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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

My use cases are convert format, edit ebook, create ebook from text. The last two with the editor which used to be a separate application. Maybe it was named Sigil?

I send books to my phone with Syncthing. It would be nice if calibre had a way to receive the position in the file and if the reader on my phone had a way to send it to calibre. It would be easier to pick up a book on another device, maybe my tablet, but it's not really important. I always have my phone with me and for a typical fiction book a phone screen is really OK.

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I use syncthing to sync my library around now, as mentioned in the article (I believe). This works great for Koreader, which stores read stats in a plain text file next to the ebook file. That can lead to syncthing conflicts sometimes, unfortunately but I suspect that might be more because of my combined use of git-annex and syncthing to archive my collection than anything specific to syncthing.

It does mean I need to use koreader everywhere though, I don't have a way to sync read progress back into Calibre, but then I don't really have read progress there anyways. I have a "read/not read" flag there, but it's some custom thing I added somehow, Calibre doesn't support that out of the box anyway.

I googled it and it seems that koreader has a selfhostable server that can be used to sync reading positions across devices

https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server

I used koreader years ago. I'll give it a try again. If I like it I'll download the server and check if I can make it work.

The protocol is simple enough that there are multiple implementations. I like this small one, which does all the necessary things:

https://github.com/b1n4ryj4n/koreader-sync

Thanks.

I installed Koreader but I think I'll stay with CoolReader and do without progress sync.

The two deal breakers are

- I can change the brightness of the screen in CoolReader by sliding a finger on the left of the screen. I must use a menu in Koreader and that makes brightness control almost useless.

- There is no way to change the color of the text. I like red on black in night mode. White text is too bright in a dark room. Reading thought the issues on GitHub it seems that maybe a custom CSS can do the trick but I don't feel like investing time in that. Progress syncing is not so important to me.

> - I can change the brightness of the screen in CoolReader by sliding a finger on the left of the screen. I must use a menu in Koreader and that makes brightness control almost useless.

Strange, because Koreader has this functionality. On my kindle paperwhite I can slide up and down on the left side of screen to change intensity, on my oasis I can additionally slide up and down on the right side to change color temperature.

Which platform isn't it working on?

Android. However I found Expert Mode and activated it. Then Taps and gestures, Gesture Manager, One-Finger Swype and there are the two swyping gestures to set brightness.

One is done. Text color next, maybe.

As a side note: I always thought that CoolReader settings UI was a mess but Koreader's one is much worse: less funky but even less efficient.

but see that's the thing, i don't even need that silly thing. i just run syncthing everywhere I need to (and it pretty much runs everywhere, including the kobo), and that's it. no middleman required (other than the syncthing meet-me infra of course, which is not as much as i expected: https://relays.syncthing.net/).

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