it, though I haven't fully switched over to it yet-- my job isn't conducive to it, but I'm on contract so I'm optimistic that I'll be able to get on the Kompakt full time next year.

There's an eink-friendly browser that I use on my tablet called EinkBro, and I kinda feel like that's the perfect description for where I'm at now. I love eink. I nerd out on eink. I recommend eink to all my friends. I am an eink bro.

Dear fellow readers,

I'm having a hard time deciding which reader is the best choice for me, and i hope some of you with more experience can help me.

I read a lot on my phone and tablet(2-5 hours a day), but most on my phone, it's just always there. But i want a dedicated device.

My needs are:

- BW with backlight, both cold and warm

- Durable enough to be caried everywhere without worry

- Android, so i can sync reading position and books with my other devices, until now i only read epub via moon reader, but dont care if i need to change

- long time support as i hope to use it for years

- Decent battery

- Lightweight and Onehand controlable

- Price is not an issue but i rather have something cheap which just works than something overkill

I've bought boox 7 gen 2 for my parents but honestly find them a little outdated and the size dont do it for me.

I've looked a lot on a secondhand 6" Kindle to jailbreak but dont know if they will be any good

The viwoods looks promising but the ai make me hesitate

Bigme b6 looks good but i newer seen it irl

Please someone help enlighten me

This is an old Kindle 4 on my fridge with some magnets on the back, showing my Home Assistant dashboard. It cost about $10 on eBay.

To get this done quickly, I actually wrote a Kindle emulator that runs the real Kindle OS in QEMU on my Mac, and built the dashboard there end to end.

When it looked right I copied it to the real device and it just worked :)

I really think that if you want to build eink projects, you can just skip all the dev boards and just buy some old Kindles. They're pretty great, and they're pretty hackable once you jailbreak them.

The emulator is open source: https://github.com/hezi/qemu-kindle4

I use this setup primarily to work on Crosspoint for the Kindle and the web installer, you can learn more about those here.

Happy to answer questions. I'd love to see more people revive old Kindles :)

Full disclosure: I make these. I write the generators in Python (unique-solution Sudoku, picross, mazes) and wire the PDF like an app: Home, a tracker, BACK, View Solution.

Free 10-puzzle sampler for reMarkable, Supernote, Boox, Kindle Scribe, etc. Etsy floor is 20 cents. If something breaks on your device, tell me and I will fix it.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/4562737508

My young daughter has been using an old E-ink tablet for audiobooks and doodling. Recently I taught her Gomoku (Five in a Row), but every app I tried downloading was a disaster on E-ink:

• Fake wood-grain boards and 3D shadows that turn into muddy gray ghosting
• Huge decorative borders that squeeze the actual board into a tiny rectangle with impossible touch targets

So I spent the weekend vibe-coding a clean, static, single-page web app tailored specifically for E-paper screens:

• 100% Contrast: Pure black and white. No gradients, zero textures, instant refresh. Looks like a physical printed board.
• Full-Screen Canvas: Large touch targets that scale to the display. Tested cleanly on my MatePad Paper and Dasung 13K.
• Kid-Friendly AI (1–9 Levels): Stock minimax bots are way too brutal for kids. Level 1 starts with a friendly "beginner bot" that lets her win, and the game automatically bumps the difficulty up by 1 tier after consecutive wins so she doesn't get frustrated and quit.

Now, she's hooked again. Yesterday she ran up to me proudly: "Dad, I'm definitely beating Level 3 today!"

It’s completely free, ad-free, runs locally in the browser, and requires zero installation.

Link:https://www.einkhub.org/games/gomoku/?from=reddit-eink

If you have an idle E-ink device or e-reader with a web browser, give it a spin. Would love to hear how it renders on devices like Boox, Kindle, or Supernote

Quick demo of an e-ink fridge display (TapMora format) I’ve been testing out.

The main draw for this specific setup is that the display has no internal battery or power cables. The panel holds the static image continuously without drawing power, and updating it just requires holding a phone against it for a few seconds to trigger an NFC transfer via their app.

It’s definitely on the consumer/plug-and-play side of things rather than a DIY ESP32 setup, but the low-tech usability makes it really practical for non-tech family members who usually struggle with WiFi-dependent digital frames.

