Did something similar with my 7th gen paperwhite, turned it into a little weather and calendar display. Wrote up the process if anyone wants to try it, also the battery life on these things as a dashboard is insane, barely need to charge it.
For what its worth, if you have one of the older paperwhites that's basically bricked now, you can jailbreak it and turn it into a pretty neat e-ink dashboard. I did this with my 7th gen a while back, wrote up the whole process. Its been running as a little weather/calendar display for months now on basically zero power. Better use than letting amazon decide when your device stops working
Oh nice, shelfdroid looks great! The admin functionality is a big gap - being able to manage users and backups from your phone is something I've wanted but never got around to building. I'm working on SoundLeaf (https://soundleafapp.com), the iOS side of things for Audiobookshelf, so it's cool to see the Android ecosystem getting some love too. Starred the repo.
Building SoundLeaf (https://soundleafapp.com) - a native iOS client for Audiobookshelf, the self-hosted audiobook server.
The whole thing started because my wife couldn't get into the official Audiobookshelf iOS TestFlight beta. Her exact words were "I cannot live without audiobooks." I'm a backend dev, never touched iOS or Swift before, but how hard could it be? (It was quite hard.)
About a year in now. CarPlay, offline downloads with background sync, Cloudflare Access support for tunneled servers, sleep timers that create bookmarks so that you can remember where you were the next morning. Currently working on podcast support. Solo project - no tracking, no accounts, just talks directly to your server.
I've been building exactly this with SoundLeaf [0] - an iOS client for the excellent open-source Audiobookshelf server. No data collection, no third-party servers, just your audiobooks syncing directly with your own instance.
The user-friendliness challenge is real though. Setting up Audiobookshelf [1] is more work than "just sign up," but once you have it running, the local-first client becomes much cleaner to build. No user accounts, no subscription billing, no scaling concerns.
Simple pricing too: buy once, own forever. No monthly fees to access your own audiobooks.
My wife was frustrated waiting for Testflight access to the original Audiobookshelf app, so I built SoundLeaf as an alternative. Started as a weekend project but evolved into something we both genuinely love using. It respects the self hosted spirit and privacy with zero tracking. Happy to answer any questions about implementation details or challenges connecting to the Audiobookshelf server API.
I revived my old kindle pw7 using this a week or so ago. If you have an old kindle lying around, you can use it as an e-ink weather dashboard (or anything else for that matter, as long as you can convert it into a 8bit greyscale image).
Yeah, it'll work plugged in. Since the dashboard mode locks everything down until restart, you can leave it connected. Though keeping it constantly charging might turn your battery into a spicy pillow eventually - maybe chuck it on a smart plug to charge for an hour every few days if you're worried about that.
https://soundleafapp.com
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundleaf/id6738635634