Kobo announces its first color e-readers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14277930

Kobo announces its first color e-readers

Kinda surprised they even still exist. Bought one for my mom years ago. She used it a lot but thought 10-15 bucks for an ebook was too much. So i had to download a bunch of public domain stuff for her. Kept her occupied for a good while

Why at you surprised? You can have 10000 books in the space of a single folder.

I know. Mama was very picky though

You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It’s way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it’s a lot lighter than carrying books around.

They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.

I just wish the tech was there for Graphic Novels.

Why would you be surprised? And why would 15$ for a book be too much?

Because we are/were not j.p. gotrocks kin

It might depend on which part of the world they live in. In the West? Not so much. But in a third world country? It might very well be a day’s work wage.

Believe it or not there are lots of pockets in “the west” where money is that tight. Fixed incomes didnt and dont stretch that far

I like my Kobo, but wish it had a bit better of a storefront. I want to get my books from more than just the kobo store. Overdrive support is nice. It sometimes loses my page just like a real book, ironically.

Still, I find myself still letting it collect dust due to it’s limited storefront and long book checkout times at the library. Physical books and newspapers are a bit bigger and stable software-wise.

I really wish epaper displays were more common. It’s a really cool technology. I’d love an inexpensive epaper monitor or maybe an alarm clock?

pebble smartwatch with ePaper please!

The Watchy exists ;D

Install Calibre on a computer and use that. Browse online sailing forums for your favourite books and new releases. Then support the authors financially by buying their paper books directly from them or their publishers.

If you buy your books from them digitally use a DRM remover (Like the plugin available on Calibre) so you can forever own your books and move them to any device you want in any format you want. Forever.

Interesting, I might look into that! Thanks.

Have a few ebooks and audiobooks in calibre that have been removed from Amazon/Audible. Nothing dramatic drama wise as far as I can tell other than the license expiring/moving.

It’s nice not having to worry about it.

I hope the reason they took so long is that they were waiting on a really good color e-ink screen, but I doubt it. That said, I love my Kobo Sage and my LazyLibrarian + Calibre-web + Kobo Sync workflow, and if you can do the same on these, then they’ll probably be a good buy.

If you want pretty good color screen, try the Boox Tab Mini C

Any chance you could share your docker-compose.yml for your stack?

I can, but I’m not happy with it. If you containerize this setup, each container needs it’s own Calibre instance and it’s very inefficient. I run it on Proxmox and plan to either package it all in a single Docker image or roll it into my Ansible playbook on a different VM.

Keep in mind that only one company makes eInk displays. They’re all using the same displays.

Only one company in the entire world makes e ink displays?

All the panels used by all Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Boox eReader models are made by Carta.

There might be other companies that make those other kinds of small updatable eink displays used in stores, or the tiny ones on microcontrollers.

Yeah, E Ink is actually a brand. AFAIK there’s no one else producing suitable displays for ereaders at scale.

Sure. I don’t see how that affects what I said, though?

What e-reader should I buy, when I don’t want to use amazon (or similar) services to log in/buy/transfer books to the reader?

I have plenty of free old PDF books I simply want to copy there and be able to read them without ads and online bs.

I don’t need web browser, mp3 player, spotify, google translator or other such nonsense. I need simple controls, backlight (adjustable) to read at night and that’s basically it.

Thanks for any input.

This guy reviews all kinds of e-ink devices. https://www.youtube.com/c/MyDeepGuide/videos

I watched his videos before deciding to get a large format BOOX Max Lumi (13") for PDF reading and note taking. I wanted the large one to split screen a PDF textbook on the left and notebook on the right. That was a few years ago, though, and I suggest reviewing some more recent videos to get an idea of what the current devices are like.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/c/MyDeepGuide/videos

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

You can easily load PDFs into kobo readers, at-least into mine. However, most PDFs will be unreadable. To reads PDFs properly on a e-reader you need a screen that is at-least as big as their render size. Meaning, that if the PDF was built for A4, your experience will be, in most cases, lacking on any screen smaller than A4.

I have no experience using such big eink and can’t comment on their quality.

I use a Kindle, but never bought a single book from them. I mostly use their transfer method for convenience instead of looking for a cable. As for books, I downloaded a few gigs of ebooks in html/RTF/doc format well before e-ink was invented, and use those with calibre to convert to epub. Pdfs are rather suboptimal for ebooks.

I agree with the other reply that pdfs are terrible for e-readers. That being said, Pocketbooks can open them (which is not that common) and it is possible to read them, although it isn’t so comfortable, especially for A4 pdfs. It can also open wide range of other formats and I’m quite happy with it in general. You can connect it to a computer and simply copy your books there, among other means of getting books there. But I have to say I have no first hand experience with competition.

Thanks for the input. I wrote PDFs, but it might be possible to get another format. Check the other comment.

As for Pocketbook, which model do you have? Is there anything you dislike about it? Would you buy it again or seek alternative? Thank you.

I see. You can open just about anything, something like 18 formats, it’s on their website. I prefer epub, but it can open Kindle’s mobi etc. That’s why I bought it, I got a large library of pdbs.

I have Touch HD 3, I had some Touch Lux before. I had it for a while, don’t know their newest models. But yes, not only would I buy it again, I already did, just bought a newer version. Unless I was looking for something for hand note taking, I wouldn’t change. What I dislike is that when you break the screen, it’s expensive to replace, so I just bought a new one instead. Nothing you wouldn’t be used to from phones. And I’d very much like to have an option to disable the touch layer of the screen by long press of one of the physical buttons, but it’s a minor issue. What I like is the tunable intensity and colour temperature of the light and I’m quite happy with everything else. You can upload books by sending them as an attachment to a special email. If you don’t like the interface for reading the books, you can even quite easily replace it with Cool reader. I tried it before, but I didn’t do it in the newest one. You can use dictionaries, some are preinstalled, or use notes and highlights, but I don’t have experience with that.

PDFs are usually terrible for reading in this screen size. If they are plain text, you might be able to convert them to proper ebooks in Calibra.

OK, thank you for noting that. Never thought about it. My local library hands out free e-books of classic old literature so it might be available in other formats too. I grabbed some PDFs, because it was easiest to open in PC or android. Will check it out.

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Kobo announces its first color e-readers(www.theverge.com)

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