[aluxeterna]

Howdy, this is my first post but I am grateful for the insights on this thread and this forum, and wanted to share back some things I've picked up from my InkBook prime--something things that worked, some that did not. I tried a lot of different approaches to getting the reading experience the way I wanted it, but I kept running into a few sticking points with the default functionality--the dimmest backlight level was still too bright, and the serif typefaces in the default InkbookReader were not all that great for reading long passages, in my opinion. (The inclusion of the dyslexia font however is a thoughtful addition.)

I tried FBReader, which I had used extensively in my old rooted Nook Simple Touch (the battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, hence the new ereader.) I ran into the issues others have had, in which the physical buttons wouldn't work, and the icon would not appear in the built-in app launcher. However, I was able to sideload-install my preferred fonts and use those in the reader, and the built-in light control gave me a slightly dimmer option than the system itself did.

I installed two other launchers--RelaunchX, which I had used a version of on my NST, and Nova Launcher, which I've used on my phones for years. Nova Launcher had three major downsides in my opinion--greyscale tones to much of the interface, the inability to use the library widgets, and battery life. I rooted the device and re-installed Nova as a system app to make widgets available, but only the "recently-added" Library widget ever worked, and the layout did not work well, cutting off the lower parts of the book titles even when I expanded the widget. The "currently reading" widget, which was the one I was most interested in, remained invisible no matter what I tried. I think that would have worked against a white background, but since I was unable to change the wallpaper in Nova, I couldn't test that. I also tried a couple of high-contrast icon packs (downloaded from Aptoide app, which does work on the device) to address the low visibility of some of the icons, but the icon packs would not deploy across the interface, and could only be applied to icons added to the desktop, not in the app drawer. Battery life still was not great. So after that experiment, I was left with an easier-on-the-eyes, slow tablet but not a great reading-centered device.

RelaunchX had trouble launching epubs in FBReader until I found where in the settings i could set the file associations. The interface was very readable, and the battery life wasn't as bad as when I was running the more traditional tablet-oriented Nova Launcher. I wish there were more options for organizing the books on the device, but having my books organized by Author-named folders at least made for a clear navigation path to the books I was reading. Getting the launcher in a good place though made me more frustrated with the shortcomings of using FBReader on this particular device. (I still love the FBReader program, but my understanding is that the InkbookReader app is based on FB, and so there are system functions that are left unavailable to the standard FB app when used on the Inkbook.)

In a thread about one of the other android ereaders, someone had mentioned that Alreader had an e-ink option through the link on their website, so I gave it a try. Initially some of the interface was hard to read, but once I got the e-ink setting turned on, it became as usable as the Nook version of FBReader. I was additionally surprised to see that Alreader had an even more nuanced backlight control mechanism which I could set to a 1% brightness, without any grayscaling over it to keep it at the level I wanted. I found this lowest-possible-setting to be just right for reading in my environment. Furthermore, I found that if I turned off the E-Ink mode in Alreader, I didn't lose any of the high-contrast theming, and I was able to customize the overall reading experience with even more granularity. Oh--and the physical buttons worked!

Your mileage may vary, but RelaunchX and Alreader have proven to be the best combination of software to drive my new device. I don't think this combination requires rooting or major configuration changes. You can add fonts to Alreader by creating a folder called "fonts" (lowercase) in the main sdcard folder, and dropping them in. They'll show up at the bottom of the typeface list in Alreader.

Hope this helps. I was just about ready to send back the device since reading on it had been frustrating, but I'm pretty pleased with it now. Thanks again.