Using Boox Devices’ Page Flip Buttons With Third Party eBook Apps
The Boox Page, Palma and Go 7 e-ink tablet models feature the return of physical buttons for page flipping, which is a huge improvement in usability over the touchscreen-only devices like the Poke3. The buttons are on the right in the default display orientation, but if you enable rotating the display, they’ll adjust as expected for left-handed or landscape use.
Boox’s preinstalled eBook app, NeoReader, is already configured to use the buttons. Most other reader apps can work with them, but you need to configure them individually.
Here’s what I’ve found works, using a Go 7 Color (Gen II), which I recently bought to be my new main eBook reader.
This should also be useful for finding the volume buttons setting when reading books on other Android devices too.
System Settings
Open the app, then tap the Boox dot menu. The cube with a ring around it will open the system’s customize menu for the app. Open the Others tab, and look for the Customize Buttons setting:
- Page-turning: Works for some apps, such as Libby.
- Volume: Leave it on here for most e-reader apps, then tell the apps to use the volume buttons for page turning as described below.
- Scrolling: Some apps use this for a slower or smaller scroll amount than Page-turning.
Commercial and Library Readers
Most of these need the Boox config set to Volume. Then you need to open a book and tap in the center of the screen to get at the menus that have the paging options.
Bookshop.org
Tap the “…” button, then Visual Settings, then the Advanced tab, and enable “Turn Pages With Volume Buttons.”
B&N Nook
Tap the three vertical dots, then Settings. On that menu, turn on “Enable Volume Buttons.”
eBooks.com
Tap the gear button. Toward the end of the Settings list, enable “Volume Buttons Turn Pages.”
Ebooks Reader also pops up a request to rate the app after the first couple of times you use it. Which would be fine except it’s one of those cases where the button color scheme gets mapped to white-on-white, so you can’t read the labels.
I got around this by using Boox’s dot menu to customize the app’s display and turn on text outlines. It doesn’t seem to affect anything else in the app, just those buttons. But now I can read them.
For the record, as of the December 2025 version, the order of the buttons is:
- I Love it!
- Needs Work
- Maybe Later
- No Thanks
Google Play Books
Surprisingly, this one doesn’t need you to open a book first. From the main app screen, tap on your account icon in the upper right, then Play Books Settings -> Ebook reading -> “Use volume keys to turn pages.”
Kindle
Tap on “Aa” for the font display, then go to the More tab and enable “Turn Pages With Volume Controls.”
Kobo
Tap on “Aa” for the font display. Scroll down past the font settings and enable “Page using volume keys.”
Libby
Automatically works with the Page-turning option in Boox customizations.
Hoopla
Automatically works with the Volume option in Boox customizations…but backward from every other app I’ve used.
Also, you have to enable “Stay active in the background” on the same Customize/Other tab in order to download anything you borrow.
Other Apps
Librera
Automatically works with the Volume option in Boox customizations if you open a book in “Book mode.” You can turn it off by tapping the gear icon, then un-checking “Navigate with volume buttons.” Librera also has a “Reverse buttons” option, which is something I haven’t found in any of the other apps I’ve used.
Nextcloud News
A nice feed reader app that syncs with a Nextcloud server.
To use the buttons to scroll up and down within an article, set the Boox config for the app to either Page-turning or Scrolling. They seem to scroll the same amount, but Page-turning moves faster.
Or, to use the buttons to jump forward and backward between articles, set it to Volume in the Boox config, and then enable “Navigate with volume buttons” in the app’s Settings list.
Wallabag
A great read-it-later app, like Instapaper. I’ve replaced Pocket with it. Wallabag supports using the buttons to scroll within an article.
The Boox options for Page-turning and Scrolling both work for moving within an article.
Or you can set it to Volume, and configure the app itself to use the volume buttons for scrolling. From the main screen’s hamburger menu, open Settings, then UI, then set “Go up and down using the volume buttons.”