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Comment by kelvinjps10 | Hacker News Reader

What extra features has over regular kindle software? I find kindle features enough but I want to know if I’m missing something

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As someone who thought the same (stock was enough for me) until I had some free time and switched, here are some things I'm really enjoying, in no particular order:

- Format support: EPUB, CBR/CBZ (comics, graphic novels), PDF

- Dark mode

- Fully programmable gestures and shortcuts

- Automatically syncs with my readeck instance (think readitlater/instapaper) to dowload the articles I save for example here on HN

- Calibre integration over wifi

- RSS/Atom

- Custom dictionaries

If you are into manga, there is an extension for directly downloading them on the device

I'm really happy I made the switch.

What's the point of Dark mode on an eink screen?

Because most of the page is dark, with light only coming from the text, the total light emitted is much less. That makes it less annoying to my wife, when I'm reading before going to sleep.

Eink doesn't emit light.

this is the worst kind of pedantic engineer comment that seems to infest this site. they're obviously talking about the frontlight. dark mode reflects much much less light back at the user through the lightguide because the dark bg absorbs more of the light.

It wasn't obvious. My thought process was that they were equating ereaders with eink displays, and they had a non-eink ereader. To me, emitting light and reflecting light are completely different.

(I suppose I'm not supposed to feel complimented by the term 'engineer'? I'm not trained/experienced in any engineering discipline, not even software engineering.)

Many Kindles have backlights for night-time reading!

I think they're frontlights :-)

But indeed it's a feature I cherish.

If you want pedantic ridiculousness, well, notice that I never said that the e-ink emits light. It does, however reflect light back from the device's frontlight. The device taken as a system most certainly emits light, but less so when in dark mode.

Very true. Sorry for misreading your comment.

I thought perhaps you had a non-eink ereader and were equating eink screens with ereaders. Apologies.

I use dark mode for this too!

For some people it's less eye straining if they're reading at night, doesn't help for me personally, but it's a popular feature

I have no idea but users seem to like it despite all the ghosting.

The reason I use koreader is because it can sync my progress on disparate devices. I have a normal sized kobo and also a phone sized viwoods eink device.

Being able to put epubs bought elsewhere and reading them without needing to convert the files is a huge plus

Where do you buy your epubs from?

In my case from different places like itch.io , smashwords.com, gumroad.com, some fundraisings that provide epubs. You also have some nice free places like standardebooks.org. Or you can sail the digital seven seas if there's no availability.

Theres a long trail of smaller stores, including Kobo store and ebooks.com

Standard Ebooks for high quality public domain books, though they also offer azw.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ has more books than you will be able to read in your lifetime for no cost. Some are classics for a reason, some are garbage - same as any other publisher.

There are a number of other free ebook sites out there as well.

Anna's Archive

I wouldn't assume that purchases are taking place.

Considering that the GP said

> Being able to put epubs bought elsewhere

I'd say it is in this case.

Kindle already supports that, or at least my 5 years old vanilla Kindle can.

Not quite. If you use the "send to kindle" feature, since 2022 Amazon will convert it for you before it puts it on the device.

If you copy an epub to the device over USB it won't work. The kindle itself does not support epub.

really, epub without conversion? Which kindle can do thay?

Stuff which may be above the kindle stock features (as seen on Paperwhite 10):

- Allowing to highlight text across pages. Used to work in the past but no longer works

- Allowing exit to library from mobi files without a cold reboot of the device. Used to work, no longer works.

- Not deleting contents of my library on an update overnight? (files still on disk, metadata gone, no longer visible on Kindle)

- consistently working dictionary, offline, at least for English texts? (used to mostly work, with recent updates it is broken)

- Not getting worse on every update

- Better keyboard layout, maybe supporting smaller languages

- Not deleting purchased books remotely

- better bookmarks and navigation support. I find Kindle useless for the technical reading and learning materials, as navigation and cross-referencing is slow clunky and useless, I need paper books for that, or a computer.

- Better image display? Also hinders proper use for digesting technical content.

- Text Search?

- EPUB support.

IMO the most important one is more options for PDF rendering, often allowing you to read PDFs without squinting.

Never updating if you don't want an update. I see no reason for my e-reader to have updates. I have a Kobo and after I updated it once about 5 years ago I haven't since because it already does everything I need it to.

- Better and faster UI. I always thought the Kindle was just slow, nope, it's just really bad software

- Customise any/everything. Font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, margins, header/footer content, the list goes on

- Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats.

- LLM-integration through plugins like KOAssistant, highlight a word/phrase/passage to get it explained to you. This was invaluable for me when reading through a series from the 1950's about the late 1700's, lots of phrases I'd never heard. Many I could grasp the meaning from context but it was way more fun to hear the "why" behind the phrase. Same with historical events that I am less knowledgeable about than I wish. Let's me stay "in the book" instead of picking up my phone.

- Full control, some people don't care/need this but I love being able to SSH into my Kindle and do whatever I want. I love having my entire book reading experience end-to-end be fully open source and self-hosted.

Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats

I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.

Same here, I jailbroke my kindle just 1-2 months ago (when the PW5 JB came out) and I had been using BookOrbit for only a few weeks before then. Since then I've read over 15 books and been loving BookOrbit and KOReader.

Thanks for the BookOrbit hint. Seems very interesting.

I see it supports audiobooks and ebooks. Do you know if there is any way for keeping sync between an audiobook and ebook?

It does not have any sort of "whispersync" but, ironically?, I feel like whispersync could be recreated with things like Whisper and parsing the epub/whatever to line up progress. BookOrbit is in active development from what I can see (I'm not connected to the project, just a happy user) and it wouldn't surprise me if that was a feature in the future. It's something I've mulled over building for a while (even before Whisper).

For my Audiobooks I don't use BookOrbit because my setup is:

- Buy on Audible

- Rip DRM off

- Add to Plex

- Use Prologue (iOS only) to listen

And I freaking love that setup so I'm not looking to replace it currently.

if your on iphone or ipad witbound basically does what whispersync does but its your m4b and epub files

How do you rip the drm off audible? Id love to free my audioooks.

Well tbh the reason I like it has to do more with calibre (free software)

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