Hello, entities that lurk in my phone. You might remember my last "review" or comparison between KLC and Kobo Forma.

I thought that maybe an update was in order, seeing that the KLC is going to stay with me till one of us dies.

Usually the ereader has to retire before I do, but don't let that keep you from betting against me!

Anyway. The KLC.

I have to admit that while I'm not too thrilled by the darkness of the screen, I also have to admit that the backlight doesn't seem to use a lot of battery (I keep it on between 5 and 16%, I haven't needed more than that).

Pictures show the screen under full, midday sun. And my drink.

THE PEN:

I don't do much highlighting or doodling on the Colour, probably because I ain't gonna drop 60€ on the pen (also there's a thing called metapen for around 29€ that works on the Colour, which I'm also NOT going to buy hehe).

BUUUUUUUUT I do have a friend with terrible self control that bought the pen and allowed me to try it. Hilarious, since in my 5 minute test I used it more than her since she got it lol.

Pen is nice to hold, highlighting is snappy. Good. Writing... For an emergency... OK. I can definitely write my name on it. But this is no Remarkable 2.

And that's my review of the pen. The Kobo case that has room for the pen is nice too.

My case is from Aliexpress :)

BACK TO THE SCREEN

I have to admit that 7" is perfect for an ereader. Perfect.
The pages fly by, I see no ghosting, nothing to complain about. No delay when pressing the buttons (VERY GOOD BUTTONS, PEOPLE. THE VERY BEST).

However, I've seen people claiming that ereaders don't reflect light, like an actual book, when placed under, I don't know, let's say, the fucking sun. I swear I don't get why people claim that. Maybe I keep misunderstanding them?? But just in case: e-ink does have reflections, sometimes. You have to angle the screen to obtain the desired shine free surface.

Examples:

FEATURE I WASN'T EXPECTING:

"Read out loud" Honestly it's not that great because itreadsthetextlikethis ignoring commas and any other punctuation you can think of. But hey, it exists.

Verdict: 'tis a good device, fellas. I still think that a Libra 2 would have been the ideal solution, but this isn't bad. And somehow fingers don't stain the frame (the screen yes).

You might be wondering... Where did the Forma go?? Did I throw away my soul-ereader?? NEVER.

It crossed the black-and-white bridge (just below the rainbow bridge that pets cross eventually) and landed on the desperate hands of my mother. Seeing how attached she has gotten to it in two weeks, I'm looking to hire a hobbit or two to cast the device into the fires of Mount Doom or something.

Maybe I should have noticed that she, too, wanted a fancy ereader because hers wasn't dead, but should have been.

Thanks for reading!

Question for those of you here. I recently purchased a used Boox Note Air 4C so that my son could read manga on a larger screen than the ancient kindle paperwhite we had previously. I've been running a Booklore library and using KOReader on the kindle so he can fetch the books down that he wants. The first thing I did when setting up the new Boox was to grab KOReader and point it to our local Booklore OPDS catalogue.

For some reason the Boox cannot see the catalogue or any of the other services I have hosted on my network. All of my local services (including booklore) are behind a reverse proxy (NGINX) and use a certificate to move to https. The domain is registered but only works for me since it provides a local network ip when hit.

Has anyone faced a similar problem with boox and identified a way around it? I suspect this is either (1) the Boox cannot interpret the local address correctly when it hits DNS for my domain or (2) its network configuration is somehow blocking it from ever accessing local network (seems odd).

Edit: I appear to be an idiot and was connected to the visitor network at home rather than my primary network. Had previously checked with the Kindle that both it and Boox were the same network but can't explain how I came away thinking that they were. Changed Boox network and everything works.

TL;DR: Don't be dumb, networking when tired will drive mistakes.

Hi! The name is Howler and I'm an extremely avid reader.

When ereaders hit the market, I wasn't a fan. Where was the smell? The pleasure of passing pages, the (not always) comforting weight? I didn't want an ereader.

But it got to a point where I could not fit a single book in my bedroom anymore, and I had to surrender. I got a Sony (the one with buttons on the lower part) and my fate was sealed.

Since then, I've owned a couple more devices (Boox, Tolino...) and they all died from exhaustion.

BUT

Then I met her. 8" screen, buttons, not part of Amazon, lightweight... The first impulsive purchase of my life.

I'm talking about Kobo Forma, my companion and best friend for the last 10 years. I've taken it to the beach. To the desert. Mountaineering. It fell in a swimming pool. A dog threw up on it and I immediately simpathy puked on the Forma too.

Good as new (well I had to tape the buttons because they fell).

