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Comment by fred_is_fred | Hacker News Reader

I bought one in July, I chose Kobo because it's hackable and you can ssh in. So far I've had as much fun with that as with reading.

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They’re also just more user friendly in general. I have a nearly decade old Kobo that still serves its purpose well and I love how it shows up as a mass storage device when plugged into my computer. No clunky management software (Calibre may be functional, but its UI is godawful) or file conversions required, you just manage plain old epubs in your file browser. That functionality can’t randomly vanish one day, either (unlike e.g. Amazon’s email-to-Kindle service). It’s great.

As a side effect of its openness I’ve bought more books through the Kobo store than I would have otherwise. A perfect counter example is my Oculus Quest 2 which I go out of my way to not buy games from its associated marketplace on; as long as that device is hard-tethered to Facebook and its software, I’m better off as using it as a “dumb” headset with VR purchases going to PC marketplaces like Steam.

> plain old epubs

Kobo devices ship two different rendering engines: the obsolete, appallingly bad Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK), and their own, bespoke, WebKit-based renderer. By default, files with an .epub extension are rendered with RMSDK. Consequently, you'll get all sorts of weird issues. Some of the ones I've encountered: I've had cover images not displaying in the library, misbehaving internal links (footnotes), inability to override typefaces/text size.

Easy fix: rename the file to .kepub.epub[0].

Slightly more involved fix: run the file through Kepubify[1] first. This tool makes further tweaks to the books to enable a few other features, like remaining read time estimation.

[0]: https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec#sideloading-for-testin...

[1]: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

Interesting, I wasn't aware of this, but it's good to know. My needs haven't been demanding enough to notice a difference.

Calibre can also do that for you transparently when loading the files onto the Kobo.

I had no idea! I'd switched from Kindle to Boox because Boox runs Android, which is more hackable, but if Kobo supports SSH, I'll have to give it another look!

How do you like your Boox device?

I liked my boox palma a lot until its display broke randomly after 2 months in a soft pocket and now it's ewaste.

I have a Poke since 2022 because amazon deleted my library from my Paperwhite. Same functions, better format and I can buy my books directly via browser from Kobo. No more perpetual airplane mode. Also, tons of formats, not limited to awz or epub.

I've had a Boox Page for about two years now as a Kindle Oasis replacement (current model is Boox Go 7 B&W). I get a bit more than a week of battery life typically which is good enough for me. And most valuable is using the same third party/self hosted apps for sync with my other devices. I've haven't used the Boox native store/reader even once.

It's busybox underneath so you can hack on it but you can't run full apps in the Android sense.

It’s a shame that Boox disregards GPL2 intentionally. Wish we had more hardware makers that weren’t hostile to free software.

[0]https://x.com/puffnfresh/status/1587064729977044994?s=46

You can't SSH into kindles anymore? I know that used to be a thing.

If they're jailbroken.

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