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Comment by fvrther | Hacker News Reader

Kobo are giving you root access with telnet from the start. You can flash modded firmwares, change the backend servers to phone your own calibre-web instance, install ssh, koreader and even a tailscale vpn on it. They even have UART pins labelled on their board. These are amazing devices to play with. And they read pretty much everything you throw on their storage: epub, cbz, cbr, pdf..

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I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen.

So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof, significantly cheaper, and you can actually repair it. I ended up getting a Libra Colour for myself and love it.

This shows the decline in Amazon's customer service. I had several Kindles starting with Kindle Keyboard. At that time, Amazon's service was beyond amazing.

At one point, I had some issue with one of the Kindle while it was past 1 year. Amazon sent overnighted new Kindle for free when I was just hoping they give me some troubleshooting steps.

I stopped using Kindle about 4-5 years ago mostly because of all the bad press especially around them removing purchased books. Now I mostly buy paper books. I also use BOOX e-ink tablet to borrow books from library or newspapers. (BOOX is not ideal but there is no other choice of e-ink tablets that can let you use 3rd party apps, sadly.)

I'm on the BOOX train as well. I wanted a device that I could read books and catch up on HN on. Kindles do great with the former (if you're bought into their ecosystem) but suck badly for the latter. (Silk Browser is still too slow and renders all pages server-side with no ability to change this.) My BOOX Page 7 does everything I want and more, though I did choose to root and debloat it as well as install a firewall given the company's (ONYX) shady backgrounds.

my biggest fear from moving out of kindle is losing access to the store. they did a good job securing most of the authors and books.

what’s your source for books and how often it happens for the books you’re looking for to be unavailable?

Libgen, #bookz on irc, and dedrm plugin for calibre will let you get drm free copies of books you already own so you can use them however you see fit

Sadly Libgen seems to have been down for the past couple of months, there is some discussion whether it will ever come back or not.

I heard some new guys were running it federal bureau of something

Depends where you look :)

It's mostly gone now. Even on the newer domains.

https://open-slum.org/

This is why I buy an android e-ink tablet.

My needs are unique, all of our needs are unique I suppose, but I want epub but also want to use the Kindle app (in cases of them being the only place to get a book).

I worry about firmware updates(security), but also my needs do not require the tablet being online constantly. So in a case like this, not a phone, not online, I only bring the wifi up to download books from Amazon via their Android app.

Otherwise, I copy epubs over via USB.

This is the middle ground.

I've been quite happy with the Meebook E-Reader M7.

FWIW actual kindles don’t need to be online except if you are buying a book or transferring one via their website.

Older Kindles did have an optional cellular connection, but that was to make purchases easier.

Kindles aren’t limited to the Amazon store. Your kindle has an email address you can email books to, and there are ways to transfer via USB, etc.

thanks, i researched into this and bought a boox go color 7. now i can have both the kindle app (for books i can't buy anywhere else or already purchased) and new books outside of kindle app. bonus, it has text to speech which kindle doesn't really want to let you do so it won't lower audible purchases. not the same quality as audoble, of course, but free.

google search "book_name epub"

This is rather terrible for supporting authors though. I read a lot of scifi from small authors who self publish on kindle direct publishing, and I would rather they get my money for their work.

And yes I can pay then find the epub (and not all are available, due to small author), but the experience is then much worse.

Contact the author, send direct to paypal. this way you get freedom, they get more money

> rather terrible for supporting authors ... scifi from small authors who self > publish on kindle ... I would rather they get my money for their work.

I would suggest you write them (each of them) a letter, or email, which:

1. Discourage them from publishing on an Amazon platform, explaining how Amazon, and DRM-laden reading, is terrible.

2. Suggest that they publish with a link allowing readers to pay them directly, or at least via a payment platform (see here for example: https://www.mightynetworks.com/resources/patreon-alternative... )

While this is right in theory, in practice I don't think you realize why those authors are there : discovery and ease of management. Your offer makes them lose both, for what gain from their POV ?