Forma has an extremely crispy screen, it's almost weightless despite it's size, and though many people found that the frontlight of their devices didn't work as intended, mine did.

It's so thin that even now I fear breaking it, somehow.

One would think that with such a lot of real state, I'd read mangas or comics. I'll be honest. It sucks for that. That could be a big problem for some people, obviously.

It was advertised as a good device for highlighting and note taking... But I found it so buggy, laggy and annoying that I never used the feature.

I used it ONLY to read (sideloaded books) and Heaven knows it did its job impeccably, despite the janky buttons some CEO decided they were acceptable in such an expensive device.

HOWEVER

It's going down the same road as my previous devices: burnout. The battery ain't what it used to be. Not bad for most, yet, but for a compulsive reader... It's a problem.

ENTER THE NEW DEVICE

T'was supposed to be a Kobo Libra 2 BUT THEY GOT DISCONTINUED. A minute of silence for the friend I never met, please.

ENTER MY LAST HOPE

Dun dun duuuuuun the Libra Colour which y'all knew about because it's on the title.

Right off the bat, the Colour is 7", 1 less than Forma. I'm not upset about it at all, but it's noticeable. The buttons feel functional when you click them! (In Forma they worked, but you had 0 feedback) and it uses USB-C.

The device itself feels sturdier than the forma, and since it's flat, I'm not afraid of it breaking around the handle.

Device is snappy, the backlight is a delight (hehe), I loaded all my books with no issues, battery seems durable, it's very comfortable to hold, mangas show up nicely...

BUT BUT BUT

THE SCREEN IS HELLA DARK

I know it's because of the technology it uses and that the frontlight fixes the readability issue. (So don't come after me for this complaint).

I was quite baffled. Pictures online showed that it was darker, but daaaamn. The colours are indeed muted, but I like them a lot.

I've highlighted a couple of sentences and it seems to work well, but I don't have the pen so I can't draw a masterpiece for y'all to admire.

I know some people don't care about the darkness thingy. I know that some, do. Hence this post and the images attached :)

I still don't know what will I do (keep the Colour, I bet) but I hope this helps or entertains someone.

WARNING: I don't use the Kobo services (throwaway email for the win) so I have no idea about the integrations it offers.

Verdict: Libra Colour is nice, I guess. I refuse to go back to 6" screens. But for me, the Forma was THE ereader.

Hey all, ive been looking at ereaders, and have been pretty bummed at the field. I dont really give a shit about note taking, and want a larger display (10 or 11 inches). I dont need any AI on it... The issue is, i cant find a larger display that DOESNT cram in the note taking/ai. I just want a reader. Before you say get a tablet, i realize thats an option, but not one i want to persue. I want the longevity of a eink display.

I dont think this object exists... At least i cant find it. I could be overlooking it, because ive been looking at so many, my algo could have blinded me to other options. But Kindle, Boox, and Kobos options in that size, all add in note taking. Which i could care less about.

I appreciate any input if you all have any!

My Kindle Oasis 2017 seems to have broken. I love that it's screen (Seems to be just plain old "Carta" with no numbers) does not need the backlight on to be readable in even pretty dim lighting.

I recently tried a Kobo and couldn't believe how grey the screen was and needed the backlight in all conditions other than daylight.

I would just like to see a comparison between all the screens (Carta 1200, Colorsoft, etc) to try and know how it compares to my old Oasis without having to purchase and return it.

Anyone know of a good comparison site like what I'm describing?

Hi all,

I wanted to share a small app I just released that lets you turn pages on bluetooth-enabled (sorry Kindle users) eReaders using your iPhone.

I built this because I read a lot in bed with my kobo on a clip above my head attached to my bed frame, and also while using my treadmill, and wanted to avoid reaching up all the time to turn the page.

What it does:

• Turns pages forward/back remotely
• Aaaaaaaaaaaand that's it.

The app is completely free and ad-free.

This is an early public version, so I’d love feedback from other users — especially around device compatibility, existing bugs, or features you’d want to see.

And if you enjoy the app please rate it from the “About” view:)

Happy reading!
Jeff

I try to test my epub files on a different devices. I have a Sony PRS-300 to see how the files look on older ereaders.

I've tried a few different settings, but I can't get paragraphs to justify. Paragraphs are always rendered as ragged-right. When I test my epub files in Calibre, or on a Kindle Paperwhite 10, the paragraphs are justified.

I am justifying my paragraphs with inline styles:

Inline styles seem to be a little more backwards-compatible with older devices.

All the ebooks that came with my PRS-300 also have ragged-right paragraphs.

I just wanted to check if I was missing anything. I've seen screenshots online of the older PRS-500 displaying justified paragraphs.

