• 11 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: March 24th, 2024
  • gramgantoEreader•E-reader for manga that isn't enshittified and doesn't spy on me?English
    4·
    4 days ago

    Hey there!

    Not the above guy, but I’ll share my thoughts too.

    I’ve owned two Kobo devices (the 7" Libra Colour and the 6" Clara BW), and many others, and I can highly recommend them.

    I’ve also heard of KOreader before which now I realise the KO might refer to Kobo?

    KOreader is a FOSS third-party reader application that can run not only on Kobo readers, but also Pocketbooks, Kindles, and Android devices—if you have an Android device with F-Droid, you can try it out right now. It’s extremely popular, and for very good reason—KOreader is absolutely fantastic, and I don’t think I could ever go back to reading books any other way.

    the Kobo Libra 2 or Colour or the Kobo Sage (B&W) are solid options

    Only the latter is available here sadly.

    I personally wouldn’t recommend the Sage, after the week I spent with one. Although it has a gorgeous 8" display, I found it to be somewhat unergonomic to hold, and it has a notoriously bad battery life.

    8" is edging it really close, I’d have to test it somehow. Ideally it’d be 10" diagonally as that’d be about as large a manga page is IRL.

    The only Kobo I’ve found available here that is 10" diagonal is the Kobo Elipsa E2. Is that one any good?

    I read a ton of manga on my Libra Colour (and I know many other people read manga on the Libra as well). From what I’ve been told, 7" is about the size of an actual BW manga page.

    In any case, I’ve found it to be absolutely fine. In KOreader, I use the “fit to width” option, which makes the page fit the whole width of the screen (and display about two-thirds of the height of the page at any time); I end up pushing the “next” button twice for each page, but as I like to read slowly, I don’t mind at all.

    The key factor that made me stick with the Libra over the Sage (besides the aforementioned battery life issues) was that, in KOreader, a page shown in “fit to width” mode on the Libra was the same width as one shown in “fit to height” on the Sage—that is, although an entire page could be shown at once on the Sage, it wasn’t actually any wider than it was on the Libra. For me, an extra page turn each time was worth the vastly superior ergonomics, battery life (especially the new Libra Colour, which has an enormous battery which), build quality (the Libra feels sturdier and more rugged than the Sage), and portability.

    If size is the most important factor, you’ll probably have to sacrifice ergonomics and physical buttons. I don’t know of a >8” screen that also has physical buttons.

    I may have to backtrack on the buttons if it’s really that uncommon. I’d have expected most devices to have physical buttons because it just seems so obvious to me to have them.

    Some of the InkPad’s have physical buttons at that size. I only tried one, the InkPad X Pro—and while it was significantly cheaper than the same size Kobo, I wasn’t very impressed with the UX (particularly how slow the thing was). I also found that I didn’t actually like the larger screen when reading reflowable text (epub novels, etc.).

    I planned to try the Elipsa 2E after I returned the Sage, but I actually enjoyed the Libra so much that I decided my search was over.

    Do I need any account or accept any sort of human rights abuse consent formprivacy policy in order to use Kobo devices?

    You don’t. It’s very easy to bypass the account registration on a new Kobo. You don’t even have to turn on the Wi-Fi.

    After that, you can install KOreader if you wish, which is just done through a shell script, or you can also enjoy the built-in reading software (which is pretty good as well).

    How would you rate the likelyhood to enshittify or otherwise turn into an adverse contract partner given your past experiences with Kobo/Rakuten?

    I don’t want to be the one to say something good about a company, only for the future to prove me wrong—but, as I can tell, Rakuten seems very well regarded in the community, and I don’t think they have a record of screwing people over.

  • gramgantoLinux•What distro do you use and why?
    191·
    1 month ago

    NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.