Experimenting with the Tolino Shine 4

So close to perfect...

In order to get my hands on a Tolino Shine 4 in the UK I had to use a proxy service to buy it directly from Thalia in Germany and get it shipped to me. Relying on browser translations to make sure I entered the proxy address correctly was nerve-wracking, and if anything goes wrong I'm basically on my own. Returning it via a proxy and figuring out customer service back and forth in German is just not in my current skillset or mental health tolerance. The device with the proxy service shipping cost me a total of £146.

I went to the trouble of proxy shipping a Tolino Shine 4 from Germany primarily for BookFusion. I really like BookFusion. The user interface is intuitive and nice to navigate. I love the way you can organise shelves. I love how responsive the company is if you have any issues or bugs. I love that they've made a platform that makes it easy to lend your e-books to friends. I love how I can upload my books right from Calibre with their plugin. If possible I want to be able to use their app for my primary e-reader.

However, they don't currently have any Kobo, or PocketBook integrations to allow you to read your BookFusion e-books easily on those e-readers, and they don't support OPDS so you can't access your library with them that way either. Currently, none of the dedicated Android e-readers on the market offer devices with any sort of functional waterproofing, and I don't really enjoy the Oasis-like form factor of the Boox Go Color 7, or the super bright backlight of the Meebook M6C. Plus, all Android e-readers so far have had inferior battery life to their non-Android competitors. So while there are e-readers I can use BookFusion on, they're all missing some critical criteria for me.

Now, the 4th generation of Tolino e-readers is kind of special. Before the 4th gen devices, Tolino e-readers ran on a customised Android 4 OS. For the 4th gen line they upgraded the OS to Android 8. The latest 5th generation of Tolino e-readers all use a Linux-based OS like Kobos. So with the 4th gen Tolinos you get a reskinned Kobo device with an Android 8 OS. This is important because BookFusion only supports Android 5+. With a 4th gen Tolino you get the IPX8 waterproofing and general form factor of a Kobo Clara 2E and the theoretical ability to install BookFusion. If this experiment worked out, I'd be able to Frankenstein myself my ideal e-reader.

How to sideload Android apps onto a Tolino Shine 4

I didn't need root access to do this and I didn't need to enable ADB or install a bunch of drivers on a Windows PC. All I needed was access to the built-in admin/debug mode, a way to shove .apk files into the root directory of the Tolino volume, VirtualSoftKeys, and the Simple Ink launcher.

These steps will only work with 4th generation Tolino e-readers and has only been tested on my Tolino Shine 4. Copy these steps at your own risk!

First grab your .apk files for Simple Ink launcher, VirtualSoftKeys, and BookFusion.

Then connect your Tolino to your computer via USB. I had to use OpenMTP in order to see the volume on my macbook as for some reason it wouldn't show up as an option in Finder. But that was easy enough.

Drop the .apk files into the root of the Tolino volume and disconnect from the computer.

Go to the search bar on your Tolino e-reader.

Type 112358132fb into the search bar and hit search.

A debug menu should appear on screen.

Go to the next page of the menu by swiping right to left or tapping the tiny arrow in the menu navigation bar near the top. Find your .apk files and install them all. You will see and error saying install wasn't successful, ignore it, you apps will have been installed.

Once that's done, exit the debug menu and restart your Tolino.

When it reboots you should get the option to launch Tolino or the Simple Ink launcher. Select Always and click the Simple Ink launcher option.

You should now see a screen with a list of just the word App down the page over and over. Long press one of them and a menu will pop up to let you select the apps you want to add to the launcher from the installed apps on the device.

Before you load any reading apps you'll want to make sure you don't have to reset the device every time you want to switch reading app. For this you need to load VirtualSoftKeys first.

It will look like a mess when it first launches because for some reason it's all set to be transparent. Swipe up from the very bottom of the screen to open a separate settings app within the VirtualSoftKeys app.

You should be able to make out some kind of toggle that activates VirtualSoftKeys by allowing it to appear on top of other apps.

There should be some option to select Don't remind and I know to make the VirtualSoftKeys settings permanent.

