my weird lil book (which i love <3)

lera · 05-31-2025, 08:05 AM

so, i wanted to post about the book i happen to be using for my e-reading needs in the latter-day times and ask a few general questions! if these are like super basic and i should've just searched the web or something i'm super sorry

so this book i got last year's winter in a second-hand manner from a certain russian lady and it has quite a bit of capital W Weirdness about it. it self-identifies as a pocketbook 622, but it had clearly been tampered with: it has a custom turnoff logo in mostly cyrillic script branding it "Touch", used to have a veil of an unidentified rubberous substance on the back branding it "Odyssey" with some unintelligible half-erased characters (which at this point got erased completely, so i removed the substance). moreover, it refuses to open any book that is not of .fb2.zip format - not pdf, not mobi, not even epub works, the reader it uses straight up crashes on attempting to open such files. also in absence of connection to the greater internet its clock got desynced iirc about 12 minutes into the past and i fail to imagine what kind of a gravitational maneuver is nessecary for such a large desync, like, it got to have been near a black hole at some point of its life! speaking about the internet, it has trouble connecting to that too, not every network works and even with the ones that do opening anything in the browser is a bust (not that i need internet on it like at all but i tried to configure pbsync once and quickly abandoned the idea in favor of continuing to send books in via wire).

dried sediment: it's a weird book that quite possibly came from another dimension (or at the very least russia) and it can't open epub nor pdf :P which i'm always working around converting epub to fb2.zip but like man it's a bit odd isn't it? if there's some sort of better reader software that i can additionally install to it it'd be great (as it self-identifies to be running on some version of linux) but i'm not really sure how would i even install things upon such a quaint device

rkomar · 06-08-2025, 10:48 AM

It sounds like you have a PocketBook Touch 622. If you go to the PocketBook website at https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/support?model=135 you can download the user manual and the last firmware version. The user manual contains information about doing a firmware update. If the hardware really is the same as the official PocketBook Touch, then it is probably best to update the firmware and get the applications for reading all formats reinstalled. However, if the reason you can't use the existing applications is that the memory is starting to fail and corrupting the contents, then updating the firmware may leave you with an even more broken system. Maybe you can install something that gives you access to a shell on the device and explore it further before deciding on whether to attempt to update it or leave it as is. Personally, I use utelnetd for getting shell access over the internet from my desktop, and you can search for that in this forum if you want to install it. Third party software is usually just copied to the /applications/ folder when you mount the filesystem via USB.

05-31-2025, 08:05 AM	#1
lera Member Posts: 18 Karma: 1191672 Join Date: May 2025 Device: PocketBook 622	my weird lil book (which i love <3) so, i wanted to post about the book i happen to be using for my e-reading needs in the latter-day times and ask a few general questions! if these are like super basic and i should've just searched the web or something i'm super sorry so this book i got last year's winter in a second-hand manner from a certain russian lady and it has quite a bit of capital W Weirdness about it. it self-identifies as a pocketbook 622, but it had clearly been tampered with: it has a custom turnoff logo in mostly cyrillic script branding it "Touch", used to have a veil of an unidentified rubberous substance on the back branding it "Odyssey" with some unintelligible half-erased characters (which at this point got erased completely, so i removed the substance). moreover, it refuses to open any book that is not of .fb2.zip format - not pdf, not mobi, not even epub works, the reader it uses straight up crashes on attempting to open such files. also in absence of connection to the greater internet its clock got desynced iirc about 12 minutes into the past and i fail to imagine what kind of a gravitational maneuver is nessecary for such a large desync, like, it got to have been near a black hole at some point of its life! speaking about the internet, it has trouble connecting to that too, not every network works and even with the ones that do opening anything in the browser is a bust (not that i need internet on it like at all but i tried to configure pbsync once and quickly abandoned the idea in favor of continuing to send books in via wire). dried sediment: it's a weird book that quite possibly came from another dimension (or at the very least russia) and it can't open epub nor pdf :P which i'm always working around converting epub to fb2.zip but like man it's a bit odd isn't it? if there's some sort of better reader software that i can additionally install to it it'd be great (as it self-identifies to be running on some version of linux) but i'm not really sure how would i even install things upon such a quaint device

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06-08-2025, 10:48 AM	#2
rkomar Wizard Posts: 3,049 Karma: 18821071 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Sudbury, ON, Canada Device: PRS-505, PB 902, PRS-T1, PB 623, PB 840, PB 633	It sounds like you have a PocketBook Touch 622. If you go to the PocketBook website at https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/support?model=135 you can download the user manual and the last firmware version. The user manual contains information about doing a firmware update. If the hardware really is the same as the official PocketBook Touch, then it is probably best to update the firmware and get the applications for reading all formats reinstalled. However, if the reason you can't use the existing applications is that the memory is starting to fail and corrupting the contents, then updating the firmware may leave you with an even more broken system. Maybe you can install something that gives you access to a shell on the device and explore it further before deciding on whether to attempt to update it or leave it as is. Personally, I use utelnetd for getting shell access over the internet from my desktop, and you can search for that in this forum if you want to install it. Third party software is usually just copied to the /applications/ folder when you mount the filesystem via USB.

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