A Case of One's Own: Open Book Enclosures

Originally published at Crowd Supply.

If you’ve been following the development of the Open Book, you’ve probably seen my penchant for overly detailed documentation on circuit boards. Open Book Touch is no exception; every available square inch is covered with silkscreen text explaining what things are for. This is what it looks like inside:

But of course, you’re never going to toss it into your backpack looking like that. A device needs an enclosure, and my rudimentary enclosures from the early days simply wouldn’t cut it. So for the first time I worked with two industrial designers — Tristan and Ben of Mystery Form — to design an enclosure that fit the open source spirit of the book.

Along the way, we ended up designing three.

The Author’s Edition: Now Available in the EU and UK

You’ve seen the 3D printed enclosure before, and it gets the job done: snap fit, clean lines, nice fit and finish. For the Author’s Edition, though, I wanted to play with different materials, and what we arrived at was this: a design for a single aluminum extrusion that the device can slide into on a sled.

Also, just to be clear: this is a 3D printed prototype of the Author’s Edition; we haven’t actually done the aluminum extrusion yet. But the additional funds raised for the Author’s Edition will be enough to fund Ben and Tristan finalizing the design, as well as tooling for a run of these aluminum enclosures.

I’m very stoked about this. This is the Open Book that I want to carry around with me day to day, and it’s the kind of thing that can only exist through crowdfunding. I wouldn’t be able to drop thousands of dollars on tooling for an enclosure like this on my own, but with your help, we can all have one. Also: if you were previously in the EU or the UK and wanted in on the Author’s Edition, I know that it was not shipping there previously. We’ve fixed that error, so if you want to change your order to the Author’s Edition, now’s the time!

And of course, I will be open sourcing the design files for this when we ship, so if folks want to fork Open Book Touch and make their own, this crowdfunded aluminum extrusion design will also be a part of the creative commons. Still: Crowd Supply won’t be stocking this version of Open Book after the campaign ends, so this is your only chance to get it from us, if you don’t want to have to make it on your own.

The Injection Molded Case: Still a stretch, honestly

So I know that I had talked about the possibility of an injection molded case in the campaign materials. I’m going to be honest: it remains a stretch goal, and we’re going to have to look at the final numbers to see if it can happen. Either way, I wanted to share some of the thinking that went into it, along with a very rough 3D printed prototype of the direction we have been hoping to take it.

The goal of the injection molded case is to mate a front frame with a matte polycarbonate frontplate, which snaps onto the front of the book and makes the screen feel flush with the bezel. This prototype was laser-cut and back-painted, then bonded to the snap-fit frame — but not the e-paper display — with adhesive.

The joy of something like this (as opposed to permanently bonding the front layer to the screen, like an Xteink or a Kindle) is that it remains user-repairable and user-moddable. The reality, though, is that injection molding really only makes sense for very large manufacturing runs, so it’s still entirely possible that we will ship the 3D printed version. But — once again — I’m going to open source this design too, in case folks want to DIY it the way we did in these photos. And if it’s at all possible, I’d love to be able to ship Open Book Touch in this injection molded case.

The 3D Printed Case

Having said that, I absolutely adore the 3D printed case. We will be shipping it in black, and it’s the version of the book that you’ve been seeing in all the campaign photos so far:

But one of the core joys of the Open Book is the ability to make it your own. To that end, what if you want a version of Open Book in sparkly pink or purple?

Personally, the one that I’m carrying around lately has that sparkly purple frontplate, but a translucent backing, which reminds me of the Atomic Purple Game Boy Color that I begged my parents for as a kid.

To be clear: we’re not shipping Open Book in these colorways. But in open sourcing all the design files, we are making it so you can 3D print your own enclosure and make it look like whatever you want.

The North Star of my practice is a desire to democratize the knowledge required to create useful technology. I want you to feel like this is your device, under your control. I want you to imagine a world where you don’t have to accept the tech that’s sold to you as it’s sold to you, but rather one where you’re free to make the tech into what you want to use, on your terms.

You choose what books go into it. You choose what enclosure it goes into.