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Comment by criddell

7 days ago

I use a Kindle Oasis and love it.

I’ve seen the Xteink devices mentioned here and am intrigued, but the screenshots turn me off instantly. The font rendering or hyphenation or kerning (not sure exactly what) looked terrible.

Fortunately, since these run open source software, this will likely eventually be fixed. The Kindles weren’t great at the start either, so I have a lot of hope for future versions of the Xteink devices.

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criddell

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OkCompute64  7 days ago

I got an X3 the other week when it was on sale for €50. Been enjoying it for "read anywhere" as I can always carry it on me unlike my Kobo Clara BW.

I sideloaded the Amazon Kindle fonts (Bookerly and Ember) and a few others using the builder at https://crosspointreader.com/fonts obviously you need to be running CrossPoint to load the fonts so have that flashed on first.

You can download the Kindle fonts from https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/branding/echo-guide... if you don't already have them.

That said the Clara BW is still my preferred e-reader as I find the larger screen better for longer reading sessions however you really can't beat having a tiny 3.7" e-reader with you everywhere. All those "micro waits" at places and I can read a few pages or even a chapter of a book rather than using my phone for nonsense stuff.

Another tweak I do is use the ePub optimiser at https://inky.crossink.dev to give me more "friendly" ePub files for the X3. I didn't have any issue with my regular ePubs but this optimised ones open faster and do look a bit nicer overall so it is worth the few minutes it takes to optimise all your books IMHO.

leecming  7 days ago

font styling is one thing but the xteink devices use very low resolution displays (220PPI for the X4) versus the 300PPI on any modern Kindle/Kobo ereader so you're not going to get around text looking worse on them