I was rewatching the Chobits anime after thinking about how we're basically living in the Chobits universe with our voice-enabled AI assistants (minus the bodies, I guess). Chobits was one of the first anime that I watched back when I got access to high-speed internet back in the day. Apparently the Chobits anime has a lot of filler episodes, and I never read the manga, so then I decided I'd read the original source material instead.

But I've never liked reading manga on my Amazon Kindle Voyage. The screen is too small for full pages and I really don't like reading panel by panel. I wanted to read the manga with two pages showing at once, since they often have images that span two pages at a time.

I looked at a few of the current 13-inch e-readers like the BOOX Max but they were way too expensive to justify for just reading some manga. I didn't want a whole new tablet for writing down notes or annotating documents in color E Ink. I remembered that Amazon had a giant Kindle at some point (The Kindle DX which was only 9.7 inches but seemed huge at the time), so I had a conversation with ChatGPT about older models. That pointed me to the Sony RP1 from 2017 as a potential cheap alternative to the $700 BOOX. ChatGPT also mentioned that this model had the potential to be rooted, which would let me load CBZ files and an Android app for reading manga.

I found a used Sony DPT-RP1 on eBay for only $140 though it was missing its stylus. Apparently the stylus is over $100 to replace, but I don't need it anyway since I just wanna read manga. I sent a message to the seller and had them verify that the firmware version was low enough to apply the hack, and it ended up being a lot lower than necessary, so I ordered it.

Once I got the device, I had Codex work on actually getting root on it. Since the process was already well documented, I just needed to feed it the repo, plug in the device and tell it what I wanted it to do. I definitely could have done this myself, but at this point I actually trust an AI more than myself to not brick my device. It actually made backups of the existing firmware before installing the newer one, then modified the boot image to get me root on the device.

From there, I had Codex do whatever I wanted to customize the e-reader. I installed KOReader to test it, then I basically made a new fork of it targeting Android API level 22 specifically for the e-reader. A year ago I would have never considered making a bespoke fork of an Android app just because I wanted to add features for my 9-year-old e-reader, but here we are. I added a feature to remove extra whitespace on pages so the images appeared larger, and added an RTL plugin that wasn't supported for the version of KOReader that I was using. I also installed an app to sync the reader to my SMB shared folder over Wi-Fi. And I added a feature to show the book cover of the latest book I'm reading when the e-reader goes into sleep mode, just like on the Kindle!

The fun doesn't just stop there, though. I also got Codex to add chapter metadata to the cbz files so it would be easier for me to navigate using the tables of contents. It just read the files until it found a table of contents and then figured out which file corresponded to the first page of each chapter.

Regarding the actual device, I've been more impressed with it than I actually thought I would be. I knew that a 13-inch screen would be big, but it's a lot bigger than I imagined in real life. On top of that, the e-reader itself is crazy thin and super light. I guess that not having dense glass really lightens up the device. It's really nice to hold it in my hand and just read stuff and the E Ink screen is a lot easier on my eyes. The difference between it and an iPad is huge.

I've been pretty inspired by reading blog posts about people using AI to hack their old devices to install things that they wouldn't have been able to, thus extending the usable life or feature set of the device. Or being able to reverse-engineer proprietary protocols so they can use their devices without connecting them to the internet, or after the manufacturer stops supporting the device (such as this Sony RP1), or just because they want to. It seems like almost every day I'll see posts like these on Hacker News.

So it's been super interesting to me how lowering the friction involved in writing software has opened up all of these interesting use cases, especially for personal devices. I'm super happy that I have an amazing manga reading device, and for only $140 and some tokens on my ChatGPT plan. I'll be keeping this in mind next time I'm thinking of making an upgrade. Maybe it'll be a downgrade and hack instead!