I got the Libra Color awhile back. I rediscovered my love of reading. Chewed through dozens of Star Trek books (some are quite good!). And a comic, which surprised me with the color and resolution the Libra offered.
The store seems to work well and the prices are pretty cheap, but you can also load them manually through something like Calibre if you already have a collection of ebooks.
I love how thin and light it is. I originally thought the small size would be a downside, but being able to fit it almost anywhere has made it great for plane/train rides or any kind of trip.
The battery lasts quite a long time, though it seems to discharge quickly if you don't use it for a while.
I think my favorite part is that it's just super intuitive. It feels purpose-built and does everything in the way I expect it to.
I am the developer of an app where its main purpose is to optimize file size and page turn performance of comics/manga on low-powered ereaders like Kobo: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc
I got a Kindle Paperwhite as a gift from my work and I fell in love with e-readers. Then I really didn't like how Amazon was locking down getting your own epubs onto the device (it's only gotten worse), so I quickly found Kobos were an excellent device for my use case. I found that buying ePubs online was way more available than I would have thought and now I get to keep my digital books. Just drag and drop them onto the Kobo.
Kobo also has a "sideload mode" that (despite the slightly confusing name) just remove all online features all together.
It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.
Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.
I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.
what you mean by locking down? your epub is your epub . i read third party epubs on kindle all the time. i am not sure if i am missing something here dont understand the downvotes. I've read third party books on kindle for decades with no issues.
I gifted my sister my kindle this morning (it was unused for years) after loaded it with azw3 files converted from epub using calibre. The other options is to send epub via email. But I told her to never put it out of airplane mode and get it on WiFi because amazon has deleted my "documents" (that's what they called sideloaded books) before.
I own two kobos, a libra for fiction and an ellipsa for tech books and textbooks. Both have koreader on.
using https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle it's trivial. I just bought the Greg Bear humble bundle (27 epub books), dragged all of them in one step, clicked the submit button and that was it. Books showed up on my paperwhite kindle in a moment. Couldn't have been easier. Books sent that way don't disappear from your device as far as I can tell - I've done similar large batch uploads for ages, and they're all still in my library, and available on all of my devices.
> i read third party epubs on kindle all the time.
No, you do not. Kindle has never and, as far as I am aware, to this day, does not support epubs. The only way to read epubs on your Kindle is to convert them either by Amazon's Send to Kindle service or through software like Calibre.
1. Epub of a book exists on a computer
2. User takes simple action to read that book on a Kindle device
3. ???
4. User succeeds at reading that same book
When step 3 is basically invisible, "reading an epub on a kindle" seems like a rational way to view things.
Like when Github invisibly renders Markdown into HTML for display in my browser: It seems rational to say that I'm reading a Markdown document.
Or when I print that same HTML onto paper and read it. I'm not reading the HTML nor the Postscript intermediates: I'm still reading a Markdown document.
Interesting observation here. I still read a lot, but airplanes have become a place I rarely do. I used to always pick up a book every time I flew and would finish it on the flight home. I would still much rather read a real book on the beach than doomscroll though.
> "We're losing the person who reads one book a year," he says. "And that was the person who bought their one Tom Clancy novel when they went on vacation, because you needed something to read on the plane because there was nothing else to do on the plane. Now that the plane has Wi-Fi, and so does that beach, that person is scrolling, not reading."
Personally, I have basically stopped reading since my 20s, but I used to read a ton. I like pulp fantasy and scifi and noir detectives and other nonsense, no one seems to write that sort of thing anymore. I loved Dragonlance when it was around
I don't want fantasy with "the most unique magic system ever created" or "the most complex society" I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
I get it, I'm boring but I guarantee the whole "men don't read anymore" would be less true if publishers still put out books like I'm describing
Instead when I go into a bookstore for the one time a year I shop for my wife for Christmas, I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
> I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
If you're okay with these characters and kingdoms existing in vaguely-medieval China (with magically-empowered monks and Taoist-Buddhist symbolism) rather than vaguely-medieval Europe (with magically-empowered knights and Christian symbolism), then I think you'd be very happy to learn about the genre of xianxia (lit. "immortal heroes"). Unlike the Western high fantasy, xianxia fiction is at a peak of popularity right now, with tons of new stories getting published each month.
