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Comment by rlue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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/

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