But Amazon DRM-laden reading isn’t terrible. I buy a book, it’s on my Kindle. With Kindle Unlimited, I can read tons of books for a fairly small monthly price.

Not sure what problem we’re trying to solve.

So, I had a kindle, amazon prime, everything.. until the pandemic, and here in Norway we don't have an amazon webshop of our own. Up until this point I had been buying from Amazon US. The pandemic made shipping from the US hard, and so I decided to use AmazonUK, my login worked there, so i just switched to using that one. Then shipping from the UK became hard (brexit), so I started using AmazonDE.

Then Amazon locked my account, and said I needed to prove who I am. So I did, sent in documents to prove who I was. Didn't matter, apparently I had broken some rule about using my login in different amazon stores or something. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do that.

So now I lost all my books I had bought, because Amazon decided to ban me.

If I had bought these books from any open store, I would still have my books.. but because I bought from Amazon, I've lost them all.

That's why DRM free books are important.

The problem of supporting authors who actually want to be paid more than beer money (or any money, really) for their work, for one.

There's also the problem of moving those books onto another platform once Amazon directly affects you and you wish to move onto something else. (Amazon Unlimited DRM hasn't been broken yet.)

This is partially on the author, and I say this as somebody how writes as a hobby. It's not too difficult to publish on the Kobo store, and there are other stores out there. Of course, it's difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to reach and to some small features, but they are no panacea either. For example, they don't support epub 3 with aural synchronized media, and they do something terrible to images embedded into ebooks that make them frankly useless. And they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content.

I believe Amazon impose a whole bunch of conditions on people publishing on their platform. Along the lines of exclusivity and controlling where else if at all you can sell it. I'm pretty sure Corey Doctorow extensively covered this.

Yes they do. One particularly annoying one is about pricing: price can't be zero. If you write as a hobby and don't care about making a dollar, then Amazon gets in the way. Sure, you can publish in Amazon and charge 1 USD, but then you can't publish your book on your own website for free because it goes against Amazon's TOS.

There are other peeves. Covers for example: it's against the TOS to have a cover that shows female nipples, but it's okay to show male nipples. Beyond the sexism of the rule, I'm worried that the way to enforce this is to have some ML system checking all the covers and making judgements about nipples. Which means you have to ask your cover artist to not draw anything that may accidentally look like the wrong kind of nipple \o/ .

> they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content

Probably because of the kindles with 'free data' to download books.

FWIW, Amazon generally doesn’t require DRM on ebooks.

> This is rather terrible for supporting authors though.

Supporting a terrible platform to become the main place to get books is way, way worse.

`filetype:epub book_name` should be tried first, in my opinion.

... but this does not replicate the kindle one-stop store experience. and looking on the kobo store doesn't help either, i wanted the experience for someone who actually migrated from kindle. i may find the books i'm looking for now, but what are the struggles for people who actually used it? do they come later than kindle, are they using multiple shops, etc.

edit; yes, i know about the pirating options. i'm not talking about those.

Kobo in my experience has all the books from big publishers, the publishers that publish paper books too. What they do not have is the stuff from Kindle Direct Publishing. This is stuff people have self-published on Kindle, I think Amazon requires exclusivity when you do that too?

In my opinion this is actually more of a blessing than a curse since I consider 99% of that garbage I don't want to sift through.

Sometimes multiple store headaches are still a necessity depending on region. Even on Amazon.

IIRC they give you a better revenue split or something of that nature if you only publish there

same

If there's no DRM-free version available to purchase, I buy from the kobo store (it's very easy to access different region stores which can impact book availability) and I then remove the DRM. Library genesis is also an option, of course.

You can browse the Kobo book store here https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebooks

What are the prices compared to Amazon's? Books are generally cheaper here in the subcontinent. I did a price comparison of 30 books and found out that Kindle editions cost significantly lesser than Kobo. And Kobo editions cost slightly higher than paperbacks.

The total amount for these 30 randomly selected books came to: Paperback price: ₹13,017 (~$149) Kobo price: ₹13,252 (~$152) Kindle price: ₹9,171 (~$105)

I found that it's often best to use google search to search the kobo store. Books sometimes have multiple editions with significant price differences. Not sure if it would make a difference in this case.

