DIY E-Reader Folds Open Like A Book
hackaday.com
There are plenty of lovely e-readers out on the market that come with an nice big e-paper display. There aren’t nearly as many that come with two. [Martin den Hoed] developed the Diptyx e-rea…
    • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
      4 months

      There is a build page on the github for the device.

    • Fmstrat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 months

      I posted this as a comment on the creator’s post. Will have to see if they respond.

      I see “open” in the title, but no git or Bill of Materials (BOM) links. Is this actually open? Or based on other’s open efforts?

  • FreeBeard@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4 months

    Looks really nice. How much do you want for one? Surely not more than twice as much as the competition needs. /s

      • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 months

        And each screen has infinite battery life! Oh and each is as flexible and light as I dunno, a sheet of paper maybe!

      • TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 months

        I want VR recreations of famous libraries with full on books you can take off the shelves to read and homeless people washing their feet in the bathroom sinks

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4 months

    pair of 648×480 e-paper displays

    Um lol no. I could see using a pair of Inkplate 10’s connected by (at least metaphorical)) duct tape. Doesn’t seem worth mucking with special hardware.

    Every affordable e-reader I know of is simply too small though. I mostly want to read stuff like ArXiV preprints (A4 sized pdf’s) so would want at least a 13" screen. Someone a few days ago posted a link to a 14" Android tablet with a semi-reflective display at around $300. It seemed interesting but I’d rather degoogle.

    There are some hinged Waveshare displays that look nice but they are regular TFT displays so wouldn’t be great for a portable e-reader with long battery time:

    https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/15.6inch-dual-monitor.htm

    • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
      4 months

      I hope you get what you want. Me I want something I could put in my pocket.

      • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
        4 months

        The small kobo kinda fits in a jean pocket, easily in cargo shorts or inside jacket pocket. Only comfortable for reading novels though. I prefer a little bigger even if it isnt pocket size.

        • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
          4 months

          I do like the old kobos. Fully hackable.

          I like dedicated devices for things rather than all in ones. If you have the money of course.

      • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4 months

        Oh hmm, I just use my phone for that. It doesn’t seem worth having an additional, limited purpose device. I assume a 7" e-reader is too big for a pocket.

        The Inkplate 10 isn’t pocketable but it’s very light, easy to put in your backpack or whatever. I just wish they had a 13" version. The 13" Ipad Air is really very nice if you don’t mind Apple products.

        There are also some folding phones now with largish screens. A buddy of mine has one and it’s nice. Too expensive for me though, and it’s more Android.

        • FrederikNJS@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          4 months

          Yeah most 7" readers have the page turning buttons on the side which usually makes the device too wide for pockets.

          The 6" readers fit my pocket quite well… So a foldable dual screen 6" sound like a pretty nice upgrade.

          Most of what I use my readers for are reflowable text like epubs… But I guess if you could show a single page from a PDF across both screens then it might actually be big enough to be able to read while still being pocketable… You would probably want to go with the high resolution e-ink screens, like the one in the Kobo Clara HD (1072 x 1448). A combined resolution of two of those would be 2144 x 1448,

        • Wolf314159@startrek.websiteEnglish
          4 months

          Being able to fold down a larger “sheet” display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I’m kind of over all-in-one devices. They’ve turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.

          Obviously that’s not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I’d want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.

          • hovercat@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            4 months

            I just upgraded to a foldable phone and it’s a game changer to have an 8in screen in your pocket. Reading long form content is so much more enjoyable, and I’d love to have an E-ink reader that folds like my phone does.

          • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
            4 months

            My buddy’s folding Samsung phone is really cool and you might look into it. It unfolds to a single screen of maybe 10" diagonal and square perspective. I think for full page PDFs though, I need something bigger so I’ve given up on pocketability.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyzEnglish
      4 months

      Hello there, just scrolling through and I saw your comment. You seem to know a bit about this topic. I’m currently thinking of buying a reader as I lost mine some time ago. I used a kobo and a kindle in the past and didn’t see much difference. However, this thing about reading papers seems really cool. I have tried in the past reading PDFs on those readers without much success.

      Do you think you have good options for reading articles/manuals? Consider I end up printing about 50 pages a day in articles I read. If I can turn that into something digital that’d be cool.

      • Anivia@feddit.orgEnglish
        4 months

        If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)

        If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device

        • ranzispa@mander.xyzEnglish
          4 months

          I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that’s quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.

          However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan. I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.

          Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that’s quite rare. The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don’t want to be panning up and down a page all the time. I don’t know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.

          • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
            4 months

            I’ve had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn’t perfect.

      • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4 months

        I’m still looking for a good answer myself! There are lots of possibilities but all have drawbacks from my perspective. I guess the 13" Onyx Boox sounds nice if you don’t mind the cost. I haven’t tried it though. Same with the 14" TCL Android tablet if you don’t mind Android.

      • Hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4 months

        You probably mean the PineNote, the 10 inch eink tablet. Pinetab is a normal tablet with a lcd screen.

      • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4 months

        This? https://pine64.org/devices/pinetab/

        It’s just 10" and looks like an old design. Micro USB, oops. The Inkplate is 10" ESP32 epaper so it uses very little power. Alternatively there are tablet-style x86 laptops and I almost bought one last year. Now the price is way up due to DRAM shortages and so on, oops. I have some scrounged HDMI monitors so I want to try using one in portrait mode with my raspberry pi 400. If that works I could see getting one of the Waveshare dual screen monitors and maybe a Pi 500+.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
      4 months

      EInk gets expensive fast as the size gets bigger. At 10” its hard not to just use an lcd and bigger battery.

  • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    I don’t like the fact that it has two displays. It’s unnecessary and makes it thicker and heavier.