As you might guess by the name, at first this was only a literary movement in China; but these days there are tons of English-language xianxia stories as well. And they're not necessarily being written in Chinese and then translated, as you might guess; there are some Western authors writing in this genre too.
---
That being said: while you can find some xianxia stories in published physical form in stores, as a "new media" genre being written mostly by younger digital-native people, most xianxia stories are first being published digitally online as serial fiction.
Among websites where these serials are published, https://wuxiaworld.com is popular for authors writing in Chinese (I believe the site offers professional translation services to authors), while https://royalroad.com is popular for authors writing in English.
Also, as a "new media" genre, these stories are "not well understood" by traditional publishers (i.e. they don't know how to market them), so these stories tend to need to achieve a very high level of popularity before the traditional publishers are willing to engage with them. So even when these authors do produce novelizations of their originally-serial stories, they often end up finding no physical publisher willing to pick them up, and instead end up self-publishing only for digital distribution through Kindle/iBooks/etc.
I like wuxia films quite a bit so I bet I would like this too. I don't own an e-reader or anything but I'll see what I can find. Thank you for the kind recommendation
I used to read a ton of that stuff too and I really miss it. Terry Brooks type stuff. Enjoyable adventures that focus on a small group of characters. I also don't want overly complex worlds and stories for that type of book. The rest of my life is already too complex as it is.
> I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
The genre survived John Norman and Jack Chalker, it can handle a little sex stuff aimed at women. I haven't read that book, but I have read "In the Barn", from famous award-winning anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions" and as such one really has to lean into the dairy-themed smut for me to raise an eyebrow.
I interpreted the OP as complaining not that romance took over specifically his subgenre of fantasy, but rather it has taken over bookshops and related venues completely.
You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.
My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.
I grew up on Redwall, Riftwar, Dragonlance, Mercedes Lackey and Troy Gibson and probably a few others that I'm forgetting now.
Nowadays they would probably be criticized as being too generic or too slow or not engaging enough or whatever but I loved them
Actually, thinking about it. All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.
Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it. Salvatore cured me of that.
But this Blackgate looks interesting. I'll take a closer look when I'm home. Thank you for the recommendation. Love your username too, gave me a good laugh when I saw it.
Bookstores aren't for you. As you've seen, they cater to a certain type of customer now. Similar to how department stores are biased to one type of customer and dedicate much more floor space to them.
There are plenty of old books in the genres you like waiting to be read. Some of them will be in digital format. None of them will be AI dreck.
I mean they 100% exist. Brandon Sanderson isn't some excessively complicated fantasy world (despite what fans may say, Sanderson is very approachable). Dungeon Crawler Carl is all the rage. Hell, The Locked Tomb trilogy has tons of big swords and stuff. The reason why morning glory milking farm and other smut exists on bookshelves now is that women were finding and buying the small stuff when no one gave them the time of day. If you want your stuff back on shelves, start buying them, for they 100% exists even if it's a self-publishing sword and sorcery guy.
I love that Kobos can still be set up completely offline. At the setup screen you can mount the device, set a flag in the config file, unmount/reboot, and boom, it's ready for your books.
My Clara BW is my daily driver. As much as I'd like to use an open reader, their rendering and screen quality are still not quite as polished as the corpo options.
This guide is for a kobo that is already set up, but the procedure is mostly the same from step 5 onwards for a new device.
The only step that I think is missing from this guide is that you have to select a language before connecting the Kobo via USB, in my experience. Mass storage mode should work once you have picked a language.
I also did the same on a factory reset, used Libra Color, and that worked well. On that device I had to do some trickery to get the notes feature to work, which I think involved loading up some dictionary files. I can't readily find the guide I followed for that.
---
Edit: I'll also note here that this setup works flawlessly with Calibre! It is detected and syncs easily!
It’s nice that they have it but strange that it’s hidden.
It would be better if it was an option on the setup screen, and even better if it was the default option and if the login screen was in the parameters.
Because as an hidden option I always fear that they remove it and that we have to find an alternative.
