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Comment by temphaaa | Hacker News Reader

Can someone recommend a good F/OSS ebook reader on F-Droid? The existing ones I have tested have too many knobs and options and are not really user-friendly.... My wife started to get into reading, but I could not get her to get out of the Kindle/Play Books ecosystem because of the user-friendliness and easy synchronisation across devices that Kindle gives.

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KOReader [1] is my favorite reader. Pairs well with my syncthing library of ebooks (I just keep the phone's copy in read-only mode).

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...

Koreader interface with syncthing is not that user friendly to non techs, very powerful can do anything but i don't think i would advise that to non techie

KOReader can update over WiFi as well, right?

You mean whether the KOreader software can upgrade itself over Wi-Fi? Yes... it can.

To add to this, since the original comment mentioned kindle, you can jailbreak many of the models and install KOReader in them if you want to keep using the hardware.

And then you can automatically sync your reading process with the KOReader phone app. I use that functionality almost every day for when I don't have my Kindle with me (train ride, lunch break etc).

Just to add, KOReader might not look super use friendly at first, but I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s an amazing reader.

Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.

Episteme is pretty good

https://github.com/Aryan-Raj3112/episteme

Using readera with network connection disabled. Super app.

It depends.For me it’s not on app For a dedicated device(phablet/tablet) - KoReader. For Smartphone (no longtime reading) - Librera Reader

KOReader is good, as others have mentioned.

If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is licensed under the AGPL[2].

[1]: https://readest.com/

[2]: https://github.com/readest/readest

I actually use MuPDF for epubs, as well as pdfs.

Me too. It seems to be the only one that does not litter the sdcard directory.

[Liseur](https://github.com/chmouel/liseur) seems nice, if epub is an acceptable format. It's available on F-Droid.

Supposedly it can interface with various sync providers, but I've not tried this myself. The rendering is lovely.

Librera. I found it daunting at first launch, but gave it a chance and once set up it's perfect. You could set it up for her and it would be as friendly as it gets.

For example, my usage now only ever goes like this:

1- Open Librera. Presented with a scrollable page of all book covers.

2- Scroll down to the epub I'm currently reading. Tap it once.

3- Resumes the book where I left off, with previous view settings. In my case full screen text with zero UI (tap once to hide the UI).

Koreader is far and away the best. Definitely suffers from the top many knobs problem but if you spend a little time to go through the settings and install a plugin like SimpleUI and Bookends you can get something set up that's ultimately pretty end user friendly and still very powerful. You can use anything you want to sync your library, Google drive, syncthing, self hosted solutions that expose opds, etc.

i would say Librera FD, much better on Android than KOR, specially for images

Try storyteller. It’s an awesome app that does the whispersync thing where you get the audiobook and ebook together, can switch between the two and not lose place, can read both at the same time where the ebook underlines what’s being said. All self hosted though so you need to have a way to…obtain drm free e/audio books.

I run Calibre Content Server on a VM. So my ebook reading is just accessing that in the browser. Works great.

I have spent much time trying to solve this problem. KOreader is okay for looking at a document, but not for long reading sessions.

Unfortunately I have had to go proprietary and use readera premium, which works fine for epubs.

Try Librera if you haven't.

Yeah I tried that and I actually still have it installed. It's better for pdfs because of reflow but the ui is too much with all the buttons. Ty for the suggestion though.

It's not on F-Droid, but I really like FBreader. You can get it directly from their website if you don't want to deal with the play store.

Even if you have a FOSS ereader app with good sync, where are you gonna get books to read on it?

The only options are stripping the DRM from kobo books or piracy, last I checked.

No, there are a lot of DRM free books, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709186 mentioned here or https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks more broadly.

Piracy and stripping DRMs though definitely work.

Not the answer to your question but... do your eyes a favor and use an e-ink device for reading.

You can thank me later (in 20 years).

FB reader? Sync has to be manually config though (Calibre is simplest but probably not for completely non-technical people)

just let her read on kindle, as you've said yourself it's a better option

Honestly I use Lithium with no network permissions. It's not Foss but it's good enough for me.

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