What other popular stores exist? And I assume you sideload those books to Kobo afterwards? In that case, is the experience of reading sideloaded books inferior to that of reading store bought books?

I don't know if it still works, but the last time I checked it was possible to un-DRM (de-DRM?), and convert amazon format to normal epub, and read it everywhere

Depends on which version of the DRM. KFX hasn’t been broken yet. It’s been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where the DeDRM people make some progress then Amazon tweaks something and they have to start over. There are some workarounds that involve getting Amazon to give you an older version of the file, but then you lose the typography improvements present in later versions of Amazon’s ebook format.

Yeah there's a way to do this with Calibre + some plugins on windows. I tried on my Mac but it was unsuccessful.

I use the libby app on Kobo to get books from the library. Its just what I need. I can add epubs and pdfs from dropbox but never use that any more.

annas-archive.org

ebooks.com has loads of books on the platform, though they're DRMed. libby's great also.

no need to be locked into kindle anymore.

transferring books is also easy. you can install Calibre on your computer, connect the Kindle to it via USB and transfer. if you're into self-hosted, you can run Calibre on a server, either as an installed binary or in a container, and send books to it via email or dropbox.

Search for alternative first. If it doesn't exist: purchase and download the file from amazon and remove the DRM.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155 - Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th (2025-02-16)

See title of OP ;)

This thread is about Kindle alternatives. If you don't have a Kindle at all, there's nothing to jailbreak.

anna archives

I got a Kindle (moving on from an absolutely ancient rooted Nook) purely because the Oasis looked so nice

I'll never get a Kindle again because I was blown away by how impossible it was to repair (plus the closed system really sucks). Mine broke for no reason at all a bit ago; my best guess is the battery started to swell inside it and that broke the screen. Got a Forma super cheap ($25!) and I've been super happy with it, feels a bit cheaper but it's actually got some level of grip. Have read more on it in a month than I did on my Kindle in the last 3 years.

Haven't even dabbled into the custom tools stuff much but it all sounds great. Might get a cheap secondary one to play with, can become an (outdated) offline Wikipedia reader if nothing else.

Where did you find a Kobo Forma so cheap? A quick check on Ebay lists the cheapest at 150€, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong model.

Just got really lucky. Someone hadn't a clue what they were selling, was listed as "Kobo e reader" or something very vague like that. Fully expected it to either be broken or not match the image.

In general the Forma looks overpriced imo, the benefits of the 8 inch screen don't really warrant a price that nears the Libra Color or Sage.

Shocking that battery didn't work after a year. I still use my Kindle 3 from 2010; it still holds weeks of standby charge, days worth of reading.

Don’t they have a 12 month warranty? What do you want Amazon to do after more than 12 months? 10% discount is above and beyond their obligations.

Have human wellbeing as the priority in making products.

Treat users with respect.

Make hardware open, firmware open, repairable.

Let’s be honest here, there are user hostile products and pro-user products. Let’s make making user hostile products illegal / unprofitable with laws.

For the record, my Kindle died after 4 years and Amazon replaced it. That one died after 2 and they replaced it again - all free. Australian Consumer Law is required to be followed if they want to trade here. If you want respect, speak to your lawmakers.

I thought 4 years is not bad at all but it’s even better because „consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law, … don’t have a specific expiry date“ and „apply for a period of time that is considered reasonable having regard to the nature of the products or services“[0].

0. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/broken-but-out-of-warr...

ACL is fantastic, gotten my 2017 MacBook Pro 15" fixed multiple times for free even out of applecare, last time it was fixed, it was 6 years old. Had issues with the keyboard, and the screen. Seems to be a common issue with this model.

https://gregsamborski.com/macbook-pro-led-screen-discolorati...

It's completely reasonable to expect it to last longer than 12 months, especially considering this is their premium model.

In Europe, consumers should be getting longer protection than 1 year. May require a fight / small claims court submission to exercise one's rights.