    • SkavarSharraddas@gehirneimer.de
      4 months

      I like the concept. I have a e-ink reader where I removed the hull because it’s annoying, but at some point I must have damaged the display a bit and now it has a little black spot. With this the added bulk also doubles the area available for text. Maybe not that useful for novels that you read through linearly, but for non-fiction it would be nice to see other chapters, glossaries, etc. on one display while keeping the other at the page you were reading. Mainly a problem of software and enough buttons to be able to comfortably use that.

      Though the low-res displays of this prototype look atrocious to me (pixelation and uneven blackness), maybe a later version will improve on that.

      • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 months

        Books are made like this because it’s impossible to make them any other way, but a digital device can have just one “page” since you read one page at time like Kindles and Kobos

        • bluGill@fedia.io
          4 months

          The other option is a scroll. historicaly I’m told a book was always a scroll and the factor we now call a book was a codex. (I don’t know how to verify this)

        • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
          4 months

          For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I’m sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn’t want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.

          • Zink@programming.devEnglish
            4 months

            I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that’s so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don’t know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.

      • Simulation6@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4 months

        Go old school and have it recreate a scroll. Really, not having to shift your head/eyes when reading is a plus with r-readers.

      • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 months

        Nevermind the fact most readers and tablets come -with- a cover … So its almost like a book anyway. Which people fold behind the page. Like a book. What was that extra screen doing again?

  • PumpkinSkink@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    Great. Now i can get that “real book feeling” of wrestling the books pages to lie flat enough for me to read them as I lay down.

  • markko@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    The only reason I’d want 2 “pages” is so I could close it to protect the screen(s)… but that’s exactly what covers are for.

    Apart from the tiny minority of people who might prefer the form factor/“book feel”, are there any actual advantages to having 2 screens for general reading?

    • Jtotheb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 months

      It’s probably just for the people who want it. I have thought about how much nicer two pages would be in the past for this reason and for displaying sheet music.

      • markko@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 months

        I did consider less common uses like that, which is why I specified “general reading”. I prefer paper for my sheet music, but I’d choose something with a faster refresh rate than e-ink if I had to use something with a screen anyway.

    • yobasari@feddit.orgEnglish
      4 months

      Could also be useful for doing research with ebooks. Maybe show a list of bookmarks or the table of contents on one screen and the text on the other screen. Or you could compare different texts easier, showing one on one screen and one on the other. Or use one screen for notes. But I guess people that need to actually do productive research will use a desktop anyways.

    • pleaseletmein@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4 months

      I would like to be able to get comics and manga in ebook form. I’ve always had to go with the print versions because two-page spreads end up looking bad/being more confusing to read on my ereader thanks to the single page display.

    • mister_flibble@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4 months

      It would probably work really well for graphic novels, since they do occasionally have panels or illustrations that span both pages.

  • Foofighter@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4 months

    Why not hundreds of screens so you can present all pages of a book at the same time and you just skip through the screen? Would be so much more convenient and innovative!

    • bampop@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 months

      I’d get a whole bunch of these and keep a different book on each one, so you could just pick it up and read it. But it’ll never work, it’s too much trouble to keep them all charged.

      • Foofighter@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        4 months

        That’s very smart!

        I think I see a business opportunity here. One could Design covers for each device so that you can identify them easily when they are standing next to each other. I bet these can be placed a lot a similar price as phone shells. If only we could find a solution to the charging problem.

  • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    Look. Hackaday… If it’s a slow week… We get it. Take a day off. We still like you. Just… Less of this please.

  • rossman@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4 months

    oo we can bring back 2 page spreads, probably 2x price though.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    I read for hours on my tablet just fine. I don’t even see the need for e-ink displays, let alone this form factor. Also, I find the tablet easier to hold for hours, compared to a book.

    In spite of all that, I kind of want one, I’ll admit. I have a 3D printer, maybe I’ll make one.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 months

      E-paper is easier to use outside or in bright light, and the battery tends to last longer. Anecdotally, it also doesn’t hurt my eyes as much.

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nlEnglish
        4 months

        And by “tending to last longer” it is good to note that it almost always lasts 5x-10x longer, as in you only need to charge it once a month instead of every few days with medium reading, depending on backlight usage.

        When I only read a few pages a day because of my schedule, my battery lasts over 6 months easily. Meanwhile my unused iPad has to be charged every week or so even if it is used 0 minutes.

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4 months

          Yeah, for sure. I mean, it depends a little bit on the model of the e-reader (color takes more out of it, etc), but I only charge my Boox every other week, and I take notes on it, read on it, the works.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4 months

      I’ve tried. I really don’t want to have another “gadget” in my carbon footprint, but can’t avoid it. I’ve read in my tablet, it’s just too heavy. So, it’s gonna be a PC, a laptop, a tablet, a cellphone, and an eBook reader -_-

      The only good side is I use them way more, I think, than your average person. The PC is almost ten years old, the laptop is like six yo, my cellphone is getting to 4 years of use, but the tablet is only a couple of years old and it was supposed to serve as a reader. Also, if I use my tablet just to read, it’s a waste of energy; eink devices are typically very efficient.

      • Zink@programming.devEnglish
        4 months

        I’m just here to point out that the fact you genuinely care about your carbon footprint probably puts you ahead of 80% of the population, and the fact that it has materially affected your device choices probably puts you ahead of 80% of the remainder.

        There’s definitely a unique satisfaction that comes from filling tech needs with hardware that already exists, and which does a great job at it too.

        That goes across hobbies and mediums too. I just finished a big outdoor carpentry project where I was able to find perfect long-term uses for pieces of wood from The Initial Build in the construction of The New Hotness.

        • selokichtli@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4 months

          You got me curious about that New Hotness, NGL. Thank you for your kind comment.