And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
I do agree, but I am glad the option exists, in contrast with competing readers on the market. And I am very glad that it is an option that requires zero talking to activation servers or other infra.
The way they implemented this means that these Kobos can always avoid being e-waste even if Kobo disappears. Assuming they don't maliciously remove it, that is, but seeing as it was added fairly recently and is fairly obscure, I doubt they would bother doing so for current and past devices.
> And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
Being generous and expanding DIY to mean any "open" or "modifiable" reader, this ecosystem has actually be rapidly improving in quality and selection recently. A few new devices were announced recently, and I'm particularly interested in the new M5Stack offering since it has a frontlight and LoRA.
I wish I could recommend any Android-based readers, but the software ecosystem for them is quite poor. I would immediately purchase one if they offered a verifiably-clean AOSP or LineageOS option.
Love Kobo. I switched from Kindle to the Libra Colour a while back. It's a superior device and I don't have to give money to Amazon. It's more responsive, it has physical buttons for turning pages and the screen looks great. The built in book store is ok. I haven't had trouble finding anything, but there aren't many reviews if you're into that sort of thing. I was able to sideload my Kindle library easily too.
Does it have Goodreads integration?
Not that it'd be a dealbreaker for me to switch, but I do enjoy that it syncs my reading progress / library with Goodreads. Which is how me and my friends tend to share what we're reading and then discuss the books at times.
Amazon wiping people's e-books they had already bought was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah, they swore to never do it again but what's that worth?
I've been steering clear from Kindle even though their devices are an attractive buy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Amazon left the e-reader market in a few years since their Kindles are tainted.
A possibly minor nitpick but given women are the majority of their customer base, please make these things more aesthetic. Doesnt even have to be a whole redesign, give it some color, even just an on-trend shade would go far to make it a lot more fashionable.
What I would appreciate is them not plastering the logo/name on the front where it's staring you in the face as you try to read. I already bought the damn device, stop advertising (harassing) to me!
(Both my previous generation Kindle Paperwhite that I switched from and the Kobo Clara Colour that I switched to, do this.)
Then if they could make the glass screen flush with the front like the Paperwhite, that would be awesome too.
Public Service Announcement: if you're loading epubs to Kobo via Calibre, make sure to convert them to kepub (the Kobo's "enahanced" version of epub). Calibre can do that with no loss of quality with a checkbox, and page turns are much much faster.
Kobo Elipsa (1) is my preferred reader for PDFs/papers in particular. Genuinely good product, software works well enough and presents as USB mass storage, long battery life. Other than perhaps a more responsive, USB-C pen, IDK what else you could improve on.
I just got the biggest one they sell. I wanted to fulfil my dream of turning pages using a remote. It turns out though, that the device is switching off both wifi and bluetooth every few minutes (Maybe only when there is no wifi available) and there’s no devmodeon capable of fixing that.
I bought a Clara Color when Amazon decided that my Kindle Keyboard was no longer worthy of receiving ebooks that I purchased. I've loved it so far. I love that was even able to load my jailbroken epub library to the Kobo. I paid for the damned book. Let me read it!
Does anyone here have experience building custom apps for the Kobo? I'm considering getting an e-ink device as a way to shift document reviews off of my regular LCD screens and away from my desk.
Is there anything out there comparable to my original Kindle Oasis? Mine has lived in airplane mode its whole life and I’m afraid for when it finally dies
I bought a kobo (2022 maybe?) pretty much entirely because (at the time anyway) it had the best on-device integration with Overdrive. not sure if kindle, nook, etc still require you to browse and check out books on a secondary device and then sync but I appreciated the kobo getting rid of that step. still using it and still happy.
Is there a way to get kids books on Kobo? Every time we
fly we carry like 10 pounds of board books to keep my son entertained. It would be awesome to have an ebook reader with his board books and other stuff on it.
Of course one pays for the actual electronic device, but after that, why buy ebooks? Nearly everything one would want to read is already on the shadow libraries.
They’re also just more user friendly in general. I have a nearly decade old Kobo that still serves its purpose well and I love how it shows up as a mass storage device when plugged into my computer. No clunky management software (Calibre may be functional, but its UI is godawful) or file conversions required, you just manage plain old epubs in your file browser. That functionality can’t randomly vanish one day, either (unlike e.g. Amazon’s email-to-Kindle service). It’s great.
