web VS koreader

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; likewise it's not possible to accept money without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal. (Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things doesn't mean you can't run your web app on a single tiny server, and that outsourcing the basic underpinnings of your web app, like the OS, runtime, and database to some cloud service, or that resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, will result in complexity and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

Hey a little later to the party here but I'm really enjoying this. I started reading a book with it and while I agree with others it's not great for grammar it certainly shows me many new words without requiring me to read at a glacial pace.

PS: You should def try to include some books from https://standardebooks.org/ which are much nicer formatted than the ones you're using from Project Gutenberg.

Good luck and I hope you can keep building this out. Already the update to tap anywhere to close the word definition is a nice improvement :)

A number of e-book platforms are discussed on my blog, which dives deeply into the technical nuances of typesetting a few[1]. Ultimately, I typeset a classic from Standard EBooks[2], Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde[3].

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

[2]: https://standardebooks.org/

[3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

As an aside, for anyone looking for free classic books to read on their various eReaders, these are very well done: https://standardebooks.org

It is the same when you download a kepub book from standardebooks.org. You will have the epub file with kepub features.

> https://standardebooks.org/

Standard Ebooks is seriously impressive. One of my favorite sources of books in the public domain.

I’d also add in addition to this excellent list of DRM-free ebooks, it’s always worth looking into borrowing a book from the library via Libby/Overdrive.

Kobos[1] and Pocketbooks[2] are a lot more open than Kindles. AFAIK you can transfer .epub files into both devices and these epubs are perfectly readable via the stock OS. If for some reason you find the stock proprietary OS lacking, you can install an open source one like KOreader [3] or Plato[4]

Of course you want a good way of organizing epubs pdfs mobi, and like has already been mentioned Calibre[5] is a great option.

[1]https://www.kobo.com/

[2]https://pocketbookstore.com/en-ca

[3]https://github.com/koreader/koreader

[4]https://github.com/baskerville/plato

[5]https://calibre-ebook.com/

[2]: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Dictionary-support...

Oh man I absolutely love the work that you guys do. I'm actually in the process of learning Ebook production using the 'Step by Step' guide on your website. I'm essentially learning it all from scratch as I have little to no programming/SWE experience (I learned a bit of Lua because of KOReader[1]) but the technical side of ebook production has always fascinated me enough to keep learning.

[1] https://github.com/koreader/koreader

Ha! I feel similarly, if not as eloquently.

Installed https://github.com/koreader/koreader on mine + enabled SSH server.

I read that KOreader is unstable on the Libra 2[0], so I haven’t installed it yet even though I would like to. What has been your experience running it?

[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/8414

You can easily modify it (like adding KOReader).

I'm using Kobo Clara 2E (6" screen size), and it is unpleasant to read PDF and CBZ files (comic/manga) since Kobo only provides zoom and orientation mode. I installed KOReader on my Kobo. It has more setup to display those files way better. The views of PDF in KOReader and Comic in Koreader. I read Epub files in Koreader to maintain its original format.

I installed KOReader on my Kobo Clara 2E. KOReader is a document viewer to read PDFs and manga/comics. KOReader has more setup to display fixed-layout format in a way that is better than the native Kobo display (Kobo stock).

It doesn't try to solve the same use cases that Calibre does, but I built an open source (EPUB only) manager / reader / statistics tracker called AnthoLume [0]. It mostly stemmed from me reading in KOReader [1] on my Kindle, and not having the ability to sync the progress to my iPhone / iPad.

It's got metadata matching, support for multiple users, and statistics tracking which allows me to have a "Leaderboard" that shows how fast you read (words per minute). Fun competition between my wife and I (that I'm 100% losing). It's a Progressive Web App and utilizes a Service Worker to support 100% offline reading as well.

There's a demo server [2] (creds are "demo" for both user & pass).

[0] https://gitea.va.reichard.io/evan/AnthoLume

[1] http://koreader.rocks/

[2] https://antholume-demo.cloud.reichard.io/