To give you an idea of how different it is from commercial products: it actually tracks reading in a useful way. It shows a chart of how long you have spent on each page, so you can figure out which parts of a book you have not yet read. That is really useful when jumping around technical books. If you are interested in tracking your general reading habits, there are handy views that shows which books you have read and when you read them (either by time of day or across a month).
As for reading PDFs, well, eInk has its limitations and KOReader does it's best to work around them. If you want to read a multicolumn paper on a small screen, you can configure it to go down one column then right back to the top of the next column. If you want there to be overlap between the screens when panning, you can configure that. You can also have it display which parts were overlapping, so you don't get lost when it displays the next part.
There is tonnes of other stuff in there. I just mentioned those two because I use them the most. Overall I would say it feels like KOReader was designed by people who want an amazing reading experience, rather than by people trying to sell novels.
Some of those features like the column panning are also available in Boox's default reader.
I am not going to claim that it is perfect. They cram a lot of functionality in there that serves a very diverse audience. The volume of options is going to have a negative impact is going to have a negative impact for anyone wanting a simple, to-the-point interface. The diverse audience bit means that virtually noone is going to be interested in a majority of the features, even though I suspect that a majority of users will interested in a combination of features that they won't find in other products.
While I may have been a bit unfair in saying that most commerical reading software is geared towards selling novels, I don't think that assessment is too far off base. Most software does appear to be designed for people who just read novels. KOReader is geared towards people who care about features that other reading software rarely provides.
That's insane, I thought it was already good with a whole page, I will have to explore this more. Might need to update it as well, since I installed it a few years ago.
I wonder why is lua so rarely utilized like this on its own. Such a neat language.
[0]: https://github.com/koreader/koreader-base/blob/master/ffi/bl...
There was some discussion about it on HN not long ago:
All Kindles can now be jailbroken | 1377 points by lumerina | 2025/02/17 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969
I found KOReader's Android app a tad buggy, but the experience is wonderful on Kindles. If you've got an old Kindle kicking around, I also wrote up a little thing about bringing them up to speed which mentions KOReader: https://vale.rocks/posts/improving-early-kindles
It is a good reason to look into rooting, PDF reflow and the function to remove margins make it possible (at least tolerable) to read PDFs when an .epub / .mobi is not available.
You can also run Alpine Linux on a rooted Kindle with graphical interface, I found it amazing but ultimately not that useful with the limited system memory.
Every time I connect my Kindle 4 to the internet, it disables developer mode and I have to rejailbreak. This is despite using an update disabler plugin (I've tested them all).
If you've ever tried reading an epub using Kobo that you didn't buy from the Kobo store, you may have noticed that highlighting text is very laggy. Koreader has no such lag.
Conversely, the built-in software never struggled with that file.
That said, I think this may be mostly based upon a book's formatting. Messing around with upload options in Calibre may help. (For example, Calibre recently added an option to speed up load times with Kobo's reader software.)
Koreader is wonky in places. But, like vi and bash, you get used to the wonkiness and it works well enough for the job and is everywhere.
Also, turning pages is faster than with the stock reader of the device.
Protocol is atom based, chatgpt was able to make a custom OPDS server for my needs within minutes, it took another hour or two to fix and customize generated code.
I think it works using the file name of the epub. Not sure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32442549 has some more tips.
Oh and https://bookshop.org/beta-search now actually lets you check "DRM-free" when you search, which is a very good step in the right direction!
I have a dream of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu taking up the mantle. Though I think anyone could make something that's better than what we have now, which is nothing.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide...
[1]: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=361503
[2]: https://forum.linuxconfig.org/t/calibre-and-dedrm-problems/8...
This lets me use "Mail to PocketBook", Dropbox sync etc. or the fantastic Push-to-Kindle browser-plugin in combination with the fantastic KOReader. No flashing or jail break required.
But I gave it a go again and this time I spent time figuring out how to sync between devices. I've yet not synced files but here's what I got so far.
