The Open Book Touch is a new, pocketable, front-lit e-reader designed with an open-source philosophy. After six years of development, this device offers a distraction-free reading experience, focusing solely on books.

It features a symmetrical 4.26-inch front-lit e-paper touchscreen, measuring just one centimeter thin. Unlike tablets, it boasts no physical buttons on the front and is designed for portability, easily slipping into a pocket. The device supports EPUB files and renders multiple writing systems, with Wi-Fi primarily for book downloads. Both the hardware and software are open source, encouraging user modification and customization.

The Open Book Touch emphasizes typography, with a typesetting engine, various fonts, and proper hyphenation and justification. It includes features like highlighting, dictionary lookups, and bookmarking. The frontlight offers adjustable warm and cool LEDs for comfortable reading in any lighting condition. The device utilizes an ESP32-S3 microcontroller and includes 16 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM.

Key to its multilingual support is the inclusion of GNU Unifont, enabling legibility across numerous writing systems. The interface is localized in several languages, with support for right-to-left scripts. The project also releases its bespoke C++ application framework, Focus, under an open-source license, aiming to foster further development in portable electronic devices.