27 Feb 2026

In the search for an e-paper tablet in 2026

1765 words

Backlog

I think it was like 2020 or 2019 when I learned about E-book readers. I’ve grown up with books. And I wanted to become a Computer Scientist. Back then, I bought a BOOX Poke Pro, a 6" Android e-book reader from BOOX. Afterwards, for the next one, I bought a BOOX Leaf which is bigger and 7". And I still have this device at the time of writing this post. I wrote the experience I had with both Poke Pro and Leaf in pcworms, a Persian blog about computers and tech. You can find the post about Poke Pro here and the one about Leaf here.

Like any other geek, I always wanted to tinker with what I had. For the first one, Poke Pro, I didn’t make any modification to the device. I used the stock OS and just installed few apps. I even didn’t try a custom launcher. One reason was the price. If I had brick it, I could not buy another one to replace it. The other reason was KaiOS.

The need for e-paper tablet

From the start, I wan’t aiming for an “e-book reader” device. But rather for an “e-paper tablet”. That is, it’s just a tablet but with e-paper display rather than regular ones. That’s why I wanted an Android e-reader. Because I could install apps of me choice, and also browse the web.

But I have to admit, it didn’t go well the way I wanted it to be. What I had in mind is that an e-paper tablet can do whatever a normal tablet can, excluding games and videos.

That’s very much true in theory. But in practice, it’s much different:

BOOX devices offer Android as the OS. Then you can install any app you want. But the fact is that with most apps, you won’t have the good experience like in normal tablets. Most Android apps aren’t meant to work on a display with a refresh rate of like 5Hz. Here FOSS really comes to the rescue.
For a long time, BOOX devices had very limited RAM and also a low-end or mid-range processor. This has quite changed in the recent devices. But on Leaf from 2021 with only 2GB of RAM, I constantly had the problem where OOM kills one of the apps.
BOOX devices are quire meant to be used for reading. And people don’t spend time reading 8 hours a day. If you use your device like a normal tablet, the small battery will drain quickly. So don’t get fooled by the marketing of “multi week battery life”. Leaf has got a 2000mAh battery. Before the battery gets weared, it could last like 2-3 days which is roughly just half a week.
E-book reader devices usually come with monochrome e-paper display. Most of the time, they have black+white and 16 shades of gray. This, however, has changed recently. We have colour e-book readers with a very small price difference from their monochrome counterpart. For instance see Boox Go 7, Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour.

With all these, still me e-paper tablet has been very useful to browse the web, read Wikipedia, check Emails, ssh to somewhere in Termux, read blogs with RSS and sometimes write posts in this blog and more!

BOOX, the only “real” player

The most important thing about BOOX e-book readers is the fact that they are not e-book readers. They are tablets with e-paper display. And therefore, you can do many stuff with them as you do with your tablet. Of course, you might not have the best experience with them as I have written above.

Back then, the only “real” players in the market of Android e-paper tablets were Onyx BOOX and Likebook. Both terrible choices. And BOOX was the less terrible choice. Like many other corporations out there, BOOX also utilizes free and open source software in their devices without paying back. Labor, free of charge! However, from legal point of view, they are not required to “pay back” for permissively licenced software. But they do need to release the copyleft code, and despite several requests, they haven’t done so till now after so many years.

This has put BOOX, like many other manufacturers, in a good position to exploit the market and customers to sell more and more devices. They stop providing software support for their devices after like 2 or 3 years. And they also don’t let the community provide software support. Not only they don’t release the Linux code used in their devices, but they also don’t officially allow custom ROM or OS on their devices.

For instance, this BOOX Leaf I’ve got now has lost software support for so long. It’s a long time BOOX makes empty promises about releasing new firmware and OS version. But the fact is that they stop releasing anything after ~3 years.

With all these, BOOX has been better than Likebook. The only manufacturers who produce e-paper tablets.

Exploring for alternatives

From late 2025 onwards, I’ve been researching about alternative options to have an e-paper tablet, and not just an e-book reader. And something which either can have proper long term software support, and also a decent hardware like used in BOOX devices.