Here in Mew Zealand we have the consumer guarantees act. Stuff needs to last for a duration commensurate with its price. Nice and vague and super good for the consumer.

An iPhone can generally get fixed under warranty for 2-3 years. I’ve never tried a Kindle but the premium model should get 2 years without too much fuss.

Consumer protections in the UK and EU means they have to last a reasonable length of time, and if not you get a proportional refund (or repair, or replace). I've had refunds from devices several years old.

Amazon is [d]evolving the concept of "owning" what you paid for - slowly, but surely [1]

[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-removing-download...

Yes, every device should fail immediately upon warranty expiration.

You should build a company founded on that principle.

Call it GTL Pty Ltd

Formerly known as Guaranteed To Last, but they dropped that naming and are now know simple as GTL after a social media smear campaign where people were saying ‘guaranteed to be the last thing you ever buy from that company’.

Oh, come on, they could totally own that smear campaign. "Guaranteed to be the last [class of device] you ever buy, unless you give it away." Something something heirlooms, put together a simple, 30-second narrative for the advertisement campaign, job done.

12 months is a laughable amount of time. Sadly, companies have normalized such short periods of time, so much so that everybody would give me looks when I say that 5 or 10 years would be more appropriate. Especially tech folks, so I'm expecting pushback in a forum like HN.

My in-laws have a few kitchen appliances from the 80s. Still working rock-solid. Not the wifi-enabled modern crap with some shitty cloud-based app that you need to replace all the time.

In Europe the minimum is 2 years, but I agree it's still too short.

That's kinda my point. Two years are better than one, but celebrating it as the achievement is really missing the bigger picture (and is a great success of lobbying work)

Would be normal/natural if we could change the batteries and not throw away devices when the battery fails even more natural when the device is not dirt cheep.

This! I've worked on https://github.com/bjesus/air as a completely alternative and open source UI for my Kobo Clara HD. PostmarketOS support on the device is great and very recently an important patch that will allow us to use Wayland was also merged: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merg...

This looks great. Is there by out-of-the-box usable e-reader that supports SSH? Air still has some manual steps/maintenance.

For comparison, I've used PostmarketOS on Pinephone, and it required a lot of fiddly to get a poor experience.

But maybe the simpler usecase of "just reading" has good solutions?

Looks like I could use https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian-image on my PineNote.

Remarkable Pro looks great and runs Linux and has SSH out of the box.

Boox devices are Android based, so also pretty hackable.

I moved from Kindle to Kobo for the sole reason that the backlight had tunable color temperature. I've ended up liking it for lot of reasons, including how open they are.

Kindle Paperwhite (and possibly others) have adjustable colour temperature too, with time-based automation. From a quick squizz, not quite the same as the Kobo (I don't think it has the "more blue in daytime" function) but just noting that it does exist on some in some fashion.

It's great that Paperwhite have caught up to Kobo in this manner. Back when I was evaluating replacing my (lost) Kindle I believe it was only an option on the top tier ($300+) Kindle.

I love Kobo for that. I hooked UART with a Variometer (measure rate of climb in aircraft) and use it in glider soaring as a flight computer (good contrast on sunny day)

Posted the details here: https://zabirauf.dev/blog/aviation/glider_flight_computer

Thank you! You just sold a kobo :-)

I have a remarkable 2 and really like it, but my wife needs a new "Kindle" and I'd rather cut my finger off than pay Amazon to abuse me. Looking forward to trying out the kobo

Is remarkable 2 a good ebook reader?

The actual experience of reading is quite good, but, it is not really fully-featured for EPUBs.I was trying to reflow text into a different font and size yesterday and it took forever. I ended up giving up. It is, however, quite hackable, and `rmapi` on GitHub allows you fine control of its (linux) system.

Nope, though possibly with a custom workflow, it might be.

I own a Kindle Scribe, Paperwhite (a couple versions) and reMarkable 2, and while I promise myself to set up an easier experience for using reMarkable for reading and then selling the Scribe, I didn't find the time so they "got me".

It has no backlight, which I would find annoying, but i know someone who has read tens of thousands of pages on the remarkable 2. It's easy enough to copy epubs and pdfs to it though, and the screen is big which helps.

