The Best Hacks and Tricks for Your Xteink E-Reader

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Most people who read e-books do so on a phone or a Kindle, and that’s fine. But for the more exacting (if not adventurous) digital reading enthusiasts out there, I recommend exploring life outside of Amazon’s ecosystem—and I particularly recommend doing so with one of the tiny e-readers made by Xteink, a Chinese tech company with an unfortunate name but some great devices.

Out of the box, an Xteink X3, X4, or X4 Pro can seem a little finicky, or even intimidating. But if you’ve mastered the basics of navigating their clunky operating systems and loading up a few books, you’ll quickly find they are both magically portable and a joy for distraction-free reading. And once you’re a convert, you can use these tips and hacks to get even more out of your impossibly wee e-reader.

Convert Your EPUBs to XTC to Preserve Their Formatting

While getting e-book formatting to match what you’d find in a printed book has always been a challenge, the native software that ships with all Xteink devices handles it particularly poorly. While you certainly can read EPUB files loaded onto them, they may show up with awkward formatting, such as unnecessary spacing between paragraphs or missing indents. These devices still can’t display text in bold or italics right out of the box, never mind if you’re reading something with embedded charts or images.

You can solve for this by converting your books to a proprietary format called XTC before loading them onto your e-reader. Rather than a free-flowing text document, an XTC file is essentially a series of bitmap images of the original e-book. All images, stylized headers, and text formatting will thus be preserved, with a few downsides: The image can look slightly less crisp, and the file will be a lot larger—50MB or more, depending on the book, versus 2MB or so for most EPUBs.

There are a few ways to transform your EPUBs into XTC files, but the easiest is this web converter, which allows you to customize the font choice, page orientation, text alignment, and other factors, then download the finished result to sideload onto your device.

Replace the Stock Firmware with CrossPoint Reader

If converting to XTC is too cumbersome or limiting for you, you have another option: Replace the Xteink software entirely. Xteink devices run on dead-simple ESP32 processors, and they are mostly open and easily hackable—meaning you can overwrite the stock firmware without the need to jailbreak them first.

If you think that sounds onerous, it isn’t: In less than a year since the Xteink X4 launched, the device has built up a huge online following of tech-heads and tinkerers, and they’ve not only created a custom firmware for Xteink devices—called CrossPoint Reader—they’ve built a website with a tool that allows you to flash your device with the new software with a single click. (Note: As of this writing, CrossPoint is not yet available for the new X4 Pro, though it is in development.)

After upgrading to CrossPoint, you’ll find your Xteink e-reader a lot more pleasant to use, with more straightforward menus and options and a host of improvements to the e-reading experience, including a wider selection of fonts and more support for customizing your margins, line spacing, and more.

Explore CrossPoint Forks for Even More Features

You need not stop at CrossPoint. There are dozens of “forks” of CrossPoint built on the same basic platform but offering different tools and custom options. Flashing with these takes one extra step—you’ll need to download the .bin files from GitHub first, then choose “Custom .bin” from the CrossPoint Flash Firmware page—but it’s still a fairly foolproof process. Here are a few fun ones to consider, or you can browse the entire list:

• CrossInk: This popular CrossPoint variant emphasizes improved fonts and adds basic reading stats.
• CrossWordle: This option adds a Wordle-esque game to the CrossPoint firmware.
• CPR-vCodex: This CrossPoint fork is all about the stats, offering in-depth, granular tools for tracking and gamifying your reading.
• CrossPet: This one adds a Tamagotchi-like virtual chicken to your e-reader for some reason.
• Biscuit: Aiming to turn your Xteink device into more than an e-reader, Biscuit uses tile-based navigation and adds features like a Bluetooth scanner, a simple chat app, a password manager, calculator and flashcard apps, and some games (including a passable Tetris clone).

Whether you stick with the stock firmware, switch to CrossPoint, or dive into one of its many forks, the Xteink platform rewards tinkering—making these small devices capable of far more than their size suggests.