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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

I like this a lot - particularly as there may be a range of reasons that you can’t get hold of a particular book in physical form.

I’ve never used or looked into non-ecosystem e-readers. Do you have any recommendations?

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I use the Calibre e-reader with custom style overrides to get my preferred spacing, margins etc. It's ugly out of the box but doesn't require much tweaking to look like Apple Books if you know css. Works great on MacOs/Linux/Windows (I use them all). If a book has hardcoded fonts/styles/spacing I don't like then I use the Calibre editor to remove them.

I don't use Calibre as a library tool, I find that pretty annoying. I just use a git repo with folders for genres and markdown file with each book for notes.

On Android I use ReadEra.

Cheers - this works great. I’ll have to stick to using Calibre for library management, unfortunately, as I run a Kindle too.

What are your overrides? Thanks!

I use a window a bit bigger than a typical fiction paperback and a bit wider aspect ratio. I like a good bit of whitespace in the margin to help me concentrate. I don't want the text to feel crampt or my reading scanline to enter another window. After making the changes I zoom in (ctrl-mousewheel) until the text is roughly 20pt on a 34" screen (depends on the screen). The viewer might need to be restarted to sort out the layout changes.

This is what I have in my notes for the settings. Just a result of iterative poking until I like it so the css is uh... not fit for a code review :)

# Font

   Baskerville (google fonts) I think I might use Merriweather on some OS because they render differently, I can't recall offhand).

# Colours

    custom scheme:

    foreground: #2f2f2f

    background: #fcfcfc

# Page Layout > Padding

    100, 100

    75, 75

# Misc

  - remember window last position

# Headers and footers

  - progress bottom right

# Style > css

   p 
   { 
     line-height: 1.5em !important;
     font-size: 0.854em !important;
     padding-bottom: 25px; 
     text-indent: 35.868px !important;
   }
   
   div 
   { 
     line-height:1.5em; 
     padding-top: 1em; 
   }
   
   line-height: 1.5em;

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