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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

We've been in touch with Kobo but they haven't expressed a lot of interest. We do have an integration with the Google Play store, so if you search for an ebook we have in our catalog, it should appear near the top.

I use a Kobo eink device myself and haven't noticed the cover art problem you're describing. Make sure you're on the latest firmware, and that you're transferring our kepub files using a USB cable and not Calibre. (Calibre may attempt to apply their own conversion on top of our own conversion, which can result in unexpected things happening.)

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>Make sure you're on the latest firmware

If I may interject, overriding Kobo's firmware with KOReader (simple drag-n-drop of a file) gave a second life to my Aura 2. It's made it responsive and snappy while providing more features. It may not be necessary for newer ones (or for cover art on sleep), but I was on the fence to upgrade my 5 year old e-reader before trying it, feels like a new device now.

Are you aware that someone is selling your books on Kobo with the Standard Ebooks publisher name?

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?query=standard%20ebooks&ac...

Yes, that's going to happen. The books are in the US public domain and anyone in the US can do anything they want with them, including reselling them. Obviously we are not the ones selling these.

That's fair, but I'd think the issue was less about copyright and more...trademark infringement? Since they're selling as "Standard Ebooks", I think there's reasonable grounds for confusion that someone browsing the Kobo store might see one of the books being offered as coming from you and make a purchase as a kind of donation, thinking that it's going towards SE's upkeep rather than into some random's pocket.

This is a problem Project Gutenberg has had for years, on Amazon and other platforms. It's a game of whack a mole and ultimately not really worth pursuing. As soon as you shut one guy down, another one appears with the same great idea.

In any case almost nobody is buying these anyway, as there are so many other free ebook editions of just about all of these books already.

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe failure to defend a trademark is a great way to lose a trademark.

I'm surprised Kobo doesn't have a list of banned seller names for situations like this. It would take zero effort on their end, and they're clearly opening themselves to liability.

Off to create Amazon and Disney stores over there... /s

I am not a lawyer bit it seems that Standard Ebooks is not a trademark.

The stories may be public domain but your arrangement, and more importantly your trade name are protected. You may not have the desire to take action like a dmca takedown, but you're definitely within your rights to do so.

You can stop the third-party vendor from saying "I am Standard Ebooks", but you can't stop them from referring to the book as coming from Standard Ebooks, because that's true.

That is very sad to see.

Thanks for both answers, I use Calibre, so that’s the reason why I’m getting that.

I've taken to just opening the SE website in the Kobo experimental browser and downloading the books directly onto the device that way. The browser is pretty sluggish, but even then it only takes a few clicks if you know what book you're looking for.

There's been some talk about improving the Kobo browser experience, if you want to take a crack at it! https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/126

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