Personally, I find it to be an excellent ebook reader. Easy to navigate, and works well with epubs and PDFs. I like to highlight and annotate on books as I read, and to me that is an absolutely killer feature that the remarkable allows me to do. It also saves a separate copy with the annotations so you aren't marking up your original, which is something I really love.

Devices made specifically to be e-readers are usually a bit less friction. but to me, The openness and hackability of the remarkable and it's excellent feature set for writing makes it an excellent choice.

I have a reMarkable 2. It's better as a book annotator than a book reader, IMO. It's fine for my use case (reading during rest periods while at the gym), but I wouldn't use it as a full-time reader, as it can get quite slow and doesn't have very many eReader features.

Fwiw, several stories here on HN about remarkable, so a search is probably worth doing if you've not read those other stories yet.

The Kobo Libra Colour has the best UX of a device I own, in that it's completely invisible. I can just read my damn books, highlight passages I think are noteworthy and save words I like the sound of. Everything just works, and the high seas experience is seamless.

I’ve recently looked into buying a replacement Kindle. In the end the Kindle hardware looks and feels much more premium with the display being even with the frame.

I hope there’s new models coming from Kobo that address that soon.

I recently had a very bad experience with Kobo.com. Bought an ebook thinking I could simply download and view it on computer. haha was I naive... I could not download it from the website, instead the download gave me some XML file for some Adobe shit app, which would then download it. But I did not sign up to download and install Adobe shit on my machine. So another option is using the Kobo app. But guess what... they don't have it for GNU/Linux. And I thought maybe I can use it with WINE, but their friggin download link for the app did not even work in Firefox, even when allowing all the third party crap they put on that page to load. So that way was also blocked. OK, I thought, let's get it refunded then. But good luck!!! finding any kind of support e-mail address! All their docs and links brought me back to their chat bot, which did not help me and instead always directed me to the docs again.

Worse, they have the audacity to state on their pages that only some ebooks are eligible for a refund and to find out whether yours is, they send you back into the docs and chat bot loop. I guess they don't want people to refund, so they made finding any contact info especially difficult.

How to make a real shitty user experience 101, presented to you by kobo.com. With this it is clear to me, that I will never again buy any ebooks from them. For anyone, who does not own their Kobo device already, I say hands off this one! Maybe buy the book and download a DRM free ebook from ... elsewhere. That way you pay, can have a clean conscience and enjoy your ebook.

DRM free ebooks are very few and far between, especially current titles.

What you describe is a pain and all true, this is just the state of ebooks unfortunately.

Kobo is not great at offering refunds like Amazon, as expected in many ways being a much more lean business not being propped up by AWS margins.

Kobos are just a simpler mental model for non IT experts as well, you plug them in, they behave like a USB key, you can't get easier than that.

Behaving like a USB key is not a simpler mental model than "buy books on Amazon and they're on your device".

I agree on the freedom for geeks, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking non IT experts want to deal with files.

Kobo has the same thing. Buy books on Kobo and they are on your device. But they also support ePub natively and ADE DRM natively so there's more options of where to source books before conversion.

Kindles have literally always behaved like that, from the beginning.

The very newest generation of Kindle changed the storage protocol from traditional mass storage (which was compatible with everything) to MTP, which is mildly annoying for Mac users, but it is still intended to just show up as a flash drive.

That is exactly how Kindle first generation used to work, and thankfully mine still does its job.

I love my Kobo reader and am happy with switching to it after a decade or more of daily Kindle use. But I think it is important to not over-sell it. It has had certain unexpected frailties, such as corrupting the database when I neglected to eject the USB device before pulling the cable, something that resulted in losing my notes and current progress. I also had to learn about the Kobo ePub format and install a Calibre plugin to get that working, otherwise some ePub files would rapidly drain the Kobo battery. I did not expect bad html/css to significantly affect battery life. I'm not sure I would recommend it to an older person or someone who doesn't have a little patience for tinkering.

