InkBox OS – open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Kobo's eReaders | Hacker News Reader

InkBox OS – open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Kobo's eReaders

inkbox.ddns.net

54 pointspaulcarroty20 comments

Kobos are fantastic. I don’t think they took off outside of Canada unfortunately.

Last time I was at Value Village I saw a handful of them for $5 each. I picked up a couple of them and turned one into a weather station[0]. Took under 5 minutes including mounting it.

[0]: https://github.com/brunolalb/yawk

Iirc "Tolino" readers in Germany (and maybe rest of Europe) are just rebranded Kobo readers. So... In a sense they took off here?

I just wonder how compatible the firmwares are. Haven't found anything about flashing Kobo firmware (Tolinos use Android) on Tolino devices, so all the cool hacks may not be feasible :(

https://github.com/Kobo-InkBox/inkbox#readme appears to be the non-ddns.net version, and is GPLv3

what do you mean by non-ddns.net version?

ddns.net is a home-IP address masking service which means maybe https://inkbox.ddns.net/git/explore will still be alive in an hour, maybe not. Thus, one can certainly take their chances with the home-hosted gitlab instance or take their chances with GitHub's availability

If you want a hackable e-reader, I have loved the Remarkable tablet. It's definitely more of a "writing" than a "reading" tablet although it works great with pdfs and epubs. Even lets you "write" notes on top of them!

It's not all open source though. They will give you access to the device and you can fairly easily move files on and off, but the app is proprietary.

Both Kobos and Kindles are very hackable. On the older Kindles (not sure about the newer ones) the included shell scripts and JavaScript files are even (pretty well) commented. It's a standard (apart from upstart) X11/Awesome WM/GTK2 stack.

Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyWu_pHwqNg

Oi, it works on the Kindle Touch too? The website just mentions Kobos.

This is the sort of thing I badly want in my life, but the sad reality is that Amazon has a massive ~monopoly~ grip on most of the e publishing market. Most of the books I want to buy only have a electronic version for Kindle.

Being able to strip the DRM so I can read on non-Kindle devices is a major cat and mouse game and it's majorly frustrating to have a solution worked out only to have it break the next time I buy a book. Has anybody had continuing success with this?

Just buy the eBook from Amazon. Then download the DRM-free version of the same ebook from pirate sites (Russian pirate sites are a good resource for this). Enjoy a guilt-free, drm-free experience of reading ebooks.

z-lib has an incredible archive of all the books you could think of and is still available on tor!

how do you find it on tor?

http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52...

https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2021/04/11/dedrm-tools-7...

For any Kobo (as well as Kindle & PocketBook) owners considering stock firmware alternatives, there's also [KOReader](http://koreader.rocks/)

KOReader is fantastic!

Technically it's not really a firmware replacement, but an application on top of it (implementing pretty much all e-book related features).

There's even an Android version, which is how I use it on my Boox tablet.

This looks nice! I wonder if it supports Overdrive? My kobo device is strictly a frontend to the local library; it would be nice to have firmware which wasn't constantly trying to sell me things.

Inkbox? The temporary tattoo technology acquired by BIC?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com