As I did the exploring, I also contributed various stuff to postmarketOS wiki. First, I wanted to go to mainline BOOX Leaf which I currently have. But then realized, it’s best I stay in me own field, and just gather information and contribute to the documentations in the case someone else wanted to do it.

Contacting Kobo and PocketBook, they allow custom OS on their devices as long as the user takes full responsibility. They both release the kernel code as public. And some Kobo devices are already well supported in mainline. On the other hand, a big problem is their hardware. Unfortunately, the SoCs used in Kobo and PocketBook devices are too weak to like browse the Web. But at least because we have kernel source code, there is a good chance we could use it to add mainline support to other e-paper devices such as BOOX.

PineNote?

Some might ask why not PineNote? If you have already purchased hardware from Pine64, you might not be asking this question. There are various disadvantages about PineNote, or in general, Pine64 devices, which makes reasonable to think they are not in the market at all, not even the niche markets.

The SoC used in PineNote is too old and as a result, it’ll be too slow. It’s 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.8Ghz. Leaf which I own is octa core, and 4 of them are high performance Cortex-A7x cores.
The e-paper display used in PineNote is also too old. It’s Carta 1000. Currently the last generation is Carta 1300. Carta 1300 offers better refresh rate, image quality and contrast.
There is only a single version of PineNote, which is 10.3". I personally look for 7" options. Some users also want 6" or even smaller devices. So there isn’t much of a choice in this regard.
I’ve heard from some people, that Pine64 sometimes ships defected hardware. I don’t know if this is true or not. But indeed, this scares me. Especially given that I’m based in Iran and it’ll be nearly impossible to return the product and request a refund.

However, don’t get me wrong. They are doing a good service for the community so they can develop and build. You can find datasheet of almost all parts used in PineNote, and they also sell spare parts. So their devices make a very good development platform.

New choices as of 2026

Now in early 2026 while I write this post, there are so many new players producing e-book readers or e-paper tablets. Some of them run Android. For instance, Xiaomi has entered the market like few years ago. Of course, many of these are chinese manufacturers who have got a terrible history of not releasing the kernel source code.

On the contrary, as the competetion in the market becomes harder, we could hope more attention will be paid to the open source community. And then perhaps we could see better situation for the users.

What can we do?

An e-paper tablet is no use without a good software ecosystem. This means everything, from the kernel to the shell to apps. A Linux distribution with mainline is a better choice for e-paper tablets comparing to Android as we could utilize the hardware more efficiently, and also extend battery life. A well-known fact about e-paper devices running Android is a shorter battery life.

Also, Linux has a better chance of success on e-paper tablets than on mobile phones. You probably already know Linux Mobile is far from everyday driver for a vast majority of users, even if they are technical or power users. The two biggest challenges when mainlining a device are GPU and modem. Both of which are not really a thing in e-paper tablets. 2D acceleration can be for sure very useful. But 3D acceleration as well as video codecs have got no benefit as far as I know. And even without 2D GPU accelerated rendering, I think we could go very far with CPU rendering.

Here are some ideas to improve the situation:

Request kernel source code from manufacturers and possibly publish them. Some manufacturers release the kernel source code only based on individual users request. If you’ve got a device, give it a shot and then upload the kernel source code to some online code hosting like Codeberg.
Write apps which are optimized for e-paper. I’m planning to do so with Qt and Rust, so me app can be useful on both Android e-paper tablets and Linux ones in future.
Write graphical shell optimized for e-paper
Extract data such as firmwares and waveforms from your device and publish them online. For instance, I have extracted so many things from BOOX Leaf I’ve got.
Contribute to the documentations about your device(s). Contribute to postmarketOS wiki(see below). So developers could use their valueable time only for developing, what most people, including me, cannot do.
Donate e-book readers or e-paper tablets to mainline Linux developers. Or to postmarketOS.
Financially support mainline Linux developers or communities. Even small amounts of donations are better than nothing.
Spread the word!

Farooq's