KOReader advantages?

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by jberd

I haven't tried creating my own.

But there is an English Wiktionary version at http://www.dictinfo.com/stardict/wik...-2015-02-01.7z
(I found the link at http://www.dictinfo.com/).

Also, if you go to http://pan.baidu.com/s/1c01qNM4#path=%252Fhuzheng_life, there are several stardic dictionaries. They are in several files (stardict-...-tar.1 to stardict-..-tar.7); if you download them and cat them together, you get a tar file with many dictionaries.

Jay

Thanks.

[344a]

I haven't tried the koreader yet.

I've been using the kobo h2o for 3 days, and I am happy with the default reader so far, except reading pdf.

Does koreader handle pdf better?

[adrians]

Originally Posted by 344a

I haven't tried the koreader yet.

I've been using the kobo h2o for 3 days, and I am happy with the default reader so far, except reading pdf.

Does koreader handle pdf better?

Much better, as others have mentioned in this thread.

[lngndvs]

I have just finally finished installing KOreader on my shiny new KA1. My first impression of the KA1 was it is slow and clunky, but good for reading ebooks. I will use the public library. As a GNU/linux user, it was pretty easy to get Calibre working on a basic level, which helped in processing the few PDFs I have already tried, including library scans. KOreader makes reading PDFs even possible. Font sizes/rendering in landscape mode are usable, unlike the stock "nickle", which actually I can, I think, read the pdfs converted by Calibre to epubs.

I have thousands of PDFs of scientific litarature, so my best reader would be the new Sony 13" model. I knew I could not do that, YET, so went with the KA1, with good reviews, esp. using KOreader, at a more reasonable pricepoint. The whole ebook infrastructure is bothersome to me. I can use Overdrive with the KA1, to some extent, but my initial impression is that I still need to use the library's catalog to borrow. Will figure that out.

With KOreader, the clunkiness factor is less noticeable, but I still really like the nickle reader for epubs. KOreader, so is my initial impression, does operate at a more tolerable pain level (as far as page turning).

I have a ways to go, but without KOreader, I"d have filed the KA1 away under the pile on my desk. Just for reading novels.

I new must learn Calibre, and that workflow. I like the concept of "series" that has been mentioned: anything to facilitate organization, but I have not figured out how that works. My pdf collection is scattered out all over the place on my desktop, with pdfs relevant to a particular topic in a somewhat disorganized mass, on different partitions, backed up copies all over.

WHat would help me would be more documentation in a form readable by a newbie. I am grateful for the instructions that I found by Maltby, even though it took a time to work my way through them.

Good docs will be helpful. Same for Calibre. I am still struggling with shoptalk.

Thank you VERY MUCH to those whose labors have made my life easier!!!

Alan Davis

[the.Mtn.Man]

I think the primary draw of KOReader is that it's free, open source, and not controlled by "The Man". Whether or not that's a sufficiently compelling reason to use it over Nickel is a question for the individual.

[Philippe D.]

Hi Alan,

I must say, I originally installed KOreader for the same reason as you did - I'm looking for a way to store a significant library of scientific PDFs (even though I bought my Kobo reader for personal use, to read novels). In my (short) experience KOreader is way better than Nickel at displaying PDFs, but is still not quite satisfying. I didn't try making very extensive experiments, but for some documents, page clipping didn't work too well, and the end result was that the displayed part was still too small for comfortable reading, even in landscape mode.

If you have good tips on how to configure KOreader, I'm very much interested (or even just a good place for documentation on how to do X or Y with it). My guess is that it can do a lot of things, but you may have to work a little bit on configuration and tuning.

(For regular novels, it seems to me that Nickel is rather more convenient - but then, I'm not using my Kobo reader as a storing medium for novels, so I'm not keeping a huge library on it - which is quite the opposite of what I'd like to do with scientific PDFs)

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

I think the primary draw of KOReader is that it's free, open source, and not controlled by "The Man". Whether or not that's a sufficiently compelling reason to use it over Nickel is a question for the individual.

