Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

I will never buy an eReader without support for koreader. It's absolutely essential to me, most importantly:

* Lots of quick fixes for poorly chosen CSS properties (called "style tweaks" in koreader), just apply them on-the-fly.

* Support for StarDict dictionaries, which you'll find plenty for all kinds of languages.

* Great PDF support with automatic or manual cropping, and special viewing mode for two columns, perfect for scientific papers.

* OPDS support so than I can easily download books from my Calibre library

* On Kobo, way, way more options to set the backlight (original firmware is way too bright in the dark even on lowest setting), many options to configure "warmth" of the backlight for late-night reading

* Great support for bookmarks

* Super easy to hack and contribute as almost everything is written in Lua

Nice list! May I ask what dictionaries do you use (I've just chosen from the internal list, but they seem not that "ideal" after Oxford)? By the way about backlight - on Android there is a bug with that feature: warm light can't be used and also if you start using automatic lighting it does not actually work. Not a big deal: just using system presets from device lighting menu.

I use the ones from https://www.thefictionary.net for a few large series ( Cosmere, Realms of Elderlings, Malazan, Worm). Helpful to keep track of characters especially if you’re picking it up after a break.

I personally use a dictionary generated from a wikitionary dump. I used to use a script [1] to generate it, but some are now already available and linked in the KOReader wiki [2]. I found a wikitionary-based bilingual dictionary is quite good!

[1]: https://gitlab.com/artefact2/wiktionary-to-stardict [2]: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Dictionary-support...

I've bought a dictionary from Pons when that was still available many years ago, I dimly remember there was a script to convert it to StarDict. Nowadays it's a bit difficult because everything has moved to online services, you often cannot buy these anymore as offline versions. I'd suggest to go search mobileread.com and Reddit, there are usually good suggestions there...

Another killer feature for me is its built-in support for Wallabag. I host my own server and routinely save longer articles to it so that I can download and read them on my Kobo later.

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