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Comment by yzydserd | Hacker News Reader

> Much improved Kobo support. calibre can now natively edit, view and convert KEPUB format files used by the Kobo. It also automatically converts EPUB to KEPUB when sending books to Kobo devices.

Great to see improved Kobo support.

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Most of the Kobo support was already extant in plugins, but their position was precarious because the plugin maintainer for many of those had passed away.

For this release Kovid obsoleted many of those plugins by moving the functionality into the base application. He also has his own Kobo now, so he's able to take on that maintenance.

Never had issues with Kobo devices and Calibre. Is there any advantage to converting books to KEPUB format?

There’s some extra stats when you open the book on the device. I _think_ that’s pretty much it though. AFAIK KEPUB is just ePub with bits of added metadata.

I think that for some reason they use different renderers, and the kepub one consumes less battery.

I think you can get more format options with kepub, also page numbers are more accurate?

Some ebooks that have extremely long chapters have very slow page turning performance towards the end of the chapter. (e.g. most of the Terry Pratchett Discworlds that are essentially one large chapter)

There's probably an O(n^2) page break algo there which is fixed with the kepub format

I’ve been converting to KEPUB[1] for years and two things I noticed immediately as I started doing so and still stick in my mind are more accurate page numbers and faster page-turning performance. Can’t really say anymore how much of a difference it is, since I always convert.

[1]: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

https://send.djazz.se uses this under the hood and can be self hosted

Footnotes open in popup windows over the current page instead of teleporting you to the end of the book, is one feature that I love.

The books I buy from the Kobo store always have the page numbers match up with the rendered pages. The books I... acquire through other means... do not.

I haven't tested this yet but kepub imbeds progress data, which means this can probably be synced with Calibre. This is very nice for those of us which keep a larger library and change readers over time. Prior to this, we had to use a very janky workaround to sync this data. Most of us just didn't bother, so when moving books around, the progress data would reset.

It can make a huge difference in performance and batterylife, as well as how well images are rendered. I learned this by chance through this (great) site https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...

This was after a year or two of suffering through bad performance and a janky experience. Except for the purchased books of course. Somehow I never thought it was possible to fix.

I used addon kobo support with calibre previously. It looks like they incorporated their functionality into the main app.

Nice, but not game changing.

Oh I'll have to test that one. Turns out that the text justification kobo uses is very sensitive to the HTML structure.

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