I got an XTEink X4
The device I've been reading a lot of books on recently is not a full size e-reader. I got the "viral" miniature e-reader barely bigger than a credit card, the Xteink X4, and I've been really enjoying it. It's so limited and "dumb" that it does not even have a clock feature. I think that's why a lot of people like it.
in the two weeks I've had it, I've finished three books, which is a lot more long-form reading than I've done in a while. As I wrote a little while ago, reading novels hasn't been very high on my priority list for a while - I've been focusing my leisure reading on comic books and film scripts. My NAS has a crap ton of script PDFs, and I mostly read them on an ancient iPad, or while sitting at my computer. However, my natural resting position is completely sideways, and it's kind of hard to hold a full-size iPad above your face when you are prone.
My husband has an ancient Kindle. It is sixteen years old. He has been using it forever and will probably never stop. It occurred to me that I might read books faster if I were also using an e-reader - not because it's easier on the eyes, like a lot of people prefer, but because it doesn't have any extra features. The X4 has fewer features than I even dreamed. And it cost, like, seventy bucks, so I got it.
It's great! I hardly notice the small screen. I'm a very fast reader, so I'm hitting those page turn buttons pretty much continuously, but it hasn't bothered me yet. The quality of the epub rendering is not amazing - the screen is small and has a low resolution - but it's good enough to read, and I'm certainly reading much faster than I ever did when I used to read novels in the iPhone Books app.
I think the best part of the device is that it's so small and light, I can hold it in either hand and read in pretty much any position without my arms or hands getting tired. I'm able to hold it above my head without strain while lying down. It's itty-bitty. It's so small it basically doesn't exist. It can go in my pocket and I can pull it out whenever. It doesn't take up space or call attention to itself on the subway or the bus. It's so small that it can fit into interstitial time in my life in the exact same way a phone does.
Which is probably why people are using the magnet on the back to attach it to their phone. I am not!! I do not want my phone in my hand when I'm reading it. I just stick it in my pocket and pull it out instead of my phone. I am keeping it in a little plastic booklet cover that I bought from the XTEink site. It works very well. It doesn't need to do much to work well!
I'll say that this is filling a very specific role in my life right now. My life is currently full of travel and weird visits to strange places and a lot of time spent in the car. If I were someone who had a ritual of reading before bed, like my husband does, this would probably be a noticeably inferior way of reading e-books. If you want to leave notes in a book, this is a bad choice. If you want to search for text or interact with the text in any way besides "render it so I can read it," you're boned. If you want to read books with complex diagrams, or tables, or a lot of indented quotes, or whatever, this is just going to look worse than a "proper" e-reader. It's just a way of delivering words to your face without letting you do anything to distract yourself. And that's what I want right now.
I'm very glad I got it! Thank you to Tom, if you're seeing this, for telling me about the reader in the first place. My friend Tom keeps his on the back of his phone, so that's at least one person I know using it in "the intended way."
We are both using the Crosspoint firmware replacement instead of the firmware the device shipped with. It's pretty good and has a couple improved features over the original. I do not love that - if their Reddit posts are anything to go by - the Crosspoint development community seems to be full of vibe coders. At the very least, the UI is much better than the original.
Anyway: if you also want a tiny e-reader to keep in your pocket and deliver text to your face as brainlessly and featurelessly as possible, I do enjoy this one. The fact that it does almost nothing is the whole point. For some reason, Xteink's next product in this line is going to have many more features. I'm not sure who the audience for that really is, because it feels like if you want more features, you should probably get a proper full-size e-reader, or something the size of a Boox Palma, or something like that. But I'm no expert!! I've only had one of these for two weeks, and I don't know what the local Chinese audience for e-readers is like.