The Kobo touch seems pretty hackable -- it's very easy to root the device; the firmware upgrades are just tarballs that overwrite files in the main partition and it has a backup partition if you screw it up. There's some documentation on mmapping the e-ink display and using ioctl to update portions of the display.
I'm looking to get one of these for my wife for Christmas (Neither the Nook or the kindle are really available in Canada) but I'm not allowed to mess around with her devices. However I think having an e-ink Linux machine might be an interesting device to play with.
I have the version before the Touch -- the one where they added wifi. I'd love to hack it just enough to get fixed width code examples to (mostly) fit the display width. Or, better yet, to get it to support a landscape display of ePub books (for the same reason).
I don't suppose someone's already done something along these lines? (Just asking in case happenstance brings a knowledgeable reader past this comment.)
The Wifi version is also hackable in the same way. You might want to google "Kobo wifi hacks" and start looking around. Unfortunately, it's pretty early in the scene and developers are still working to figure stuff out. I'm not sure there are yet any workable apps written for these devices.
Thank you for then nudge. It appears the platform is rather amenable, and an initial look shows several potential options. Also, the existing firmware can be fully backed up -- there appear to be multiple ways of doing this -- so that borking can be undone, at worst by restoring the original firmware image that resides on an internal MicroSD card.
Unfortunately, my initial editing of an individual ePub title to adjust the font used for <code> was not accepted; I'll be exploring why, as I was trivially modifying some apparently successful instructions for adding custom fonts to e.g. support non-Roman language characters (Cyrillic, Chinese).
I think I'll pick one up after Christmas (via Craigslist) for hacking purposes. I've got a few simple app ideas well suited for e-ink. I think if there's a good community going around this, it might be fun.
It appears one can hack the ePub to change font settings and include an embedded TrueType font (maybe also other formats?), and the Kobo firmware will successfully process this.
I'm waiting for the battery to finish charging to see how Proggy Tiny Slashed-Zero looks. It may be too small, in which case I'll try one of the other Proggy variants, or Dina. (Both Proggy and Dina have TrueType implementations, although I'm uncertain how complete they are. I may have to look around for a better choice of a small-format fixed width font implemented in TrueType format.)
I'm looking to get one of these for my wife for Christmas (Neither the Nook or the kindle are really available in Canada) but I'm not allowed to mess around with her devices. However I think having an e-ink Linux machine might be an interesting device to play with.