As a side effect of its openness I’ve bought more books through the Kobo store than I would have otherwise. A perfect counter example is my Oculus Quest 2 which I go out of my way to not buy games from its associated marketplace on; as long as that device is hard-tethered to Facebook and its software, I’m better off as using it as a “dumb” headset with VR purchases going to PC marketplaces like Steam.
Kobo devices ship two different rendering engines: the obsolete, appallingly bad Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK), and their own, bespoke, WebKit-based renderer. By default, files with an .epub extension are rendered with RMSDK. Consequently, you'll get all sorts of weird issues. Some of the ones I've encountered: I've had cover images not displaying in the library, misbehaving internal links (footnotes), inability to override typefaces/text size.
Easy fix: rename the file to .kepub.epub[0].
Slightly more involved fix: run the file through Kepubify[1] first. This tool makes further tweaks to the books to enable a few other features, like remaining read time estimation.
I had no idea! I'd switched from Kindle to Boox because Boox runs Android, which is more hackable, but if Kobo supports SSH, I'll have to give it another look!
If my Kindle ever breaks I'm going to look at Kobo. I prefer whatever ecosystem sells me the ebooks that are easiest to de-DRM so I can own what I've paid for. A decade ago, that was Amazon, but they have locked down a lot.
I probably will move to Kobo eventually as well. My current device is the Oasis and I wish I had bought a spare. I was always hoping Amazon would update it with a USB-C port which I would have bought on day 1.
I know it's such a small issue that no politician will ever take it on, but I really wish there would be some legislation around forcing interoperability and ebook transfer rights.
You can buy a Blu Ray disk and it's going to work in your player. Ebooks should be like that too. And I should be able to give away my ebook collection the same way I can my BR collection.
Doubling a really small number is not particularly impressive. The article doesn't have numbers, but I believe that Canadian sales of Kobo still significantly exceed American sales despite the doubling.
I got the Libra Color awhile back. I rediscovered my love of reading. Chewed through dozens of Star Trek books (some are quite good!). And a comic, which surprised me with the color and resolution the Libra offered.
The store seems to work well and the prices are pretty cheap, but you can also load them manually through something like Calibre if you already have a collection of ebooks.
I love how thin and light it is. I originally thought the small size would be a downside, but being able to fit it almost anywhere has made it great for plane/train rides or any kind of trip.
The battery lasts quite a long time, though it seems to discharge quickly if you don't use it for a while.
I think my favorite part is that it's just super intuitive. It feels purpose-built and does everything in the way I expect it to.
Overall, highly recommend. Very good product.
How did the comic handle on your Libra? I use an older Clara BnW and it really struggles with graphic heavy pdfs - slow page changing etc.
I am the developer of an app where its main purpose is to optimize file size and page turn performance of comics/manga on low-powered ereaders like Kobo: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc
As far as I'm aware, the colour screen devices have two processors, so that probably accounts for the real difference in processing speed.
As far as I remember it handled it fine. I think the page turn transitions were slightly slower, but not in a way that hurt the reading experience.
I think those are CBZ/CBR archives, which should hold ordinary image files (JPEG/PNG) within. I'm not sure on the details though.
I got a Kindle Paperwhite as a gift from my work and I fell in love with e-readers. Then I really didn't like how Amazon was locking down getting your own epubs onto the device (it's only gotten worse), so I quickly found Kobos were an excellent device for my use case. I found that buying ePubs online was way more available than I would have thought and now I get to keep my digital books. Just drag and drop them onto the Kobo.
Kobo also has a "sideload mode" that (despite the slightly confusing name) just remove all online features all together.
> Amazon was locking down getting your own epubs onto the device
Curious about what has changed? I've only ever used the email method and that continues to work.
It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
Same here re email. Though I’m considering switching to kobo anyways cuz Bezos sucks.
I have been hoping for an open e-reader to be built, and it appears someone is building one: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/14/open-book-touch-makes-crowd-... (Joey Castillo’s Open Book project, no affiliation, I just like open/sovereign tech stacks)
> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.
Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.
