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- Hacker News
- If you use a Kindle, you have to jailbreak it first before installing it. There's definitely been some improvements with user experience at least with apps since I first jailbroke it. There's like an appstore with games and KOReader that I use.
This is the guide I used and it's up to date.
by Cider9986 - My wish is to see ebooks become first class citizens on all digital devices. Apple has a native ebook reader built in to their devices. It's cumbersome and bloated, but it's there. No web browser except Yandex has built in ebook support, even though it would be the easiest thing in the world. Android, Linux and Windows have no built-in ebook reader, as far as I know.
Murasaki [1] is the most performant and sleek ebook reader you can get for MacOS currently. It's magnificent, but the creator has regionally limited who can get it, unfortunately.
by carlosjobim - KOReader is my jam! With its reflow for PDFs, I've used it on my Kindle Oasis 2 to read everything for my undergrad and graduate degree. Some years ago now, I wrote a script that converts the annotations to Obsidian [0], and then another little script to automatically keep my "Articles" folders in sync between the Kindle and my laptop.
Very grateful for this software!
by simonklitj - It's a shame the out of the box UI/UX is so bad, it really feels like the GIMP of e-reader software at times.
I think the Zen UI plugin is mandatory to have a good time with it.
by videah - You can use the regular Kindle viewer once you jailbroke your kindle, but KOReader has native epub and pdf support so you don't have to use a converter when uploading your books.
I did find it hard to get the bezels to be even and it still doesn't always format well depending on the book. I still kind of prefer the default viewer.
I use this plugin in KOReader which lets you download books from Z-Library within KOReader.
https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin
Another cool thing is you can use custom fonts and dictionaries. I use the OED short version and the Wikipedia one. There's built in ones that it can download but pirated ones like OED you have to upload yourself.
Unfortunately on MacOS it seems you have to use Amazon's app to access the filesystem.
Edit:
They changed it on the newer Kindle which I have.
There's open source alternatives to the send to kindle app.
by Cider9986 - I'm immensely thankful for koreader - it improves the reading experience so fundamentally that it literally drives my purchasing decisions. I got a remarkable 2 precisely because it was known to run it well. When I got a new kindle, I went for a refurbished one hoping it'd be one FW version behind (it was! lucky me) so I could jailbreak it immediately, and run koreader.
Which reminds me:
- I'm still a primitive user. Sync reading state, reflow, calibre link, yes, but I'm at maybe 10% of the features, might even be an overestimate. I may finally have to cave in and go through its manual
- I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?
- Is there really no practical way to mark a book as read other than give it a star rating or a custom tag?
- Does anyone know of anything coming close to this experience on an iPad?
- I've never given them a cent or contributed a line of code or even filed a bug report. That changes now.
by gruturo - I installed it on my Amazon Kindle and I couldn't be happier. It shows once again that free software is superior to proprietary software. Free software grows slowly to make users happier and not to attract them with useless features to extract more value from them. Congratulations for this great piece of software.by lolgab
- I really like that this exists, but I found the menus and UI to be rather non-intuitive. My main use case was to sync reading progress between my Kobo and my iPhone. I was able to do this using KOReader on the Kobo & the Readest app[1] on iPhone (also open source).
Ultimately I decided to get rid of KOReader because it felt a bit laggy. The gestures (eg: swiping up on the left side to increase frontlight brightness) didn't work well either.
I eneded up writing my own software to sync progress from Kobo to a KOReader Sync server[2] which my Readest app also connects to (love that unlike the Kindle, the Kobo is quite an open system). You can even set it up so you can SSH into it[3].
[1] https://github.com/readest/readest [2] https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server [3] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=254214
by gejose