Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveoc64 | Hacker News Reader

>I’m not sure why anyone buys Kindles when there are so many better options available.

For me, the Kobo lacks something like the Send to Kindle feature.

I can send books I've obtained from outside the Kindle Store (DRM free sellers, Humble Bundle, public domain etc.) and then store them in my Kindle library.

These are then synchronised across all of my Kindle devices and apps - completely for free

Kobo does have integration with cloud storage, but it's not the same feature.

Plus it has the Kindle Store, which has the biggest selection of books for sale.

View on HN

> Plus it has the Kindle Store, which has the biggest selection of books for sale.

Because Amazon abuses its position to get there, right? I see how it makes it more convenient, but I also see how that is a reason for not buying a Kindle.

Correct.

Maybe more intensely, if a book is available on Kindle Unlimited, Amazon has exclusive rights to the book and it is not available on any other digital store.

A working solution for me was to deploy a little website to organize both my physical and ebooks in the same place. For physical books, it tells me where they should be. For ebooks, I can download the file, the website is light enough that it works fine with my ebook reader.

Surely there are bugs, but here it is, if you'd like to give it a spin: https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

Interestingly enough, I had tried to find a way to add an 'email to my device' option, but it was too fiddly. I got it working with OAUTH + gmail, but setting it up was not exactly user-friendly. The simple download option worked much better.

Anyway just a weekend project I extended a little. Don't expect much polish :D

That looks good (not actually cloned and tried it yet).

However the screenshots in the README show (for me anyway) as broken links, even though they work when clicked on. I can see you're linking to the images in the blobs. If it helps, for my own stuff in the README I link relative to the README file in the actual source. So for one of yours for example I'd use: ./ubiblio_menu.png

This also has the advantages of both being self-contained and also working locally (eg in the VS Code preview) before you've pushed the images.

Isn't that what Calibre is for?

Calibre doesn't automatically sync books across all your devices, including last read position, bookmarks, highlights etc.

Why would I want to connect my ereader to a computer?

It's not 2004 and it's not an iPod.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com