I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.
what you mean by locking down? your epub is your epub . i read third party epubs on kindle all the time. i am not sure if i am missing something here dont understand the downvotes. I've read third party books on kindle for decades with no issues.
Amazon is making it harder and harder to copy third party books onto the devices.
by doing what? i do it all that time. did one this morning.
I gifted my sister my kindle this morning (it was unused for years) after loaded it with azw3 files converted from epub using calibre. The other options is to send epub via email. But I told her to never put it out of airplane mode and get it on WiFi because amazon has deleted my "documents" (that's what they called sideloaded books) before.
I own two kobos, a libra for fiction and an ellipsa for tech books and textbooks. Both have koreader on.
using https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle it's trivial. I just bought the Greg Bear humble bundle (27 epub books), dragged all of them in one step, clicked the submit button and that was it. Books showed up on my paperwhite kindle in a moment. Couldn't have been easier. Books sent that way don't disappear from your device as far as I can tell - I've done similar large batch uploads for ages, and they're all still in my library, and available on all of my devices.
Why should Amazon be involved at all? Why should they know my reading habits?
> i read third party epubs on kindle all the time.
No, you do not. Kindle has never and, as far as I am aware, to this day, does not support epubs. The only way to read epubs on your Kindle is to convert them either by Amazon's Send to Kindle service or through software like Calibre.
It has the appearance of working like this:
When step 3 is basically invisible, "reading an epub on a kindle" seems like a rational way to view things.Like when Github invisibly renders Markdown into HTML for display in my browser: It seems rational to say that I'm reading a Markdown document.
Or when I print that same HTML onto paper and read it. I'm not reading the HTML nor the Postscript intermediates: I'm still reading a Markdown document.
Interesting observation here. I still read a lot, but airplanes have become a place I rarely do. I used to always pick up a book every time I flew and would finish it on the flight home. I would still much rather read a real book on the beach than doomscroll though.
> "We're losing the person who reads one book a year," he says. "And that was the person who bought their one Tom Clancy novel when they went on vacation, because you needed something to read on the plane because there was nothing else to do on the plane. Now that the plane has Wi-Fi, and so does that beach, that person is scrolling, not reading."
Personally, I have basically stopped reading since my 20s, but I used to read a ton. I like pulp fantasy and scifi and noir detectives and other nonsense, no one seems to write that sort of thing anymore. I loved Dragonlance when it was around
I don't want fantasy with "the most unique magic system ever created" or "the most complex society" I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
I get it, I'm boring but I guarantee the whole "men don't read anymore" would be less true if publishers still put out books like I'm describing
Instead when I go into a bookstore for the one time a year I shop for my wife for Christmas, I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
> I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
If you're okay with these characters and kingdoms existing in vaguely-medieval China (with magically-empowered monks and Taoist-Buddhist symbolism) rather than vaguely-medieval Europe (with magically-empowered knights and Christian symbolism), then I think you'd be very happy to learn about the genre of xianxia (lit. "immortal heroes"). Unlike the Western high fantasy, xianxia fiction is at a peak of popularity right now, with tons of new stories getting published each month.
As you might guess by the name, at first this was only a literary movement in China; but these days there are tons of English-language xianxia stories as well. And they're not necessarily being written in Chinese and then translated, as you might guess; there are some Western authors writing in this genre too.
---
That being said: while you can find some xianxia stories in published physical form in stores, as a "new media" genre being written mostly by younger digital-native people, most xianxia stories are first being published digitally online as serial fiction.
Among websites where these serials are published, https://wuxiaworld.com is popular for authors writing in Chinese (I believe the site offers professional translation services to authors), while https://royalroad.com is popular for authors writing in English.
Also, as a "new media" genre, these stories are "not well understood" by traditional publishers (i.e. they don't know how to market them), so these stories tend to need to achieve a very high level of popularity before the traditional publishers are willing to engage with them. So even when these authors do produce novelizations of their originally-serial stories, they often end up finding no physical publisher willing to pick them up, and instead end up self-publishing only for digital distribution through Kindle/iBooks/etc.
