Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

KOReader

koreader.rocks

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 253 posts

Re: KOReader

#171

Post by pseudony »

the_lucifer wrote: post #67
lordleft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a heavy KOReader user and absolutely adore it, but I think it definitely trades user-friendliness for power and flexibility. The Kindle proprietary store has a far more user friendly UI imo, though it’s getting progressively worse (and the fact that kindles now default to showing you the store pisses me off to no end). KOReader plugins really close the gap though.

> I think it definitely trades user-friendliness for power and flexibility A tale as old as time with OSS software from what I've seen. So far the only exception that I've seen of a FOSS piece of software with great UX is Blender[1]. With UX not being a first-class citizen on Linux, exposure to a solid universal tooling to create great UX also exacerbates things. I think the issue of bad UX and OSS are comorbid becau…

I don’t know about that.

I think Libreoffice is easier to navigate than ribbon-era Office.

I think especially Gnome, but also Kde has better settings than Windows, which is spread across a new and a classical view (or more?).

I also think MacOS finder is worse than Windows/KDE/Gnome equivalents. When you strip so much away that people have to remember strange key combinations to jump/navigate to specific directories you have really gone too far.

And mobile UX (android and iphone) seem to me worse than any desktop system. Nothing is consistent (sharing data between apps), nothing ever seems settled (settings move around in the central settings apps every few releases).

We could argue in depth. Let me head it off a bit - taste is absolutely a thing, but consistency across releases is evidently a good thing unless you are constantly in a situation where your existing userbase is dwarfed by the prospective one. There’s a reason we hang on to diskette icons, don’t change from desktop to metro to ios style desktops every release and so on.

Last point: OSS software can be misguided, but it never seeks to bamboozle the user to make some corporate goal succeed. It won’t nefariously stuff files on a cloud or actively make it hard to export data or be incentivized to NOT interoperate with devices or programs shipped by competitors.

Re: KOReader

#172

Post by idoubtit »

gruturo wrote: post #151

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.…

> - 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).

Re: KOReader

#173

Post by j45 »

gejose wrote: post #100

I really like that this exists, but I found the menus and UI to be rather non-intuitive. My main use case was to sync reading progress between my Kobo and my iPhone. I was able to do this using KOReader on the Kobo & the Readest app[1] on iPhone (also open source). Ultimately I decided to get rid of KOReader because it felt a bit laggy. The gestures (eg: swiping up on the left side to increase frontlight brightness)…

It's good to have options.

Most software has compromises.

KOReader seems to have functionality in one place in one reader app that other e-reader apps don't.

Re: KOReader

#174

Post by nekooooo »

gchamonlive wrote: post #20
lolgab wrote: post #10

I installed it on my Amazon Kindle and I couldn't be happier. It shows once again that free software is superior to proprietary software. Free software grows slowly to make users happier and not to attract them with useless features to extract more value from them. Congratulations for this great piece of software.

I think the only proprietary software companies with any shot at longevity are Japanese companies. First Japan leads by far the ranking of oldest companies in the world ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies ). Then we have actual software like Zelda Breath of the Wild which is a technical marvel comparable to the original Rollercoaster Tycoon considering how well it runs on the severely limited arc…

this is complete nonsense. 『ローラーコースタータイクーン』はそもそも日本のゲームではありませんだよね笑

Re: KOReader

#175

Post by nekooooo »

Kirth wrote: post #46
Cyph0n wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing inherently special about Japan or Japanese people. You can pull similar examples from many other countries.

I take it you've never been to Japan... Wouldn't wanna live there permanently. Wouldn't want to have been born Japanese. But my god the products and services are head and shoulders above my baseline expectations; it's simply nicer.

get a point card and try to register it online to pay your water bill and then tell me this

Re: KOReader

#176

Post by nekooooo »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #160
CWuestefeld wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: KOReader

#177

Post by fluidcruft »

pseudony wrote: post #171
the_lucifer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it definitely trades user-friendliness for power and flexibility A tale as old as time with OSS software from what I've seen. So far the only exception that I've seen of a FOSS piece of software with great UX is Blender[1]. With UX not being a first-class citizen on Linux, exposure to a solid universal tooling to create great UX also exacerbates things. I think the issue of bad UX and OSS are comorbid becau…

I don’t know about that. I think Libreoffice is easier to navigate than ribbon-era Office. I think especially Gnome, but also Kde has better settings than Windows, which is spread across a new and a classical view (or more?). I also think MacOS finder is worse than Windows/KDE/Gnome equivalents. When you strip so much away that people have to remember strange key combinations to jump/navigate to specific directories…

People say that and I used to agree, but honestly I use neither MS Office nor LibreOffice heavily anymore. Nowadays I can figure out what to do in MS Office very quickly but LibreOffice's menus are a confusing maze (even when switched into the more ribbon-like mode).

Re: KOReader

#178

Post by exe34 »

I run this on a pinenote, and I love it. Only sad thing is that I started transitioning to Linux and then lost interest, so I've only got about 8GB for data on the Android partition. I use syncthing to sync a folder with my laptop, so I just push a pdf into the folder on the laptop and then it turns up on the pinenote in koreader.

Re: KOReader

#179

Post by vincent-manis »

tdeck wrote: post #112
hoherd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This podcast about the history of zaibatsu, hardware, and software comes to mind. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-k... > Software was not viewed so much as a product, but more like a service, similar to integration, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. It was usually sold on a time-and-materials basis, and sometimes it was just thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. The real mone…

This sounds like the way software was viewed through at least the 1960s in the US.

Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs, development tools, etc.) Autoflow's flowchart generator was a rare example of this.

Re: KOReader

#180

Post by porkloin »

lolgab wrote: post #10

I installed it on my Amazon Kindle and I couldn't be happier. It shows once again that free software is superior to proprietary software. Free software grows slowly to make users happier and not to attract them with useless features to extract more value from them. Congratulations for this great piece of software.

I've been a Kindle user since way back in 2010 with a Kindle 3G. I had a pretty huge amount of money invested into a library of books on Kindle. I installed koreader on my paperwhite earlier this year and haven't looked back. Even if it weren't for the limitations put on the walled garden for books in the kindle ecosystem, just the software upgrade alone feels great. When you hit buttons in koreader it actually responds in less than a second. I hadn't even realized how frustrating the UX of the kindle OS was until I realized the hardware was capable of feeling snappy.

There's obviously a lot you need to provide yourself that Amazon gives "for free" with the Kindle ecosystem, but using koreader with OPDS and kosync for synchronizing progress across devices, I'm very happy to be just buying DRM-free books elsewhere and hosting a small OPDS+kosync server on my home server. Installing tailscale on my kindle makes it so I can even fetch books/sync progress when I'm away from home without needing to expose my book server to the internet.

Post reply on HN