KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader
To give you an idea of how different it is from commercial products: it actually tracks reading in a useful way. It shows a chart of how long you have spent on each page, so you can figure out which parts of a book you have not yet read. That is really useful when jumping around technical books. If you are interested in tracking your general reading habits, there are handy views that shows which books you have read and when you read them (either by time of day or across a month).
As for reading PDFs, well, eInk has its limitations and KOReader does it's best to work around them. If you want to read a multicolumn paper on a small screen, you can configure it to go down one column then right back to the top of the next column. If you want there to be overlap between the screens when panning, you can configure that. You can also have it display which parts were overlapping, so you don't get lost when it displays the next part.
There is tonnes of other stuff in there. I just mentioned those two because I use them the most. Overall I would say it feels like KOReader was designed by people who want an amazing reading experience, rather than by people trying to sell novels.
If you want to read a multicolumn paper on a small screen, you can configure it to go down one column then right back to the top of the next column. If you want there to be overlap between the screens when panning, you can configure that. You can also have it display which parts were overlapping, so you don't get lost when it displays the next part
That's insane, I thought it was already good with a whole page, I will have to explore this more. Might need to update it as well, since I installed it a few years ago.
Some of those features like the column panning are also available in Boox's default reader.
I'd love to give KOReader a try -- does anyone know if it can be used with library books, via overdrive or another integration? A quick search indicates KOReader doesn't work with DRM books, but I'm curious if someone has a solution.
I think maybe for a kindle it might be worth it, but the reality is for Kobo, it's probably more hassle than it's worth.
I found my time better spent setting up a calibre-web in a docker container and then having my kobo sync to that. And that was awesome.
The Kobo OS is good enough for me to recommend it to family, there's nothing wrong with the iPod experience of uploading books.
But Koreader+Tailscale+Kavita OPDS is the best reading experience I've ever had.
Again, I don't remember. And whatever it was it's not worth me trying to reinstall it just to remember what it was, and then to uninstall it again.
The one thing you have to watch out for : You need to return those scripts whenever Kobo has an update. You won't lose your data or anything but a standard Kobo update dialed disables Koreader
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32442549 has some more tips.
Oh and https://bookshop.org/beta-search now actually lets you check "DRM-free" when you search, which is a very good step in the right direction!
I have a dream of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu taking up the mantle. Though I think anyone could make something that's better than what we have now, which is nothing.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide...
[1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=361503
[2] https://forum.linuxconfig.org/t/calibre-and-dedrm-problems/8...
Every time I connect my Kindle 4 to the internet, it disables developer mode and I have to rejailbreak. This is despite using an update disabler plugin (I've tested them all).
is it the same, better or worse and by how much?
At least in the past, screen refresh was slower; the reflective, rather than luminescent screen changed contrast and color performance; resolution was well behind standard screens.
The first two seem easily solved; the third hard to mitigate beyond larger print and appropriate typefaces. What else?
If you've ever tried reading an epub using Kobo that you didn't buy from the Kobo store, you may have noticed that highlighting text is very laggy. Koreader has no such lag.
Conversely, the built-in software never struggled with that file.
That said, I think this may be mostly based upon a book's formatting. Messing around with upload options in Calibre may help. (For example, Calibre recently added an option to speed up load times with Kobo's reader software.)
There was some discussion about it on HN not long ago:
All Kindles can now be jailbroken | 1377 points by lumerina | 2025/02/17 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969
I found KOReader's Android app a tad buggy, but the experience is wonderful on Kindles. If you've got an old Kindle kicking around, I also wrote up a little thing about bringing them up to speed which mentions KOReader: https://vale.rocks/posts/improving-early-kindles
It is a good reason to look into rooting, PDF reflow and the function to remove margins make it possible (at least tolerable) to read PDFs when an .epub / .mobi is not available.
You can also run Alpine Linux on a rooted Kindle with graphical interface, I found it amazing but ultimately not that useful with the limited system memory.
This lets me use "Mail to PocketBook", Dropbox sync etc. or the fantastic Push-to-Kindle browser-plugin in combination with the fantastic KOReader. No flashing or jail break required.
I used to think that it syncs up both the books and the reading progress / metadata but when I tried doing it, it didn't seem to work that way. I would love to hear how folks have done this. It's about the only thing left that's keeping me from using KOReader more frequently on all my devices.
Lately, I've used it on Android, and UI which is more suited for e-ink screens, look not so polished on phones, but that's just nitpicking. It's fully usable and keeps adding support for new platforms.
Also, turning pages is faster than with the stock reader of the device.
Protocol is atom based, chatgpt was able to make a custom OPDS server for my needs within minutes, it took another hour or two to fix and customize generated code.
I wonder why is lua so rarely utilized like this on its own. Such a neat language.
[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader-base/blob/master/ffi/bl...
I still have to remove a lot of CSS from most books before uploading, but after that, it is very good, as you can fine-tune every aspect and have every book look similar. Which, in my opinion, is necessary because e-ink readers still don't have enough resolution to use all the fancy fonts authors may have thought. Also, the ability to set margins to the same is very important to me.
Does the focus on eink mean it's mainly aimed at jail broken eink tablets? Or aimed at phones as well?
Nice to see there are multiple open source readers going strong!
Saves me so much work in having to convert EPUB files on my Kindle. I also love how great it is at handling PDF files and cropping margins out of pages. I don't think I would ever want an e-reader that couldn't run it at this point.