Kobo Clara BW with Koreader and Calibre
Great for ebooks, still holding out on color e-ink
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
13 points (100.0% liked)
Ereader
90 readers
3 users here now
Lemmy.world Ereader community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I started out (in recent years, previously had an old B&N Nook Simpletouch) with a Libra H2O. It was a well-made device, Kobo is a good company.
Currently I use a Boox Page (7 inch) for reading and a Boox Go (10.3 ich) for studying and notating.
Downside for Boox is the Chinese firmware that's basically a black box. The upside is they are the most flexible of any e-reader regarding self-hosting your own library and syncing across custom or personal services. I've been happy with the devices overall.
I had the B&N Nook version 1 and 2. quirky but a fun reader at the time.
Nooks were some of the best you could get there in the early days! Having such a large hacking community made fun to tinker with them.
I am finding the Kobo readers to be very hackable as well. I have been doing some fun/weird stuff with mine.
Its true! I think the underlying Linux bones help with that. The one thing that moved me away from Kobo is the notes export limitations. You have to install a mod to get the functionality, then you can manually export them to a txt file in the home directory of the device. Its good, but not as flexible as it could be.
It kind of blows me away when ereader producers don't have deeply integrated and functional notes management systems, its such a big part of the device! I suspect it may be linked to vendor lock in though, each company wants you to stay with their services and so make it difficult to extract your notes 😕
I hear that. I think people get complacent since Amazon syncs their notes with Goodreads, but competitors need to be doing that stuff too. I'd love to see an option to integrate with story graph or something like that.
I have several but Kobo Libre Colour is my go to now.
I asked someone above as well, but how do you find the colour screen in comparison with black and white? I've heard people complaining a bit about the screen door effect.
I also have the KLC and I love it having upgraded from a Libra H2O, but you do lose some crispness compared to a black and white screen. Basically you need to activate the light quite a bit more often/sooner than before, but the color is nice, USB-C is a big bonus, and the pen support is at least interesting if not a pretty big opportunity (though I use a Supernote so I don’t really need that feature).
I haven’t really suffered too much in terms of battery life or enjoyment from having to light it up more, and I wouldn’t say there’s been a significant screen door effect on mine. The color is a little pale, but I find it reminiscent of newsprint and comic book coloration in a charming way.
The color could be better in general, but personally I love having it. I don't read a lot of comics on it, so the main use for me is book covers and color highlights, but now that I am used to it, I wouldn't want to go back. It's also really good for children's books since the colors tend to be very vibrant anyway, but anything dark and moody gets pretty muddy.
Currently have a Boox Nova 2 and a Kindle Paperwhite Signature.
I mostly use the Boox Reader. The Paperwhite is a paperweight.
How's the battery life on the Boox? What are the pros and cons of running an Android e-reader?
Battery life is good. Not as good as when I got it in 2020, but I only need to charge it maybe every 3 weeks or so. I charged it 9 days ago and it’s currently at 79%. Days it still has 17 days left on the battery stats page. Actual battery life varies based on LED brightness used and refresh frequency.
Pros are what you’d expect. Flexibility, works with Android apps. Very customizable experience.
Cons… some android apps don’t play nice with e-ink, I don’t personally take advantage of much of what makes it good (few apps, I don’t do note taking), and Boox never updates the underlying OS. The Nova 2 is still on android 9. I keep it offline so no big deal.
Overall it was worth it to me when I bought it, and it’s still my preferred reader. There aren’t many (any?) current eReaders in an 8” format without the side handle button thing. I don’t like that square-ish form factor.
Sounds great. I'm a bit interested in a Boox just as a fun thing to have, and sometimes would like to read PDF which are generally quite badly supported on most e-readers. I'm guessing PDF reading works better on an Android, also because the specs are better.
PDF reading is particularly good on it, and the built in reading app (Neo Reader) has incredibly good post auto-cropping and reflow tools. If you read a lot of PDFs it’s definitely worth it.
Also, having access to android apps means it’s great for manga as well.
The nice part about Boox is that you never have to worry about formats really. They all read equally well, and you can crop yourself if it for some reason doesn't crop as expected. It then applies the same crop to all pages.
For other formsts like epub you can adjust font etc which is nice, and I use the built in dictionary a lot as I am not native English speaking but prefer to read in English generally. You can download and configure several dictionaries which is cool for multilingual people.
This is in the Nova 3 btw but I hear they are very similar.
Nova 3 is essentially identical to the Nova 2, but with a slightly faster chipset.
koreader has good support for PDFs and runs on my Kobo devices better than the native reader.
Just installed KOReader and tried it out a bit, mostly for Chinese dictionary reasons, but I'm really impressed tbh. I don't know if I'll have it as a daily driver though, I find the collections system on Kobo stock firmware much more convenient and nicer than the folder system KOReader runs on. I know there's Calibre metadata search too, but my tags are seriously messed up so I need to clean them up before that becomes useful.
Glad it was helpful. I also switch between the systems depending on what I need.
Kobo Clara 2e - I find it a bit sluggish, some other convos here tell me to use KOReader for a better experience.
I used to have a Paperwhite 3g, fantastic device but even offline I can't caution that business, their ethos and practice's. Fuck Amazon.
My kobo makes it easy to sideload books even without Calibre. Upon buying from your e-reader, the store will send you drm-free books if that's the publisher' request. If you bought a drm-encrypted book, and you need or want to read your books elsewhere the current adobe DRM protection is easy to remove with the obok plugin from the DeDRM Calibre Plugin Package, making your book truly yours.
(Removing it from the kindle books is becoming increasingly complicated)
Agree there. There are so many options for adding books to the Kobo readers, it's great and stripping DRM from their books couldn't be easier with the plugins for Calibre. All you need is the plugin and a serial number. I also like how hackable they are. Mine is doing several cool things that aren't default. And using an 8bitdo Micro controller as a page turner is next level.
I ended up with a Samsung galaxy tab A9+. I have books on Kindle, libby, kobo and moonreader. The only device that let's them all work nice from my research was an android tablet.
Yeah I have a Galaxy Tab S9 as well, but I only use it for reading PDFs or for reading Chinese graded readers. My eyes aren't too disturbed by it I think, but I prefer e-ink anyway. So much easier on the eyes.
An old kindle keyboard for books and a boox with a colour screen for comics. Really happy with both
Nice. How do you find the colour screen in comparison with black and white? I've heard people complaining a bit about the screen door effect.
I only use it for comics and it seems pretty much like reading a real comic book to me. I think if you were doing art with fine details it might not be as crisp as you might like? Although it's in colour it's still an E ink screen so not extremely high resolution or anything
I imagine this popped up because I just commented something similar, but I'll go again lol..
I use an Onyx Boox Nova 3. Runs android, builtin reader supports most formats (epub, mobi, pdf, cbz and more but these sre all I ever use).
The built in browser makes it easy to download new books, but it is of course sluggish so there is also a wifi sharing feature with a very easy to use dedicated app. Visit the IP from other device on same wifi, drop books, get them on your Boox device.
Also downloading APKs like Mihon is awesome for manga. I don't use any other apps tho, as the device is slow in general. It is for reading and nothing else, which is how I like it.