A message from Ben (CEO) and John (CTO)
TL;DR: A huge thanks to all of you; We’re open sourcing all Sol Reader device and server code (and hardware design will be coming soon); our efforts are moving to on-the-side, not full time; V2 funding didn’t materialize; all customers will be supported through the warranty period and you can use the desktop app after that to upload your books to the device.
Hello Sol Reader fans!
Ben here, CEO of Sol. I know many of you are wondering about the update on Sol and when you might be able to get your hands on V2 of the Sol Reader.
Well, sadly, we have a different kind of update. After building some amazing V2 prototypes in 2025, we weren’t able to find any investors who wanted to back the continuing production of the Sol Reader (including V1 or future V2). We considered crowd funding, but given the up-front costs, the math just didn’t add up given the sales we had from V1 and what we could project from a potential successful crowd funding effort.
Of course, we are all extremely disappointed by this. The other ramifications of this is that the Sol Reader product will now need to slot into
"side project" instead of "full time effort" for the team.
We’ve put together a great plan to ensure our biggest users and fans (you!) can still use the Sol Reader for as long as possible and we are fully committed to supporting everyone through their warranty periods. Before I turn it over to John, I just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to all of you who have been such great customers for us. It’s truly been the biggest professional joy of my life to build this product for you and see your love for it. And now, here’s John’s reflections:
Hey y'all! We've loved all the enthusiasm you've all shared about Sol Reader. Seeing people use and love our product has been extremely satisfying.
When Ben first chatted with me 5 years ago about what he described at the time as a "Face Kindle" I wasn't convinced I would use it. My whole life I've never been a regular reader. Fast forward to today and I read almost every single night. I complete more books in a year now than maybe I had ever read before Sol Reader (excluding school books at least!). I love this thing and expect to be using it for years to come.
I am so bummed that we can’t put V2 into production now. I think it is the best Sol Reader ever. Maybe someday.
That said, I still use my Sol Reader First Edition daily and I know many of y'all do too. We want to make sure the product can keep working indefinitely (or at least as indefinitely as lithium batteries allow!). To that end we are open sourcing EVERYTHING. Want to host your own server? Go for it. Want to build some sort of EInk flash card glasses app? All the code is there to feed into your LLM of choice. Want to refactor our ePUB library on some other weird device? That would be awesome too! Maybe Sol Reader could even run Doom. And for posterity, we plan to open source the hardware as well (at least the parts we are allowed to given the specific IP of our vendors).
We’re also planning to keep the servers online for at least 2026 to cover all the warranty periods (I definitely want to build an offline-by-default mode this year). And, beyond 2026, you’ll still be able to upload your DRM-free epubs to your device via the Desktop App. Our hope is that by open sourcing Sol Reader, it will continue to provide value to y'all even when our bank account runs dry.
Thank you all for going on this journey with us and happy reading!
Ben & John