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572 points bookofjoe | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pfooti ◴[] No.41864842[source]
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_.

Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard to get my CBR/CBZ files on directly. The annotation / notetaking featureas are nice (I haven't leaned into them yet, but they work well even on the small screen size), plus all the regular stuff with normal book reading. Also, since it's kobo/rakuten, the libby integration is better (search and select library books right from the device).

The actual reading app is maybe 90% as good as reading on the kindle (or a more specialized reader like perfectviewer on android). There's some annoyingly fiddly features- font size is kind of weirdly variable, when going through CBR files there's no "read next in the folder" gesture nor is there a "this is read/unread" state in the google drive ui, so you always have to remember which book you are finishing when opening the next in the series.

I tried out one of those boox readers with the android apps, which would be even better software-wise, but the boox hardware seems like garbage (for an N=1 at least). My display came with several rows of stuck pixels, and apparently it's a good thing that I ordered from amazon instead of the boox store, because the reviews indicate getting an RMA from boox directly is a pain.

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al_borland ◴[] No.41865600[source]
I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it.

The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.

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1. dfc ◴[] No.41869211[source]
I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?
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2. HansardExpert ◴[] No.41869333[source]
Yes completely.

I have both an old Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Gen I think and a Kobo Clara.

The kindle 'lives' in the car and the Kobo at home so I always have something to read.

I use Calibre to sync to both.

Rather than directly accessing Amazon from the Kindle I download bought books to my PC then strip the DRM - so I can read the same book on both the Clara and Kindle.

See: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

I'd say that the initial awkwardness is from deliberately not connecting the Kobo or Kindle to the internet to stop them from 'phoning home' when you set them up. The Kindle is easy - just don't connect it, the Kobo seems to insist but there's a simple step-by-step to bypass the enforced sign up on the Clara I use.

See: https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html - basically SQL commands.

and you can get firmware updates for the Kobo devices via

https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html

and they are easy to apply - drag / drop.

I don't get books from Kobo's site as it used to be hard if not impossible to strip the DRM from them - which meant I couldn't read them on my Kindle.

Hope that helps.

3. mdorazio ◴[] No.41869346[source]
I use a Boox reader, but pretty close to the same experience. For me, I either buy the book from one of the many places that lets you download epub, or buy it on the Kindle store and download it from Libgen. It's really a non-issue. I've only run into one or two books I wasn't able to get an epub of, and those I ended up reading on the Kindle cloud reader on my laptop.
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4. tikkun ◴[] No.41869627[source]
What are your favorite places to buy books that let you download the epub versions also?