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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

What's the best eBook reader? I'm getting fed up with Amazon, and I'd like to have some kind of clone of the Kindle. Key thing is SaaS -- I'd like my reading positions, notes, etc. to sync between machines and available through a web interface.

Glad to pay a modest amount for hosting on AWS or similar, if I'm in control of my data. Not so glad to do another corporate lock-in.

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Calibre is usually the go-to open source ebook reader. I don't know about SaaS but it does include a server so if you keep you ebooks centrally located and acess them from there, your bookmarks and notes would be preserved.

https://calibre-ebook.com/about

@JoeDaDude

Sorry for OT, but there are no PMs on hacker news. I found your comment about CO2 sensors for Raspberry PI from last year [0]. Have you finished this project? If yes, could you share a few details?

For my first Rasberry PI project, I am considering buying Enviro for Raspberry Pi + Air Quality. I would like to add an affordable CO2 sensor that would require minimal config and no soldering. Pimoroni folks told me MH-Z19 would not work because of the number of pins. Would you have any suggestions on what sensor to choose and how to make it work with Enviro / Raspberry PI?

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20185649

Can I pay anyone for a hosted Calibre server?

Run Calibre on your desktop; sync the library up to a $5/month VM, and run ubooquity there. Or Calibre.

Thorium Reader is an absolute pleasure to use. Open-source and regularly updated.

https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/ https://github.com/edrlab/thorium-reader

Is it more than just an ePub reader? You really feel it’s justified to spin-up an electorn app (!!!) to read an ePub? I use Emacs’ nov.el or Foliate which are not only low on resources but also instantaneous to open files.

I don't like it either, but the only way it is technically feasible to support the full potential styling/markup of an EPUB is to use a browser engine, and therefore electron is a logical choice. Can your specialized EPUB reader support MathML? Or vertical-ttb text?

Just this. Epub depends on the same tech stack as the web. So, either you use an engine that supports that in full, or you are going to be missing pieces of the standard. Which means that most other reading software opts for missing pieces of the standard.

It's irrelevant to me whether or not it's an electron app. I'm not running a Pentium 486 system. I've got more RAM than I know what to do with...I'll run a half-dozen instances of Thorium if I wanted to...no worries.

It’s not just resources. It’s usability. Electron apps look and feel out of place to me. I would personally never use one let alone for reading an ePub. I get the point about perfect rendering, but that’s a specific problem I’m personally not worried about.

An .epub is literally a zip of xhtml, css, and images.

If you want to build a good ereader, you either use a web browser or you reimplement one. And you have to support things like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens, rtl, mathml, and—well—the rest of the nontrivial stack.

I have a bad news for you, recently I was interested in how could I write a good QML/Kirigami based ebook reader and looked at all the existing Linux epub reader and each one was using a webview for the epub rendering. But they usually try to integrate better with the rest of the app and your DE so you just don't see it.

EDIT: the only epub reader I know that doesn't use a webview is Okular and the rendering using QTextDocument basic html support is horrible.

I ran into a similar realization when I set out to build my own minimal RSS reader.

Your options are A) web view, B) crappy RSS reader.

Koreader and coolreader both based on crengine and dont use webview. Koreader devs forked crengine and now seem to be in the process of merging back. https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/buggins/coolreader

Really wish it was a Chromium extension (or PWA) rather than separate app.

Really? Why on earth?

Since 90+% of the time I have the browser open. An epub book is just a weird, constrained website, another type of document to read.

Not saying there shouldn't be an app for those who want it.

Thorium is astoundingly slow. I've started using Sumatra for ebooks as well as PDFs. It's fast and good enough.

https://github.com/koreader/koreader and you can host your own koreader server to sync data https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server

I’ve been delighted by Foliate. Supports OPDS, and keeps getting better.

Oh didn’t know that. Thanks for the tip. I’ve been using this app on Fedora for a while. Will have a look.

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