When it comes to an eBook reader, the choices are limited. The market is dominated by Amazon’s proprietary Kindle along with a few other options like Kobo, Nook and Onyx. An interesting news for open source enthusiasts is that a developer, Joey Castillo, is working on creating an open
  • @entropicshart@sh.itjust.works
    27•1 year ago

    What kindle? I’d guess the one that doesn’t require a soldering iron to build…

    I would love to have an alternative for kindle, but this is not it; not yet at least

    • @AustralianSimon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Yeah, maybe bottom shelf kindle.

      I’ve had an Oasis for a few years and it shits all over competition at the time I got it.

      I just upload my own books to it.

      Still this is a neat option for tinkerers.

    • @dasgoat@lemmy.world
      2•1 year ago

      I have a second hand Kobo that works fine without an account or an internet connection. I just load up .mobi files I get from Anna’s or Z-lib.

  • @linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de
    12•1 year ago

    I had one of the early generation kindles for a while. There was a straighrtforward jailbreak to make it more sociable. The set it up with Calibre which was smooth once properly set up. There was (likely still is) a cool plugin that would get RSS feeds, generate an ebook and sync automatically over wifi per schedule. So then when I went out I would have everything to read fresh with zero effort. Which at the time was pretty impressive. Phone batteries sucked so they were not really viable for reading unless you could have them plugged in all the time. The kindle was magic in comparison.

    Anyone who wants to dive into e readers should go to the E-Book Readers section of MobileRead Forums. There people are very serious about ebooks.

    I was thinking of buying another ereader a couple years ago. I sort of assumed there would be some open-ish type options. But I didn’t find anything that suited me. I really liked eink and wish it was more widely used. I would love one of the phones with dual ekin/LCD displays.

    All this to say I hope there is community uptake and participation in the project. I myself do not have a soldering iron and don’t really need an ereader. But I think it’s a cool contribution.

    • loathsome dongeaterEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Kobo ereaders are very freedom respecting. You can run koreader or plato on it very easily if you are a little bit tech savvy. Just involves plugging in the reader to a computer and running a shell or powershell script.

    • conciselyverbose
      3•1 year ago

      It’s brutal.

      I like the idea, but you need a touch screen and support and you need a far, far better screen before it’s in the neighborhood of actually realistic to use. It’s not their fault that you can’t just go buy a 300 PPI screen, but the end result is just not enough to actually be usable.

  • @rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
    4•1 year ago

    Isn’t 4.2 inch like about a quarter of the screen size of a small tablet or e-reader? My phone has a bit less than 6 and is considered small.

  • Rosco
    2•1 year ago

    Upgraded my Kobo Clara HD internal storage from 8GB to 128GB, so that I can put mangas on it, and installed koreader. Dirt cheap and very enjoyable.