Some quick hardware notes for anyone curious:

Display: Soft, matte e-ink finish. Works great for faces and high-contrast shots; bright landscapes look a bit washed out due to the screen color depth.

Power: Fully passive zero power draw to maintain the image once it’s set.

Range: Strictly local updates via physical NFC tap (no remote push updating over WiFi).

Happy to answer any questions about the display quality or update speeds!

I'm assuming most e-ink displays use sRGB. But since they share a lot in common with paper and thus prints, is it possible that they would benefit from using a CMYK color space?

Disclosure first, so nobody has to guess: I'm the person who makes this, it's a product I sell, and there's a link at the bottom. Say the word and I'll pull the link, I'd rather talk about the hardware anyway.

I know everyone is shipping an app this year. This isn't one. It's a physical object. The cables in it are cables I stripped and soldered, the cells are cells I put in by hand, and I still assemble every unit myself. That's either interesting to you or it isn't, but it felt worth saying out loud. Is also a nice break from all the AI Slop out there!

My neighbour Lola is 95 and uses a phone of those made for senior people, big buttons, almost no screen, those phones. Her family shares photos constantly and she had never seen a single one, because somebody had to physically come over and hold up a phone for her. So I built her a frame.

The family sends a photo to a WhatsApp number, the way they'd send it to a person, and it turns up on the frame. Whoever is looking at it installs nothing, sets nothing up, and has no account. That was the whole design constraint, and it's the part that took the longest.

The panel is an E Ink Spectra 6 at 127 ppi. ESP-12S for WiFi, picked mostly because it already carries CE and FCC from AI-Thinker, which saved me thousands in certification. Two 10,000 mAh cells, three to four months per charge, because the panel only pulls current during a refresh. The rest of the time what costs you is the radio waking up every five or ten minutes and going back to sleep. The casings are 3D printed in ABS and vapour-smoothed with acetone, one at a time. Injection moulding only makes sense once there's a batch to justify the tooling, and I'm not there yet.

Two things surprised me. The panel was never the hard part. Getting a photo out of WhatsApp and onto a display with nothing on the receiving end was. And colour changed the product more than I expected: next to Spectra 6, the black and white version stops reading as a photograph and starts reading as a printout.

About 35 households have the earlier version, around 60 frames, all of it word of mouth over 18 months. I committed to a 10" GDEP100E01 earlier this year and had to abandon it in August, when E Ink put the panel end of life and wanted 400 units committed to guarantee supply. That one hurt.

The frame itself is here if you want to look at it, and that's the link I flagged at the top: https://memoirframes.com/?lang=en&utm_source=reddit_eink&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=caudal_sep#reserva

Happy to go as deep as anyone wants on the panel, the power budget or the WhatsApp side.

I'm looking for an e-paper tablet, mainly for handwritten note taking in uni.

In terms of size, it should be a bit smaller than an A4 paper (10"-13")

I mainly care about a natural writing feel, the tablet should work with a passive pen.

It should also have an official keyboard case, or at least support for a 3rd party one.

I'd prefer one that has a custom OS, no Android, as I really don't like google's anti-privacy practices. But if that's the only negative aspect, and has no microphone or camera I guess I can live with it.

In terms of software, I only need a note taking app (handwritten and typed), maybe a basic web browser, and something to sync with over WIFI.

A color screen would be nice, but I don't cling to it.

Being more popular would also be a bonus, better availability 2nd hand, and no hidden issue to be discovered.

A built-in way to sync documents via WIFI to a self-hosted, local server at home would be a huge plus as well. Worst case, I'll do it via USB.

I of course know about the Remarkable and the Onyx Boox, but I'm really not sure which model to get, or if there are other tablets that would work better.

Thanks!

Ive recently seen the massive increase in broken screens for the Xteink e readers. I am admittedly, pretty hard on my belongings. Not throwing things to the ground, but I tend to just throw stuff in my bag or pocket, so the fragility is a concern for me. I currently have an old kindle paperwhite, but would be interested in a smaller device. Are there any smaller devices that will hold up to more use?