Hacker News Reader

Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't use my Kindle half as much if it weren't for KOReader [0]. Ironically enough for a dedicated reading device, Amazon's built-in reader app pales in comparison to this third-party tool. The killer feature for me is on-the-fly column splitting and text reflow, with the ability to flip to the original page view by tapping a corner -- this is critical for reading academic papers, which tend to be two-column PDFs. It also features contrast adjustment, more fonts, stylesheets, wireless syncing with Calibre, and support for many more file formats including ePub.

There's also a Gargoyle [1] port for interactive fiction on the go. It's less practical due to the input lag on the Kindle keyboard, but I still pull it out every now and again.

[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader

[1] http://www.fabiszewski.net/kindle-gargoyle/

View on HN

> - this is critical for reading academic papers, which tend to be two-column PDFs

Kindle's and PDFs goes together badly. This is common knowledge.

My solution is only using web-pages based formats like mobi or epub based books.

The rest... Let's say they don't get in my reading list.

Just like the web is nicer without flash, ebooks are just nicer without publishing formats like PDFs which natively can't support reflow or anything super basic required for easy reading.

> Just like the web is nicer without flash, ebooks are just nicer without publishing formats like PDFs.

Web is nice because of flash. The video tag in HTML5 happened only after successes of services like Youtube and Vimeo and hundreds of others after they set off on their paths with Macromedia flash. Stop fooling yourself with that kool-aid against flash in recent years.

It's dated for sure, but credit be given where credit is due.

People tend to forget what a blessing Flash was when it first arrived on the web, how horrible other plugins were, like the awful Java mess. Everytime a Java-applet tried to run, you could only pray it wouldn't crash your browser and take your whole system down. Or the terrible experience called RealPlayer! Sure, Flash has a bad security reputation, for good reason, but it made the web more beautiful, interactive,fun and usable at the beginning of the new century. All you had to do was click on "Skip website intro".

I haven't forgotten. Even today, creating dynamic apps in flex using xml and actionscript is easier, more performant and saner than using HTML5. If only the flash player wasn't a minefield of bugs and security vulnerabilities. :(

Steam engines were an amazing innovation as well. They brought countless improvements to society, and were a precursor to true internal combustion. However, no one relies on them in normal daily life anymore as there are much better alternatives. We can move on from a technology and still honor what it brought to the world.

This is not a good comparison as the majority of electricity is generated by steam engines.

I highly doubt Flash did anything to significantly change this. After images and audio, the web was screaming for video. If it weren't for flash, perhaps we'd instead have links that opened up native video players, or whatever, and we'd be better off for it.

In short: YouTube would have been a success even in the alternate universe where Flash never existed.

> flash, perhaps we'd instead have links that opened up native video players, or whatever, and we'd be better off for it.

That's a hilarious mother of all assumptions. Kool-aid has taken a full effect on you! :-)

> Kindle's and PDFs goes together badly.

My point was that KOReader makes them go together nicely. :)

Thanks for the link to KOReader. But is there a reason why the Android version doesn't appear to be available on the Google Play Store?

I'm rather picky about ebook readers, mainly because many of them do not support hyphenation, which KOReader does. So I may give it a try.

Looks like they want to avoid collecting negative reviews before they're confident enough about the Android port:

https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/2040

It works great on Kindle, but I haven't tried the APK version so I can't really comment on that.

I rarely use my Kindle specifically because of the PDF problem. This also means I'm quite the novice when it comes to the entire ecosystem. Is KOReader compatible with the slightly older Kindle 4? If not, how do you get to know those things?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com