I like wuxia films quite a bit so I bet I would like this too. I don't own an e-reader or anything but I'll see what I can find. Thank you for the kind recommendation
I used to read a ton of that stuff too and I really miss it. Terry Brooks type stuff. Enjoyable adventures that focus on a small group of characters. I also don't want overly complex worlds and stories for that type of book. The rest of my life is already too complex as it is.
Give this a try: https://www.blackgate.com
> I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"
The genre survived John Norman and Jack Chalker, it can handle a little sex stuff aimed at women. I haven't read that book, but I have read "In the Barn", from famous award-winning anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions" and as such one really has to lean into the dairy-themed smut for me to raise an eyebrow.
I interpreted the OP as complaining not that romance took over specifically his subgenre of fantasy, but rather it has taken over bookshops and related venues completely.
You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.
My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.
I grew up on Redwall, Riftwar, Dragonlance, Mercedes Lackey and Troy Gibson and probably a few others that I'm forgetting now.
Nowadays they would probably be criticized as being too generic or too slow or not engaging enough or whatever but I loved them
Actually, thinking about it. All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.
Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it. Salvatore cured me of that.
But this Blackgate looks interesting. I'll take a closer look when I'm home. Thank you for the recommendation. Love your username too, gave me a good laugh when I saw it.
Bookstores aren't for you. As you've seen, they cater to a certain type of customer now. Similar to how department stores are biased to one type of customer and dedicate much more floor space to them.
There are plenty of old books in the genres you like waiting to be read. Some of them will be in digital format. None of them will be AI dreck.
I mean they 100% exist. Brandon Sanderson isn't some excessively complicated fantasy world (despite what fans may say, Sanderson is very approachable). Dungeon Crawler Carl is all the rage. Hell, The Locked Tomb trilogy has tons of big swords and stuff. The reason why morning glory milking farm and other smut exists on bookshelves now is that women were finding and buying the small stuff when no one gave them the time of day. If you want your stuff back on shelves, start buying them, for they 100% exists even if it's a self-publishing sword and sorcery guy.
I love that Kobos can still be set up completely offline. At the setup screen you can mount the device, set a flag in the config file, unmount/reboot, and boom, it's ready for your books.
My Clara BW is my daily driver. As much as I'd like to use an open reader, their rendering and screen quality are still not quite as polished as the corpo options.
I just bought a Kobo Clara Color after purchasing various Kindles for years.
It requires an online setup (account).
A quick search did not find what your saying. Can you please post a how-to or link one (that I couldn't find)?
https://qtekfun.com/random-stuff/bypass-kobo/
This guide is for a kobo that is already set up, but the procedure is mostly the same from step 5 onwards for a new device.
The only step that I think is missing from this guide is that you have to select a language before connecting the Kobo via USB, in my experience. Mass storage mode should work once you have picked a language.
I also did the same on a factory reset, used Libra Color, and that worked well. On that device I had to do some trickery to get the notes feature to work, which I think involved loading up some dictionary files. I can't readily find the guide I followed for that.
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Edit: I'll also note here that this setup works flawlessly with Calibre! It is detected and syncs easily!
Thank you
It’s nice that they have it but strange that it’s hidden.
It would be better if it was an option on the setup screen, and even better if it was the default option and if the login screen was in the parameters.
Because as an hidden option I always fear that they remove it and that we have to find an alternative. And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
I do agree, but I am glad the option exists, in contrast with competing readers on the market. And I am very glad that it is an option that requires zero talking to activation servers or other infra.
The way they implemented this means that these Kobos can always avoid being e-waste even if Kobo disappears. Assuming they don't maliciously remove it, that is, but seeing as it was added fairly recently and is fairly obscure, I doubt they would bother doing so for current and past devices.
> And so far DIY e-reader do not seem great.
Being generous and expanding DIY to mean any "open" or "modifiable" reader, this ecosystem has actually be rapidly improving in quality and selection recently. A few new devices were announced recently, and I'm particularly interested in the new M5Stack offering since it has a frontlight and LoRA.
https://liliputing.com/lilbits-more-phone-sized-e-ink-gadget...
I wish I could recommend any Android-based readers, but the software ecosystem for them is quite poor. I would immediately purchase one if they offered a verifiably-clean AOSP or LineageOS option.