Thanks!

I find this mini reader very interesting, maybe a bit too barebone.

• 114 x 69 x 5.9mm (4.5″ x 2.7″ x 0.2″)
• 220 pixels per inch
• no front lighting
• 650 mAh battery
• ESP32 microprocessor: Wifi, bluetooth, usb-C port

TL;DR

I setup a local workflow that allows me to turn a webpage to an epub on my android phone and send it to my Kobo

Introduction

Since Mozilla killed Pocket, i have been looking for an alternative that didn't depend on decisions from any tech company, but only on myself.

I used the Pocket feature quite a lot, and, even if I appreciated the effort from Kobo to replace it with Instapaper, I didn't want to depend on someone else for something as simple as reading an article later on my eink device.

I considered Wallabag and Readeck, but, for both I had to depend on someone else server, or I had to self-host, and I didn't want to deal with the complexity.

I wanted an approach where I was in control, so all the steps needed to be based on FOSS software that I could at least understand.

The basic idea

I thought that what I needed is a 2 step approach, and I could solve both of them

1. Turn a webpage into an epub
2. Send the epub to my kobo

The explanation below is long, but, especuially following step 1-a and step 2-a is fairly easy and doesn't involve any modification or coding

Step 1: Turn a webpage into an epub

In the long search to do this I ended up finding 2 apporaches, on available "off the shelf" and one that involved much more coding.

Step 1-a: einkbro

i found out that there is a fantastic FOSS browser, EinkBro, that is designed for eink screen devices, but works very well for any Android device. It is slick, fast, configurable and well designed. It implements the readibility library from mozilla, which is great, and, more than anything else, can directly export webpages as epub files. You can configure the toolbar so that the "export to epub" icon is directly visible. The exported epub is nice, looks like the "readibility" version of the webpage (probably because it is...). So, when I want to save a article I share it from my browesr to einkbro, and, from there, I export it to epub.

Step 1-b: Termux + readiblity scrape + pandoc

For this one I went all-in the rabbit hole of total control... Or maybe I could have done worse. Anyway, here are the components:

• Termux: a terminal emulator for android, that allows you to do almost whatev you can do in a terminal emulator on a full blown Linux machine
• Readability scrape is a command line tool that scrpaes an url and returns a simplified version of it, using the readability library from Mozilla (as in the read-mode from Firefox)
• Pandoc is a command line tool that can convert documentation from one format to another, like, in our case, html to epub

I won't go into the details , of how to install what. In case, just ask.

I setup termux so that, if i share a webpage to termux via Andorid share menu, it triggers the following script ~/bin/termux-url-opener (see this webpage to understand how termux handles shared URLs):

termux-toast "termux received $1" # toast message to war that the url was received

termux-chroot "~/scripts/webpage_to_epub.sh" $1 

note: for some reasons pandoc works as intended only if executed in chroot, so that's why the follwing script is launched as from the command termux-chroot in the snippet above

webpage_to_epub.sh

#!/bin/bash

# final desitnation of epub file
FINAL_DIR="~/storage/shared/Documents/epub_articles/"

# Check if the URL argument is provided
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <URL>"
  exit 1
fi

URL="$1"
JSON_OUTPUT=$(readability-scrape --json "$URL")

# Check if the readability command was successful
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "Error: Failed to scrape URL."
  exit 1
else
  echo "readibility scrape: SUCCESS!!"	
fi

# Extract title and content using jq
TITLE=$(echo "$JSON_OUTPUT" | jq -r '.title')
CONTENT=$(echo "$JSON_OUTPUT" | jq -r '.content')
AUTHOR=$(echo "$JSON_OUTPUT" | jq -r '.byline')
CONTENT_LENGTH=$(echo "$JSON_OUTPUT" | jq -r '.length')  # Length in characters

# Calculate reading times based on character length
# Convert characters to words (approximate)
WORDS=$(($CONTENT_LENGTH / 5))

# Calculate reading times based on two speeds (200 and 300 words per minute)
READING_TIME_LOW=$(($WORDS / 300))  # For 300 wpm
READING_TIME_HIGH=$(($WORDS / 200))  # For 200 wpm

# Format the output for reading time
if [ "$READING_TIME_LOW" -eq "$READING_TIME_HIGH" ]; then
  READING_TIME="${READING_TIME_LOW} minutes"
else
  READING_TIME="${READING_TIME_LOW} - ${READING_TIME_HIGH} minutes"
fi

# Output the estimated reading time
echo "Estimated reading time: $READING_TIME"

# Format the current date in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD)
CURRENT_DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