I'm still daily using my kobo touch from 2011, my oldest piece of 'still in use tech' (other than the Wii, which the kids still bowl on!).

Not being bound to an ecosystem, has really been a blessing - and in part kept it in use.

I had no idea the extent that Kobos allow you to do these sort of things. Heavily considering a Kobo as my next e-reader once my PW3 gives ups. Is there a good starting resource for Kobo modifications like you mentioned?

Mobile read forum for most of it, but also heavily recommend kobopatch

1. https://github.com/pgaskin/kobopatch-patches/releases optional but nice to tweak some small ui details and get rid of ads

2. https://github.com/videah/kobo-tailscale to have a secure connection with your calibre-web instance, but you could also use self-signed certs

3. https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio... adding books to calibre-web will cause them to appear on the device the next time it syncs with calibre-web

We also have the amazing Plato reader, like koreader but with a snapper UI and made exclusively for kobo and written in Rust by the guy responsible for bspwm.

https://github.com/baskerville/plato

There are ads in kobo? Is it normal or some sort of cheaper offering like kindles?

No ads per se, but a recommendation tile and a kobo plus subscription tile on the main screen that just eats display space for nothing. I mainly use kobopatch to change the epub reader margins, get the page remaining in a chapter and block firmware updates and a few other details. Totally optional, it's just pure nitpicking here. Here is all my kobo modding work in this repo, you can also find what firmware mods are available...

https://github.com/obynio/kobopatch-config/tree/master/src

Thanks, I'm liking kobo more and more every time I read about it :).

Out of curiosity, why block updates? Does it conflict with your modification

Thank you! Will peruse over these

They're also intentionally repairable! I've got a Kobo Libra Colour which is a newer model, and its product page links to ifixit. I love it so much.

Newer devices apparently use secure boot and prevent modding the firmware, causing the developers of the Inkbox/Quill alternative distro to abandon the entire project: https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill

What you can't do on Kobo is use the page up and down buttons to scroll in the web browser unless you go through the effort of installing the cross-compiling toolchain and building a display server and a browser.

I bought a pretty early Kobo like 10+ years ago and found myself very underwhelmed with the software situation. I sold it and went back to my kindle.

Maybe it's time to take a second look. The hacker in me's interest is piqued.

Frankly though, the biggest thing that keep me on Kindle these days I suspect are hard to replicate. For example, automatic audio book/kindle sync where I can switch back and forth, listening to the audio book in my car and reading at home in bed. For two, read.amazon.com where I can read from my locked down work machine without installing anything. The whole whispersync ecosystem.

I don’t use any Amazon hardware but Kindle Unlimited has got me like netflix did back in the day.

Trashy sci fi is my vice.

Not to mention you're not blowing money up Bezo's botoxed arse.

I moved away from Kobo because of the ancient USB port, and got my PocketBook with USB-C four years ago, and I am still using the PocketBook.

With USB-C, Kobo would be a very good product. I guess they use it now.

They do. It's great.

There are also the onyx boox models, many run android, and it seems like you can install whatever you want. I have no experience with them myself, but I am curios.

I have a Onyx Boox Go Color 7, and I love it.

Wow, this is so unbelievable, that I decided to sell my Kindle Oasis and get a Kobo. Thank you for this comment. I hate the restrictions on my Kindle.

Do you know how much of this applies to older Kobos? I love my Forma but I'd rather start experimenting like crazy on a 2011 one first if I can.

True. To play the Devil's Advocate, Kindle is exceptionally cheap (especially the older models) on Prime Days

I really like my old Kobo, but I was a tad disappointed when I had to swap the screen. It's a very shoddy build. The screen is glued to the board and the battery is soldered. I felt like it was made to break when you try to open it.

I switched from Kindle to Kobo and out of the box it would hard-crash within a few minutes of using it, every single time. You have to pry the case off and remove the internal battery hard reboot it. I sent it in, waited 2 months for a replacement, and the new one (with new firmware) does the exact same thing.

I despise Amazon as a brand but nothing comes close to the kindle hardware wise. Waterproof, indestructible, and never had it crash.

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