You should see essentially a basic Android home bar appear at the bottom of the screen with your standard Back, Home, and app display buttons.

After this I recommend increasing the gesture height option, which should now show clearly, all the way to maximum so it's easier to activate. I also made it so the bar disappears after 3 seconds of not being used so it doesn't interfere with dark mode for me by leaving a pale bar at the bottom of the screen.

Now you can hit the home button or swipe from the bottom of the screen up and go back to the launcher and launch either BookFusion or Tolino whenever you want.

Of course, one of the downsides of this is that I'd need to periodically check to see whether my app versions need updating manually. If it was a good solution in the end I think I'd be fine with that. BookFusion helpfully attach links to direct downloads of their .apk files for each release they announce in their blog and I won't need to update very often.

Another snag is that I also don't get the full brightness menu when I'm in the BookFusion app. I have to make sure I've set my brightness and warmth to what I want in to Tolino app first, and then switch over. It's not a setting I mess with a lot so that's not a dealbreaker for me, personally but I can see it being annoying for other people.

A failed experiment

I was ecstatic when my theory about being able to add BookFusion to a 4th gen Tolino e-reader actually worked! I now had a 6 inch black and white e-reader that was waterproof, with full system dark mode and nice low brightness settings, that allowed me to access my entire e-book library in a nice streamlined way and synced reading progress to my phone. Fantastic!

However, my victory didn't last long.

While I can load BookFusion, there's a strange bug where if I increase the text size or adjust paragraph spacing at all, it cuts off the end of the chapter relative to the increased text size. While I've been tempted to ask the BookFusion team about this issue, I feel it's pretty unfair to ask them to fix a bug that's occurring because I'm using my Tolino in an unintended way to install their app.

This means if I want to read full e-books on my Tolino I have to keep the text size absolutely tiny. It's not impossible to read, but I do suffer from eye strain so I like big text and line spacing so my eyes can relax and I can avoid horrible migraines.

The second major issue with this Tolino hack is that it seems to absolutely chug on the battery. A full charge doesn't even last a day. It's extremely dire, especially for a black and white e-reader. I'm not sure exactly what about this setup is consuming power like a bitcoin miner, maybe it's the way the setup handles WiFi, maybe it's something to do with it not being designed to run more than one launcher or e-reader app? But whatever it is, the battery life situation is just not workable. I want at least multiple days of charge, ideally multiple weeks. Less than a day is just pitiful.

The last issue on top of all of this, is that if I can't get it to work satisfatorily with BookFusion, then I'd at least want the Tolino mobile app or e-reader to support OPDS like the Pocketbook mobile app does. This would make it a lot easier to keep up to date with my library in Tolino Cloud by allowing me to sideload to Tolino Cloud wirelessly. Unfortunately, I've not found a way to get OPDS for Tolino.

BookFusion currently have a KOreader integration in beta that by all accounts works extremely well already, and they are planning a Kobo integration at some point in the future too. Once the KOreader integration is generally available I'll be happy to recommend a jailbroken Tolino as a simple and fully-outfitted option that's compatible with BookFusion. Until then the Tolino Shine 4 on it's own is still a plenty nice device for a standard black and white, waterproof e-reader with free cloud storage for your e-books on Tolino Cloud.

It's worth nothing too, that the Tolino Cloud service works better overall than the Pocketbook equivalent. I uploaded approximately 230 e-books to my Tolino Cloud and it had no impact at all on the responsiveness of my Tolino Shine 4 e-reader. Clearly, they've optimised their cloud library scanning effectively compared to Pocketbook. But considering how tricky it is to get hold of Any Tolino device in the UK, I'd only recommend this e-reader to people in countries Tolino operates within, like Germany and Austria, and a few other European countries.

The Tolino Shine 4 was so close to being what I wanted, and a fun experiment, but it just wasn't designed to be messed with like this. So it's back to the drawing board.

If you're lucky enough to be in a Tolino country, try them out instead of Kindle. You'll get a decent reading experience, a lot more flexibility about where you buy your e-books, and a more sustainable device overall.

As for me, the search for the perfect e-reader continues...