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Comment by rlue | Hacker News Reader

My dream for an open e-book reader is to have some kind of graphical OPDS browser as a substitute for the commercial storefronts offered by Amazon/Rakuten/etc. If you could host and publish your own ebook library (using BookLore or something similar), then explore and fetch content off of it with the same UI polish as you can get from a corporate vendor (complete with cover art galleries, carousels for recent releases and recommendations and the like), I think that'd make e-readers so much more appealing and usable for diehard FOSS folks.

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I got beat to the punch in being the one to tell you, but I can add a link: https://github-wiki-see.page/m/koreader/koreader/wiki/OPDS-s...

You can do that with koreader. It can even sync progress now with kavita. Stimulating what Amazon called whisper sync.

I use koreader, including its OPDS server support! While I'm always grateful for all FOSS (and especially for well-written FOSS), koreader's OPDS UI still has a long way to go to approximate what I'm imagining. It's basically a file browser in List view, whereas a good digital book storefront would include gallery views with cover art, synopses and other metadata when clicking into any individual publication, search functionality, recommendation carousels, and more.

Let's be honest, if we are talking about UX for the average user the koreader UI has a long way to go in general.

Yeah they could take some lessons from Plato. However, koreader works on everything. Android, Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook etc. Not just on Kobo like Plato does.

It took me some getting used to but it's not bad IMO. It's more that its conventions are a bit different from the commercial readers but that's not a bad thing.

Koreader is pretty intimidating at first but once you dig into its features and know what's going on, it's pretty easy to navigate into the menus. It require some time to invest at first, but after that it's really "set and forget" with some lovely features and power to customise absolutely everything. I love the statistics wallpaper that shows you how much you read previous 7 days, per day, and the fact that you can set every book parameter as default, making every epubs looking the same, something I've never been able to achieve with stock Kobo, where I absolutely hated beginning a new book and discover huge fonts, weird margins, and tiny line-spacing, that I had to set again.

I just installed it on my Kindle Oasis. No way to just replicate the Kindle view of all my books in a list regardless of directory, and the real killer was that it doesn't invert page turn buttons when the display is rotated. PRs welcome, I'm sure, but I had to give up on it.

True, that could be spiced up a lot. But I didn't think you intended it for mainstream users in your comment. For the HN crowd it should be enough. A mainstream user will not be messing around with OPDS servers anyway.

And recommendation caroussels are a bit too much like advertising to me. Something I wouldn't want on self-hosted stuff.

There is a brand new plugin for KOReader that offers a richer experience and uses Kavita's API. I don't have a link handy, but it was shared in the Kavita discord (and will be on the wiki once I write a new page for it).

Koreader's OPDS implementation is VERY rough around the edges. It doesn't support much of the metadata and doesn't follow the spec very well. I had to write hacks in Kavita to give users better support for it. (My understanding is Koreader isn't too hot on OPDS in general).

Is there a standard format to replace OPDS in the works?

I had the same issue, and I'm working on an ebook reader that does exactly what you're asking for. It's not available yet, but there are screenshots here:

https://leafl.it/

That sounds neat! I have an old kobo clara HD. I run koreader through nickelmenu, and I have to let it load its native software before selecting and switching into koreader. I'm also under the impression that if I connect it to the internet I'm at risk of losing my setup via wireless update. I think I had to delete a config file by mounting the device to linux to be able to even use it without a walmart / ratuken / whatever idp account in the first place.

Everyone here is lauding kobo for being so 'open' and 'hackable', but when I set mine up in 2022 it kind of just felt like they just weren't as good at fucking me over and subverting my intentions as Amazon. Kind of like being an intruder in your own home. Have things changed? Should I update my setup?

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