Yep, this is the reason I chose a Kobo.
Love Kobo. I switched from Kindle to the Libra Colour a while back. It's a superior device and I don't have to give money to Amazon. It's more responsive, it has physical buttons for turning pages and the screen looks great. The built in book store is ok. I haven't had trouble finding anything, but there aren't many reviews if you're into that sort of thing. I was able to sideload my Kindle library easily too.
Does it have Goodreads integration? Not that it'd be a dealbreaker for me to switch, but I do enjoy that it syncs my reading progress / library with Goodreads. Which is how me and my friends tend to share what we're reading and then discuss the books at times.
Kobo integrates with Libby/Overdrive which I prefer anyway. I maintain lists and progress with my public library subscription
Cool that you prefer Libby, but saying "use tool X instead" is not really a solution to wanting to use "tool Y". :D
Not as far as I can tell. If I'm not mistaken, Goodreads is owned by Amazon now.
The Kobo does have good Overdrive integration and that's a huge plus.
You're right, Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Somehow didn't think about this, but they'd of course lock it down lol
Amazon wiping people's e-books they had already bought was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah, they swore to never do it again but what's that worth?
I've been steering clear from Kindle even though their devices are an attractive buy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Amazon left the e-reader market in a few years since their Kindles are tainted.
The camel is doing just fine. Amazon ereaders have 70+% market share.
Fun fact: I searched for Kobo Clara on Amazon, and the algorithm has labelled it "Amazon's choice". A subtle agreement with you maybe :)
My wife and I both had kindles since they were first a thing and we both switched to Kobo a few years ago. So nice not getting ads.
70% women is about what I see in bookstores, and frequently the main display cases are geared towards genres more popular among women, like romantasy.
A possibly minor nitpick but given women are the majority of their customer base, please make these things more aesthetic. Doesnt even have to be a whole redesign, give it some color, even just an on-trend shade would go far to make it a lot more fashionable.
What I would appreciate is them not plastering the logo/name on the front where it's staring you in the face as you try to read. I already bought the damn device, stop advertising (harassing) to me!
(Both my previous generation Kindle Paperwhite that I switched from and the Kobo Clara Colour that I switched to, do this.)
Then if they could make the glass screen flush with the front like the Paperwhite, that would be awesome too.
Acetone or black marker will fix that.
Kobo covers are the main way people get that aesthetic oomph.
If you aren't reading comics I wouldn't recommend color e-readers yet. The screens are dimmer and have a noticeable filter over them.
Public Service Announcement: if you're loading epubs to Kobo via Calibre, make sure to convert them to kepub (the Kobo's "enahanced" version of epub). Calibre can do that with no loss of quality with a checkbox, and page turns are much much faster.
Kobo Elipsa (1) is my preferred reader for PDFs/papers in particular. Genuinely good product, software works well enough and presents as USB mass storage, long battery life. Other than perhaps a more responsive, USB-C pen, IDK what else you could improve on.
I just got the biggest one they sell. I wanted to fulfil my dream of turning pages using a remote. It turns out though, that the device is switching off both wifi and bluetooth every few minutes (Maybe only when there is no wifi available) and there’s no devmodeon capable of fixing that.
No one reasonable wants to support Bezos and his Melania funding
I bought a Clara Color when Amazon decided that my Kindle Keyboard was no longer worthy of receiving ebooks that I purchased. I've loved it so far. I love that was even able to load my jailbroken epub library to the Kobo. I paid for the damned book. Let me read it!
Does anyone here have experience building custom apps for the Kobo? I'm considering getting an e-ink device as a way to shift document reviews off of my regular LCD screens and away from my desk.
Is there anything out there comparable to my original Kindle Oasis? Mine has lived in airplane mode its whole life and I’m afraid for when it finally dies
I've never found one.
Kobo has the Sage which seems similar at first glance, but unfortunately it also has a stylus. It's closer to a Kindle Scribe or a Remarkable device.
Sage was discontinued already some time ago.
I bought a kobo (2022 maybe?) pretty much entirely because (at the time anyway) it had the best on-device integration with Overdrive. not sure if kindle, nook, etc still require you to browse and check out books on a secondary device and then sync but I appreciated the kobo getting rid of that step. still using it and still happy.