# Remove accent characters and sanitize the title to create a valid filename
SANITIZED_TITLE=$(echo "$TITLE" | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT | tr -cd '[:alnum:]_ ')  # Convert to ASCII and keep alphanumeric characters
SANITIZED_TITLE="${SANITIZED_TITLE// /_}"  # Replace spaces with underscores

# Create the final filename with date prefix
EPUB_FILE="${CURRENT_DATE}_${SANITIZED_TITLE}.epub"

# Create a temporary HTML file
HTML_FILE=$(mktemp /tmp/readability_output.XXXXXX.html)

# Write the complete HTML output
cat <<EOT > "$HTML_FILE"
<html>
<head>
  <title>$TITLE</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>$TITLE</h1>
    <div>
    $READING_TIME | <a href="$URL">original link</a>
  </div>
  <hr />
  $CONTENT
</body>
</html>
EOT

# Create a temporary title file for metadata
TITLE_FILE=$(mktemp /tmp/title.XXXXXXXXX.txt)

# Write the Pandoc YAML metadata block
cat <<EOT > "$TITLE_FILE"
***
title: "$TITLE"
author: "$AUTHOR"
EOT

# Convert the HTML file to EPUB including the metadata
#pandoc "$TITLE_FILE" "$HTML_FILE" -o "$EPUB_FILE"
pandoc "$HTML_FILE" -o "$EPUB_FILE"

# Check if pandoc command was successful
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "EPUB generated: $EPUB_FILE"
  mv "$EPUB_FILE" ~/storage/shared/Documents/epub_articles
else
  echo "Error: Failed to generate EPUB."
fi

# Clean up temporary file
rm "$HTML_FILE"

read -p "Press [Enter] key to continue..."

I spent time to craft the script to produce an output that I like, but, honestly, it's not better than the one produced by einkbro in Step1-a. The advantage with the termux script is that it is a one click process. I share the link to termux, and the script generates the epub and saves to a folder that is setup in the next step to do the uplaod automatically

Step 2: send the epub to my kobo

Again also for step 2 i found 2 alternatives, one more "manual" and direct, and the second more automatic

Step 2-a: share to http

For this I use a simple app, share via http: I share the epub file via android share menu to this app. The app generates a mini web server at my local IP address (on the wifi, that can also be the one from android hotspot). I then use the kobo browser to the local address. The browser asks if you want to download the file. Once downloaded the file is added to the kobo ebooks.

By using Nickelmenu I added a shortcut to the kobomenu to start the browser, to make things faster.

This is the simplest solution, everything work locally, no third party involved

Step 2-b

As an alternative I setup a nextcloud sync.

• On android I setup the folder where I save epubs as "automatic upload", so epub files are uploaded to a folder on my nextcloud as soon as I asve them
• On kobo I setup nexcloud syncronization. There is more than one alternative, I used this one. Whenever I connect my kobo to wifi, the new epubs are downloaded to my kobo and added to the library. The only downside is that to delete an article, I have to delete form the nexcloud foder; if I delete it from my kobo, it gets re-added as soon as I connect the wifi

Conclusions

Maybe this looks too complex, but I learned a lot of stuff and had fun in the process. i find that pandoc is probably a bit too much for what it is needed here, in the end the epub content is a bundle of html and images, probably there is a better and slicker way to package them. If you have any suggestion to improve the workflow it is welcome :-)

What do you use these days?

With so many sales over the next week, I figured it would be helpful to compile all of the e-reader sales in one place. Don't worry, these sales are only listed to help people find deals, the website isn't monetized, which means there are no ads and zero of the links are affiliated

Amazon has hinted at a new Kindle, likely color, but will it be similar to the Colorsoft with pen support, or will the Scribe get some color love?

Calibre-Web can wirelessly sync with Kobo readers by changing the API-endpoint. I'm wondering if that still works while using Koreader?

I'm trying to get a workflow running with Calibre-Web -> Kobo -> Highlights to Readwise -> Readwise to Obsidian.
Stock Kobo doesn't sync wirelessly to Readwise and if I understand correctly, Koreader offers that.

E-ink monitors exist. The only issue i could see with trying to combine them is the size difference. What good ereaders can plug into a computer and act as a second monitor?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/post/14012072

Has anyone tried an app like Thunder on the NA4C?

The Boox Note Max comes with a 13.3-inch E Ink Carta 1300 e-paper display

Kobo has announced that it will replace Mozilla Pocket with Instapaper on its e-readers by the end of summer 2025.

Kobo is relying too heavily on 3rd parties for their software, such as Dropbox, Overdrive, Pocket, and Device Repairs. This is coming to haunt them.