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by eddythompson80 4 hours ago
I don’t know man. Maybe it’s a great reader for those who really need to customize everything. However, I found it very hard to use. I can never find settings where I’d expect them to be. Is font or margins or hyphenation under the Gear symbol or the Document symbol or the Wrench symbol or the long-press book settings? Is it then under Typography, Display, Style, Text or Miscellaneous?

I had it on my ereader to check it out, but never got around to it. One time on a long flight I had a Gutenberg Project book that wasn’t rendering correctly and thought I’d give KOReader a try. Spent like 10 minutes trying to find how to disable hyphenation. And even if you get to the right menu, there will be a dozen options to scroll through on 1-3 pages. Maybe if I had internet to check where each setting is to set it up, but it’s not very intuitive to configure. I came from Kobo default reader where all the settings I care about are all front and center and you find them in the first place you look all grouped together.

Also, I realize this is a personal preference, I don’t like the “file explorer” view. I prefer a “library” view like Kobo or Kindle defaults to. If that makes sense.

7 comments

> Also, I realize this is a personal preference, I don’t like the “file explorer” view. I prefer a “library” view like Kobo or Kindle defaults to. If that makes sense.

I'm with you, my reading device is something where I don't want to fiddle or be distracted by settings and options. I just want a stock, opinionated device with good defaults that just works and I have to charge once a month. That's it.

agreed, obviously reading a book itself is the simplest way to read a book. but the simplest way to carry around an entire library is technology. so id like to remove the fiddling or needing to interact with said technology as a barrier to me turning off my brain from life to get sucked into a book
Agreed. KOReader is great in terms of capability but it is really let down by poor UI. I got used to it but it's not great
Yeah, the UI IMO is very confusing and I'm not sure it has any benefits for me or features over the stock Kobo interface. It also will understandably never support vertical writing too so it loses some more appeal there for me.
> I don’t like the “file explorer” view

Exact reason why despite having a jailbroken Kindle, I stick to the stock book browser. It's so tough to navigate on an old-gen Kindle with a low refresh rate.

Check out this plugin: https://github.com/AndyHazz/bookshelf.koplugin

I had the same problem and someone here shared the plugin, it does the job very well independently of your file structure and nesting.

Exactly my thoughts. But it all changed when i just put the tailscale proxy on kindle and allowed claude to ssh into it. Now i can just configure it remotely and never really need to do anything else except reading on kindle itself.
Why does Tailscale need to be used for Claude? Can’t you just ssh into it locally?
For me Tailscale is what i setup for all my homelab services. This way my Kindle feels like just another homelab service exposed by Tailscale. I'm sure you can do it differently.
Ohhhh that's not a bad idea at all. I'd read the article and was still largely in the "but why do I care?" space, but hands off management makes a lot of sense.
The UI can be confusing at first. Bu take some time to get familiar with it and it can be really nice. The main benefits for me is dealing with poorly formatted epub and sensible viewing of pdf on small screen (kobo libra 2). There’s also OPDS support to connect to my calibre server instance and get book that way.

There’s no benefits if you get your books from the stores. But if you manage your ebook library yourself, koreader is great.

Check out https://github.com/AndyHazz/bookshelf.koplugin

I had the same problem with the missing Home Screen view and that solved it: you can see all your books no matter how deeply nested they are