1. Koofr WebDAV for Reading Statistics sync 2. Kobo's built-in sync for progress
Both of these are free. This is a reminder mostly for myself that you need to use the service password for WebDAV access for koofr and not your koofr account's password. And make sure you save your koreader user credentials somewhere.
I'm still not happy with the keyboard situation, the koreader keyboard is ugly but I guess it's optimized for eink so that's something. I don't really type any notes into books. I mostly prefer being able to sync progress and have a centralized view of my reading statistics. And this works.
I copied all my books over manually for now, I'm happy with this. I have the following devices 1. Phone - OnePlus Open 2. eReader - Boox Tab Mini C 3. eReader - Boox Palma 1 4. Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra
Things I didn't know I needed: 1. The reading statistics. This tracks every eBook I read, and I don't have to use anything else. 2. Book map - Knowing how much time I spent in each chapter is a godsend. This really helps me understand things like this. 3. The speed reading module - perception expander - I'd never heard of this from Tim Ferris so it was new to me. I am giving it a go, and I'm not sure it's improving my reading speed but it feels like it's improving my comprehension!
Thank you to everyone who puts in the work on koreader!
I still have to remove a lot of CSS from most books before uploading, but after that, it is very good, as you can fine-tune every aspect and have every book look similar. Which, in my opinion, is necessary because e-ink readers still don't have enough resolution to use all the fancy fonts authors may have thought. Also, the ability to set margins to the same is very important to me.
At least in the past, screen refresh was slower; the reflective, rather than luminescent screen changed contrast and color performance; resolution was well behind standard screens.
The first two seem easily solved; the third hard to mitigate beyond larger print and appropriate typefaces. What else?
Lately, I've used it on Android, and UI which is more suited for e-ink screens, look not so polished on phones, but that's just nitpicking. It's fully usable and keeps adding support for new platforms.
I'd love to give KOReader a try -- does anyone know if it can be used with library books, via overdrive or another integration? A quick search indicates KOReader doesn't work with DRM books, but I'm curious if someone has a solution.
I think maybe for a kindle it might be worth it, but the reality is for Kobo, it's probably more hassle than it's worth.
I found my time better spent setting up a calibre-web in a docker container and then having my kobo sync to that. And that was awesome.
[0] https://gitlab.com/coolreader-ng/lxreader
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.artifex.mupdf.viewer.app...
The UI is so good, from quick look on LxReader's play store page, the UI is a bit basic.
Out of the box it's a bit hard to use. Love it after configuring intuitive gestures for navigation.
Especially love the frontlight switch that lets me read while helping my kid fall asleep.
Fortunately I didn't delete KOReader, so all my setup is still there if I find a reason to go back.
Nice to see there are multiple open source readers going strong!
Saves me so much work in having to convert EPUB files on my Kindle. I also love how great it is at handling PDF files and cropping margins out of pages. I don't think I would ever want an e-reader that couldn't run it at this point.
Most major miss is more friendly syncing though. Currently only supports Dropbox (WebDAV FTP seems to have issues, even when I used OneDrive key for it which works everyone else) and doesn't actually bidirectionally sync... only downloads. Why can't there be a simple auto-sync from a specific FTP directory including reading positions and such...?!
Also doesn't support Pocket or more popular sync services (only supports Wallabag).
I'm sick of the cult of "intuitive". Intuitive only helps you the first time you ever use an app, and its lack of useful features hurts you forever. It obviously makes sense to optimize for the long run.
is it the same, better or worse and by how much?
Does the focus on eink mean it's mainly aimed at jail broken eink tablets? Or aimed at phones as well?
If you combine this with a Kobo you have an ereader experience without all the DRM crap.
I used to think that it syncs up both the books and the reading progress / metadata but when I tried doing it, it didn't seem to work that way. I would love to hear how folks have done this. It's about the only thing left that's keeping me from using KOReader more frequently on all my devices.