Is there a way to get kids books on Kobo? Every time we fly we carry like 10 pounds of board books to keep my son entertained. It would be awesome to have an ebook reader with his board books and other stuff on it.
Aren't those designed fit the page, in other words, to keep it looking the same, it would have to be squished (and unreadable) to fit on the screen?
I switched to buying books from Kobo this year because removing DRM from books bought at Amazon is getting too difficult and unreliable.
I hacked my old kindle from a decade ago, highly recommended to anyone who wants to unlock it. There are guides online.
Kobo has daily deals going. Every day I open my wishlist and sort by price lowest to highest, and every few days I buy something.
Of course one pays for the actual electronic device, but after that, why buy ebooks? Nearly everything one would want to read is already on the shadow libraries.
I bought one in July, I chose Kobo because it's hackable and you can ssh in. So far I've had as much fun with that as with reading.
They’re also just more user friendly in general. I have a nearly decade old Kobo that still serves its purpose well and I love how it shows up as a mass storage device when plugged into my computer. No clunky management software (Calibre may be functional, but its UI is godawful) or file conversions required, you just manage plain old epubs in your file browser. That functionality can’t randomly vanish one day, either (unlike e.g. Amazon’s email-to-Kindle service). It’s great.
As a side effect of its openness I’ve bought more books through the Kobo store than I would have otherwise. A perfect counter example is my Oculus Quest 2 which I go out of my way to not buy games from its associated marketplace on; as long as that device is hard-tethered to Facebook and its software, I’m better off as using it as a “dumb” headset with VR purchases going to PC marketplaces like Steam.
> plain old epubs
Kobo devices ship two different rendering engines: the obsolete, appallingly bad Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK), and their own, bespoke, WebKit-based renderer. By default, files with an .epub extension are rendered with RMSDK. Consequently, you'll get all sorts of weird issues. Some of the ones I've encountered: I've had cover images not displaying in the library, misbehaving internal links (footnotes), inability to override typefaces/text size.
Easy fix: rename the file to .kepub.epub[0].
Slightly more involved fix: run the file through Kepubify[1] first. This tool makes further tweaks to the books to enable a few other features, like remaining read time estimation.
[0]: https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec#sideloading-for-testin...
[1]: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/
Interesting, I wasn't aware of this, but it's good to know. My needs haven't been demanding enough to notice a difference.
Calibre can also do that for you transparently when loading the files onto the Kobo.
You can't SSH into kindles anymore? I know that used to be a thing.
I had no idea! I'd switched from Kindle to Boox because Boox runs Android, which is more hackable, but if Kobo supports SSH, I'll have to give it another look!
It’s a shame that Boox disregards GPL2 intentionally. Wish we had more hardware makers that weren’t hostile to free software.
[0]https://x.com/puffnfresh/status/1587064729977044994?s=46
How do you like your Boox device?
I liked my boox palma a lot until its display broke randomly after 2 months in a soft pocket and now it's ewaste.
It's busybox underneath so you can hack on it but you can't run full apps in the Android sense.
If my Kindle ever breaks I'm going to look at Kobo. I prefer whatever ecosystem sells me the ebooks that are easiest to de-DRM so I can own what I've paid for. A decade ago, that was Amazon, but they have locked down a lot.
I probably will move to Kobo eventually as well. My current device is the Oasis and I wish I had bought a spare. I was always hoping Amazon would update it with a USB-C port which I would have bought on day 1.
I know it's such a small issue that no politician will ever take it on, but I really wish there would be some legislation around forcing interoperability and ebook transfer rights.
You can buy a Blu Ray disk and it's going to work in your player. Ebooks should be like that too. And I should be able to give away my ebook collection the same way I can my BR collection.
Kavita, Tailscale, KoReader with OPDS, on the Kobo is basically a perfect system for organizing ebooks, transferring, and reading.
Perhaps we should link to the article: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content...
Thanks! Good idea. I'll put the submitted URL in the toptext instead.
Doubling a really small number is not particularly impressive. The article doesn't have numbers, but I believe that Canadian sales of Kobo still significantly exceed American sales despite the doubling.