Completely Impractical but Delightful: An E-Reader Attached to My Phone

Apparently 3.7-inch e-readers that magnetically attach to the back of your phone exist.

Why yes, these custom rotating screensaver e-readers are perfectly in sync across devices.

I’m a huge fan of e-readers and reading in general, so I got nerd sniped by this pretty hard. It was only $70, so I figured it was worth the investment. Especially now that it’s easier than ever to turn a terrible side-project idea into something actually functional.

After some fiddling and letting AI run wild on making it functional, I ended up with an e-reader acting as a literal attention shield on my phone.

Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship (mostly hate) with my phone. I get that itch at the back of my mind whenever there’s a moment between moments: hey, I should check my phone, or I wonder what’s happening on the internet right now.

The obvious question is why not just use the Kindle app or a read-it-later app on my phone? I can, but it’s always one tap away from another app. Check an email. Respond on Discord. Look for the next random hit of dopamine.

Instead, now when I reach for my phone, I see a mini e-reader with beautiful rotating E Ink screensavers. It forces me to sit still and do one thing: read.

One of the first articles I read was “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, a huge long-form profile of Frank Sinatra from the ’60s. Sinatra refused to be interviewed, so the author spent a lot of time observing him and interviewing people in his orbit instead.

What made it feel like a time capsule was that I think of Sinatra as old-school, while the profile catches him when he was “The Man,” at the height of his power and basically the epitome of cool. This is something I never would have read without this setup.

It felt nice to just read the whole thing, especially now that AI can summarize the ten greatest long-form articles of all time in one paragraph.

In the before-AI times, that’s where this project would have stopped. But now I’ve built an unreasonably useful system around it.

A completely reasonable system for reading an article on the back of my phone.

From my phone, I can request a book or save an article with Wallabag to read later, and it will be available on the Xteink or my Kindle within minutes. I can get any book I want, read it, and have my progress sync between my Kindle and mini e-reader. It also logs my reading progress to Hardcover automatically.

There’s no way I would have done this without being able to casually have AI smash its head against the problem over and over again until it produced four PRs with roughly 5,500 additions.

I definitely would have stopped once the supposedly compatible sync plugins didn’t work. Instead, I kept going long enough to patch a KOReader plugin and accidentally boot-loop the Xteink with a malformed article.

Instead, this was something I coded from my phone using Codex Remote whenever I had free time. All I had to do was chat back and forth and occasionally push some buttons on the e-readers.

The purpose of the whole thing is to protect against my phone and the way it saps my attention. But I built it on that phone with technology that could work tirelessly on my behalf, which is, in a way, one of the ultimate ADHD temptations.

Now any random thought can turn into a full build. It turns out you can also use that to build somewhere to quarantine those thoughts.