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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

I can only violently agree with the author: koreader is incredible. When I look for ebook readers, running koreader is an absolute must. The nicest thing about it is how hackable it is, since most of it is written in Lua. When I got my Kobo Aura One, koreader did not yet support the colored background LEDs, and adding support for that was actually pretty easy. The koreader developers are incredibly helpful and it's just a great project.

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Koreader is excellent. On kobo the default nickel is very wasteful of space with huge margins. And for some reason ereaders all hate left justification, even though that’s the norm on printed books.

Koreader solves all of that. I love the “style hacks” section that lets you very precisely override many layout details in the book, or even define your own. Even its status bar is much more information dense and useful than on other readers.

They don’t cater to the lowest common denominator user so it isn’t for everyone, but if you are unafraid of slightly more complex and powerful software it is superb.

It's such a bummer it doesn't support Android < 4 (which means Nook Simple Touch can't run it), considering it works so well on a pretty long list of different devices.

I've read for hundreds if not a thousand hours on my Kobo Clara HD. I've never heard of Koreader, but from what I see it seems only really useful for PDFs ? I never read PDFs, only epubs, and it looks like on Koreader I would be missing stuff like chapter progress, length to read next chapter/rest of the book, marking finished books, etc.

Am I wrong in thinking all these quality of life things for simple book reading are not present on Koreader ?

Where are you getting that from? The github repo (https://github.com/koreader/koreader) lists many supported formats and features, including epubs.

KOReader has all these features and much more. I particularly depend on the possibility to quickly override styles in badly formatted ebooks, great support for StarDict dictionaries, OPDS support for quickly downloading books from Calibre server, and much more flexible configuration of the backlight.

If I'm understanding this correctly, koreader will let me read epubs on an Amazon Kindle. Am I right to be excited?

I think you can do this with a stock Kindle, by sending the epub to the email address of your Kindle (which you can find in your account settings).

No, epubs - presumably as a competitor format - are not supported.

You can do it (email "conversion" - often just a horrible mish-mash of text and images) with PDFs and text etc.

Epubs need to be converted first by a third party service, eg calibre.

Where by “competitor” read “defined and standard”.

Yup, it will.

Yes, but you need to jailbreak your Kindle to install it. If your Kindle is recent or anywhere near the latest release - it can't be rooted.

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