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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

I really like the Idea.

Since I bought a reasonably open Kobo recently, I feel the main pain point with eRaeders though is actually getting something to read on them. A dozen stores with DRM exist and the few sites without DRM naturally have limited selection. Also reading pdfs is really not great, yet converting them seems also unreasonably hard. So the problems seems not to be the hardware only, but the whole stack from hardware over software to content.

Still, an open eink device could be fun and can certainly be used for more than just reading books.

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I feel like this is more of a publisher/vendor problem than a hardware problem. The Kobo is perfectly capable hardware--moreso than the Kindle, I'd say, due to its support of EPUB. You are perfectly capable of reading DRM-free books on it if you can find them. But the vast majority of publishers sell their book wrapped in some kind of DRM, and so if the hardware manufacturer wants publishers to do business with them, they have to support DRM.

I don't think that will change unless we, as consumers, decide to reject DRM.

With that said, we failed with pretty much every other DRM format, the notable exception being iTunes audio, where Apple had enough market presence to be able to say No. Kobo doesn't, and it is extremely unlikely that Amazon would die on that hill, given that the Kindle doesn't even support open formats at the moment.

>the main pain point with eRaeders though is actually getting something to read on them

Pretty sure Calibre gives you the ability to convert to open formats.

Calibre on its own will convert between formats and there are plugins that will strip drm. I have no idea about the legality in various parts of the world but it is a solid solution for liberating content and making it portable

Yeah, but it can't usefully convert PDFs. To make a PDF usable on an e-reader you've got to trim the margins, and chop it into pages that exactly fit the e-reader screen (in landscape, due to line length issues)--and even then some just can't be converted. And in doing this you need software that knows where to cut pages and whether to insert padding so that lines don't get cut off. And you never want to use OCR or text extraction, which suck. It's an extremely difficult process, but since panning and zooming on ereaders is unusable it's the only way I've found that works (I use the k2pdfopt software)--the alternative is just using a tablet for PDFs which is what I increasingly do.

PDFs are already an open format and the software that you are looking for would take 5 billion dollars of research money to produce. Every PDF is formatted differently.

k2pdfopt, which is free, works for almost every PDF.

I'm dying for an open eink device with a color eink display. That seems to be a fairly giant limit of the current commercial readers.

My need to read PDF ebooks led me to just start using an iPad Mini as a reader. The app PDF Expert does a great job of trimming margins making almost every PDF perfectly readable on that size of device. (To really read every PDF without compromise you need at least a 13” screen.)

As a bonus I can use the app KyBook 3 for ePub files and adjust margins and so on to make better use of the screen space. My Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t display any more text per page than a phone.

Obviously an iPad Mini has drawbacks compared with an ereader in terms of battery, weight, and ability to read in sunlight. The ideal device for me is probably one of those 8” Android eink devices.

Two more points—you can process PDFs for a Kindle pretty well with the k2pdfopt program. Closed-source and conmand line, but it works.

Also popsockets on the back of small tablets and readers are great.

Many libraries lend books in electronic formats, you'll need a non-kindle to read them though since they don't support DRMed books.

If you read English, and to some degree other languages as well, you can find books in the same place you find pirated movies (actually in more places since the file size is small)

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