Comment by gruturo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruturo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm immensely thankful for koreader - it improves the reading experience so fundamentally that it literally drives my purchasing decisions. I got a remarkable 2 precisely because it was known to run it well. When I got a new kindle, I went for a refurbished one hoping it'd be one FW version behind (it was! lucky me) so I could jailbreak it immediately, and run koreader.

Which reminds me:

- I'm still a primitive user. Sync reading state, reflow, calibre link, yes, but I'm at maybe 10% of the features, might even be an overestimate. I may finally have to cave in and go through its manual

- I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?

- Is there really no practical way to mark a book as read other than give it a star rating or a custom tag?

- Does anyone know of anything coming close to this experience on an iPad?

- I've never given them a cent or contributed a line of code or even filed a bug report. That changes now.

I've been messing around with this as well, and there are a few good options now, if you're willing to self-host services:

- calibre-web, as a pure web front end to the calibre db

- Calibre Web Automated, which is a rewrite of the app, with a better web UI, that is faster and adds functionality

- Grimmory, a Java-based book mgmt. app w/ a web front end too

- BookOrbit, similar to Grimmory but written in Node and seems to scale better w/ 100k+ book libraries

The better way to get books onto KOReader is via connecting to these apps' OPDS feeds. Wireless, and most of these other apps have better library organization.

Heads-up for BookOrbit users:

Last week they released a change that put the header Strict-Transport-Security into all responses (yes, even non-HTTPS ones!). This broke not just BookOrbit, but every other app I had running on that server, because suddenly everything being served by that host refused to work without HTTPS.

I probably should have done it sooner, but I spent a big chunk of the afternoon setting up new DNS entries so I can access each app through a different hostname. That was easy enough for me, running OPNsense with my own internal DNS, but you may not have that much flexibility in your home.

I submitted an issue (see https://github.com/bookorbit/bookorbit/issues/760) and a few days later, they created a semi-fix such that the header is only sent out in secure responses. But this still has the effect of forcing every app on that server to require HTTPS.

Surprised Kavita didn't make your list. Has KOReader/Send to Support out of the box and is extremely mature (5 years old) and feature rich.

> - I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?

I use USB mass storage.

In details, I configured KOReader not to start mass storage automatically, so I need two taps after connecting the USB. Then on my Linux PC, I mount the device, exec a `rsync` command, then umount.

My ebooks directory uses Git (with LFS) so I can update it from several computers. I considered switching to git-annex, instead of gitlfs+rsync, but I'm not motivated enough to change a system that works.

> - Is there really no practical way to mark a book as read other than give it a star rating or a custom tag?

There are 3 states : reading, on hold, finished. The rating is optional. A long press on a book title will give access to this states and more.

All that metadata is stored in lua data files (a bit similar to JSON). With mass storage, it's easy to read or update these files. I use "on hold" to mean "dropped" (and I hide them in the listings).

> - I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?

I am using a locally hosted version of https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore which supports OPDS protocol. KOReader can then directly connect to that booklore server and you browse your library and download what you want. It is not the best UX ever but it works :)

> - I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?

On first exposure to calibre I was put off by its weird UI and how opinionated it was about filename conventions. But I learned to accept that it's the best solution out there with the most community support, and it grew on me. There are also a few third party projects that can interact with its database.

I use BookFusion. A plugin for Calibre (which is still my central library) lets me upload chosen books to the BookFusion server, after which I download to KOReader. Using the BookFusion plugin for KOReader I can sync reading progress and annotations to back to the cloud, and read on iOS or other devices using KOReader.

Someone claims to have ported it to iOS but I haven't tried it and one of the open issues says that the release build doesn't work:

https://github.com/hezi/koreader-ios

Awesome, even if it doesn't currently work, good starting point. Thanks.

> “ I literally endure calibre because that's how I feed koreader. Any alternatives?”

- Syncthing plugin for Koreader (for syncing your ebooks with a computer / phone / tablet)

- RSS feeds for newsfeeds

> practical way to mark a book as read

I open the book and go to the last page :)

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