Open Book is an e-book reader with Open Source software and hardware

Open Book is a project started by the developer Joey Castillo with which it is intended to create a fully open source e-book reader, covering both software and hardware.

Open Book has been in development for some time and aims to be quite advanced, as its hardware is almost finished, although the software still seems to need more work to be ready. Despite being an unfinished product, it has managed to stand as the winner of HackADay’s Take Flight with Feather contest, which means that at least 100 motherboards will be manufactured so that people can then buy e-book reader units.

Open Book will use boards built by Adafruit that will be sold through Digi-Key, although there are still issues such as price and when they will be available. However, Castillo has posted on Twitter a video in which you can see a fully assembled version of the e-book and a preliminary version of the software he will use, so at least it can be said that it is taking shape.

For now the Open Book includes a 4.2 inch screen with a native resolution of 400 × 300 pixels of electronic ink and a processor 32-bit SAMD51 ARM Cortex-M4. It also has a 7 navigation buttons, LED lights to provide information on the status of the device, a 3.5 mm headphone jack and a USB port.

Obviously, Open Book is not a mass-oriented product, but rather those lovers of Open Source, personalization and even hacking. However, it may represent a small step further in the possible massification of Open Source hardware in the future, more seeing that RISC-V has gained a lot of muscle in recent times to drive open technology processors compared to ARM and the well-known x86 manufactured by Intel and AMD.

Are you interested in knowing or even seeing if you can contribute to Open Book? You can consult the corresponding page on HackADay and its repository on GitHub.

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