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Comment by 30002926 | Hacker News Reader

To everyone confused by this announcement: previous to this feature, on the most recent Kobos you had to do some pretty advanced stuff (for average users) to avoid having to log-in with an account. This eliminates that. As well, it may have been obvious to you, long-term user of these kinds of devices, that you could add your own books without going through their store. But, to those familiar with Kindle, where the store experience is front and center, that might not have been obvious. Kobo coming right out and saying you can do this is a win for consumers.

Side note: The writing on Goodereader.com is terrible. I wish the link were to the-ebook-reader.com, which has a better summary:

https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/01/21/kobo-software-u...

Or even Mobileread forums:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4191419#p...

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I got an Kobo Aura HD.

With each update the UI moved piece by piece from library mgmt focus, to shop focus. Personally I wasn't that much annoyed, because I mostly go by filesystem folders, but there are probably some that got shafted.

About the openness of Kobo: my device can dualboot to debian or android in contrast to the Kobo Linux. I was able to change the main storage easily, it was only a microsd card in a slot internally, which after a dd copy to a bigger card was accepted and even recognised as bigger in the UI free space screen. (I'm not talking about the external microsd reader that this device also has.) The battery is a typical lipo flat pack, which should be replacable from some arduino parts online shop.

Personally i dont kind the shop-focus too intrusive on my Aura HD. I do say, it's fairly impressive that an almost 9 year old device is still getting updates, features, & optimization. There were some really quiet years for updates but the Kobo team has been very active making updates, and many of them are real QoL wins.

Ill try the arduino shops for batteries. My battery died two months ago. I have a new motherboard/battery coming, but I'd love to figure out how to source variously sized lipos.

I havent yet done much futzing in Linux, but definitely interested. Also a shout out to the integrated Pocket reader, which has been a major major win for me, makes the device much more useful to me.

The Pocket reader seems unnecessarily hobbled to me. It appears that it won't sync anything you save to Pocket unless it is detected as an "Article" category.

News site, fine, my blog, fine but a doc-site type thing, nope.

I use my Kobo Forma mostly for technical books and technical manuals, for example the Kubernetes reference docs, but I couldn't save the doc-sites to Pocket and have the Kobo sync it, and had to use a computer to save and convert it.

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