The usual tradeoff with Xteink’s pocket e-readers — the X3, X4, and X4 Pro — is that you cannot just open a bookstore and tap Buy. Kindle and Kobo hide tens of thousands of titles behind their own shops. On Xteink you had to find DRM-free files yourself.
That gap is closing. CrossPoint Reader, the free replacement firmware for those three models, now supports third-party plug-ins. One of the first community add-ons can open DRM-protected ebooks borrowed in OverDrive’s Libby app, or bought from stores such as Kobo that still use Adobe Digital Editions. The Verge’s Andrew Liszewski published the hands-on on August 15, 2026. The feature is still labeled beta, and it is now available to anyone who wants to try it.
Setup is more “flash a firmware” than “sign into Amazon.” You connect the reader over USB-C, flash CrossPoint from the project’s website in a browser, then drop the Plugin Store onto the microSD card. A new Plugins area appears on the home screen. The one that matters is Protected Content. It runs through CrossPoint’s built-in web server and talks ADE DRM. You authorize the device with a free ByteBooks account, or an older Adobe Digital Editions ID. Libby itself still lives on your phone or computer, because these readers use low-power ESP32 chips and cannot search the library catalog on-device.
The loan path is: borrow in Libby, download the tiny ACSM file, let the plug-in fetch the EPUB, read it for as long as the loan lasts. Kobo purchases from the website work the same way. Amazon’s store does not. If that sounds fussy, Common Stacks — a free app for Android, Windows, and macOS, with iOS still coming — can borrow from Libby and push the file to the Xteink in a couple of taps.
Library catalogs still vary, and popular titles still wait in line. The news is simply that these tiny readers are no longer locked out of the free digital stack most public libraries already pay for.