“I was referring to open book reader…”

The lack of capitalization, and the project name that could just as easily be a descriptor, made me miss it at first too.

"The Open Book is my long-standing attempt to design a comprehensible and accessible e-book reader that you can build yourself (or at least have manufactured affordably). The current edition is something I’m calling the “Abridged” or “Developer Preview” edition. It’s designed to be incredibly simple: there are 7 through-hole and 14 surface mount components, nearly all in a chunky 1206 package that’s easy to hand solder. The tradeoff is that it has no LiPo charging circuit; instead it uses AAA batteries, making it a bit more chunky than previous versions of the book.

The goal with this version is to get hardware in hands so we can start hacking on firmware."

https://www.oddlyspecificobjects.com/projects/openbook/

So:

• This is a hobby / project of love
• The current focus is on hardware

I’m sure that the eventual plan is to support ePub.

I’m not sure it will ever get there, because it’s not a well resourced project, but I personally don’t like criticizing one person’s efforts, which they are making freely available.

I tried to solve these cross-distro compatibility problems in a generic way with this “standard”, more years ago than I’d like to think about:

https://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/Loopback.cfg

If someone wants to come up with a bootloader agnostic solution rather than one tied to grub, like an extension to Bootloader spec , https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ , I’d be happy to evangelize it and add support to grub for using it.

I’m not aware of any other bootloader that supports reading a config file that exists within an iso though, and secure boot support may add additional complications.

Bottom line:

I feel like we could relatively easily get to a point where every Live iso that actually supports loop booting can just be added, as a file, to your USB drive (from Windows, or your android phone even) and be detected at boot in a nice little menu, no editing of config files needed.

I don’t have the time or spoons to get the Linux community there alone, but if people are interested in helping I’m more than happy to pick this up again.

(Note: Please don’t blindly suggest “Just chain load the iso!” Things aren’t that easy, unfortunately).