The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader

Got the X4. Put CrossPoint on it. Works like a charm. The http server accessible over wifi makes transferring books extremely simple. (Shame on the Kindle for locking everything down.) This is proof-of-concept that a microcontroller is more than enough for something like an e-reader.

I have a Kindle and a Kobo. They are sturdy devices. But the X4 is the one that is a genuine e-reader. Would not get it as my one and only e-reader though as you tend to miss the size and backlight of the larger ones.

What would I want from future iterations?

- backlight even if it compromises on battery a bit

- a bit more DPI

Everything else is good enough.

Oh it comes with custom firmware? This is very interesting. I would love to be able to modify some UX and I am sorry, but I need to get the following out of my head. All the e-readers I have had have made it impossible to turn off features like:

  1. Selection highlighting... I never use highlighting when reading fiction, but whenever I am not careful enough when turning a page, it'll go crazy with highlighting. Flashing screen, need to close the popup that has added the highlight, removing the highlight again etc.
  2. Most of the time I don't want to click on a word to find out its meaning. It's sometimes useful, but I'd rather have it under menu to temporarily enable it. Same reason as before. My e-readers tend to prefer this often enough rather than taking the "next page" action.
  3. Make "previous page" be small and not-under-my-finger. Ideally let me choose its position in a fairly precise way.
  4. Easy access to accidental "scroll to page 900". I generally don't want it to happen and to be honest, I struggle to think of anybody who does. It can live in a single tiny faraway menu that is impossible to accidentally tap.
  5. Swipe-left for previous page. It almost never happens when I want it to happen, so I'd rather turn it off.

In fact, I would love my e-book reader to have no gestures at all. Pretty please let me turn them off! All I want is a tiny button top-right or top-left corner for "open menu", a "previous page" in the other corner and otherwise "tap anywhere" is "next page".

Personal request to any e-book reader software engineers. Please save the position in the book to persistent storage on each page change or every few. At least if the e-reader has any chance of crashing at all, which has been the case with all the ones I have ever had. Yes, not all of them save it...

That's not to say that all the above things are universally bad UX. I think many of these are very useful, if reading non-fiction or having a different goal when reading such as learning a new language. It's just that they are less than brilliant if the goal is to read a book for entertainment in the most comfortable way possible with the fewest things going wrong by accidental taps.

I've been eyeing the Xteink devices for a while now. They fit all the boxes - small, cheap, physical buttons - a basic reading utility. However, since there's no support for DRM, I'm worried either I won't be able to find books I want to read (what if I want the latest from my favourite author?), or I'll eventually run out.

Might be a tiny tinsy bit of purchase-anxiety as well - it'll be my first e-ink device after all, but what do I know...

I've looked at this device and I wonder how good the layout engine is. Screenshots never show text with any hyphenation going on which makes me wonder if it even supports hyphenation.

One of the images on the Amazon page for the reader has somebody holding one beside their laptop and if you look at the screen, it looks terrible. There are even words jammed together ("would be most suitable forthe job").

I love that it has physical buttons though. My reader is the Kindle Oasis and the buttons are one of my favorite features of the device. The Oasis layout engine and typography are both pretty good and I wonder if the X4 would end up feeling like a big downgrade.

For those who can afford it, I can recommend the Boox Note for the ebook reader. It comes with full Android, so you are not limited to books but can read news, Hacker News, and other doomscrolling that fills the Internet.

In a pinch, you can also connect it to a Bluetooth keyboard and use it as a development terminal. SSH terminal looks gorgeous on e-ink.

I got one last April, and love it: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2026/04/04/1800

I also built two quick hacks for it that people might like:

- https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-readlater-epub

- https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-opds-server

I got one, it's pretty cool that it's small enough to just magnet to the back of your phone. If your someone who needs to use a large font on their ereader to read its certainly not for you, but the screen size is good enough for regular sized text.

It's also cool that it's chip is just an ESP32.

I love the X3, light enough I can carry it around without noticing it. Battery lasts forever. I don't feel the need for a backlight at all, I love how simple this is.

I know people favor the X4 for the usb-c, and I'm all for universal charging cables. But in my experience the usb port is often the first component to fail in something like this. And that seems super annoying to replace. The pogo pins on the other hand are unlikely to fail. And the cable is not proprietary, you can get compatible cables on Amazon/etc.

I got the X4 and liked it enough that I used it a ton even though it turned out to be too big to Magsafe onto my phone. In fact, I liked it enough that I also got the X3 on sale so I can use it the way I originally intended to use the X4.

I've been using it for about 6 months. Very, very good - especially paired with anna's archive.

IT IS VERY FRAGILE! The eink screen on my first broke while in my backpack. The company is generous, I bought a new one and they gave 35% off and included all accessories (reading light, case, extra protectors). Highly recommend.

I've been eyeing the Xteink Reader but cannot decide between the X4 (4.7" diag) and X3 (3.7" diag).

FWIW, the X3 requires a pogo pin cable, while the X4 requires a standard USB-C.

Anybody got any recommendations?

Thanks!

Love my X4. Shameless plug, I also built an iOS/Android app to manage books and also send web articles over to Crosspoint

https://crosspointsync.com/

i bought a pocketbook era lite recently, and it's a bit too locked down for my tastes - though usable. i kinda just want a dumb appliance. actually, i want a linux appliance. this probably sounds very "not productized" to a PM, but 99% of what's on there i don't want: a book store, games, etc.

i wish there was just an SDK for building apps (i'll vibe code towards a great epub experience, i'm fine with that). and, i'm fine plugging it in via USB or even SCPing files over wifi. but, it sends my reading progress to a server every time i use it which is highly annoying and concerning. however, the form factor is sufficient.

i guess i was hoping it'd be more aligned with steam's direction with their steam machine.

CrossPoint 1.4.0 came out 2 hours ago:

https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/relea...

I've had the X3 for a month and I love it. It's so small I forget it's in my pocket and have almost washed it a couple times. I'm working on custom firmware for it, so I ordered an X4 when they had the 20% off sale to test on there too.

I got the X4 a few weeks back and installed https://github.com/uxjulia/CrossInk and it has been a dream.

Hijacking … i have some random e-ink displays (from a bought product)… there seem to be 6 lines to the mcu (or 7, havent measured). Any 2026 tips on approaches to reverse engineer this to run on an arbitrary hobby mcu like esp32? Oh the mcu seems to be a WinnerMicro W100 Series MCU (arm m3)

I’ve been looking at these for a while, hoping the custom firmwares for it will become more popular, as I was considering getting this for my six-year-old.

The disabled usb is certainly a bummer. I wonder how they disabled it though – is there a hardware difference?

As someone who has resisted buying an e-reader for years because I "prefer physical books", I finally purchased a Kobo Clara BW and love it. Even though I usually only read one book at a time, having my whole library in a small form factor is really wonderful.

The no USB flashing doesn't appear to be the case if you get it straight from OEM. It is a bit pricier than amazon.

https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4

I love this thing and I use it a lot more than my kindle and my kobo (with koreader). I really like the form factor and the fact that goes out of sleep almost instantly and goes to sleep equally as fast. It seeps battery. It is perfect the way it is.

Have the X4, the size is perfect - I always have it in my pocket and can read a view pages whenever I am waiting for something. Reduced my phone usage / doom scrolling nonsense with it. Best 50€ spent in a long time.

been using on the back of my phone for a few months, my most satisfying hardware purchase in a long time

I love my X4. I throw it in my backpack or pocket when I take the dog to the park and read a few pages when we sit in the shade.