In my experience, the primary draw is that it provides much better PDF capabilities than Nickel, which is slow in that regard, does not allow highlights and page trimming options.
Sure, "PDF not suited for eink yadda", but "tablet not suited for outdoors yadda". There's always a compromise to make and I still think that Kobo should improve native PDF capabilities (after improving their toucscreen driver for the One, Koreader is better in that regard too). Until then, Koreader does the job, even without a note feature...

[the.Mtn.Man]

So I installed KOReader out of curiosity and got it up and running without issue. First of all, I don't like how it shows the internal directories on the device instead of giving me a nice list based on the meta data like the default software does. Maybe there's a way to do that, but I never bothered to find out because, secondly, when I attempted to open the Delphi Classics "Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle", a monster of a volume at 85MB and over 12,000 pages, KOReader froze and I had to reboot my Aura. I have a lot of large "complete works" volumes on my ereader, and if KOReader can't open them then it's useless to me, so I deleted it and will stick with the official firmware.

[El Duderino]

Originally Posted by lngndvs

I new must learn Calibre, and that workflow. I like the concept of "series" that has been mentioned: anything to facilitate organization, but I have not figured out how that works. My pdf collection is scattered out all over the place on my desktop, with pdfs relevant to a particular topic in a somewhat disorganized mass, on different partitions, backed up copies all over.

WHat would help me would be more documentation in a form readable by a newbie. I am grateful for the instructions that I found by Maltby, even though it took a time to work my way through them.

Good docs will be helpful. Same for Calibre. I am still struggling with shoptalk.

I've also just installed KOReader. To be fair, I haven't really used it yet other than testing a few PDF's (some pleasing, some not so pleasing results), but plan to give it a solid test run shortly.

I'd installed KOReader for nothing else other than to read PDF's. If the PDF's you load have a "text layer", meaning you can highlight the text on your computer's PDF software, KOReader can reflow it more easily.

I'm with you on appreciating the folks who spend their valuable time creating instructions, but they're scattered on different websites, using shoptalk, and often deprecated.

I'm tempted to wipe my Aura to factory and start a YouTube channel, walking through every step with detailed explanations on Calibre, KOReader, KSM, Kobo Firmware, Kindle for PC...as much as I can possible learn to teach. The problem is what happens in a year when all my content is deprecated?

The best advice I can give is build your Collections for Kobo (Nickel) in Calibre. Here's a video I followed to do it. Bear in mind they use "Shelves" instead of "Collections", but it's the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEoQGwPN8wg

[JSWolf]

I see no reason to use a custom column for collections. I use the two existing columns tags and series. Both work perfectly.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I see no reason to use a custom column for collections. I use the two existing columns tags and series. Both work perfectly.

And as far as I am concerned, tags is the worst column you could ever use for the collections.

Jon, we've been over this before. Different people want different things. And this is something that is a personal preference. The tags definitely don't fit what I want. A custom column with manually maintained by me does.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidfor

And as far as I am concerned, tags is the worst column you could ever use for the collections.

Jon, we've been over this before. Different people want different things. And this is something that is a personal preference. The tags definitely don't fit what I want. A custom column with manually maintained by me does.

What does a custom column do that tags cannot do?

[shalym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What does a custom column do that tags cannot do?

Well...if I use the "tags" column, then I have to delete all of the garbage that gets put there when I download metadata. If I use my custom column, I don't. If I decide to download metadata again, the custom column contents don't change.

Just one use case. Your way is not the only way.

Shari

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What does a custom column do that tags cannot do?

It's a matter of what the tags are. Mine are added via the metadata source and maybe tweaked. So, they are descriptive of the book and its contents. I have no need to group the books by these tags on my device.

I use the other columns for other things such as reading state, have I clean the code in the book. And I have a column that is purely manually maintained for whatever I think I need at the time.

[Ken Maltby]

KOReader has a function to search the "metadata.calibre". The menu item is "Find a book in calibre catalog", it lets you enter a search term plus has "Browse series" and "Browse tags" buttons. Poking those buttons gives you a list of those items with the number of books in parentheses. Selecting one of those will give the ordered list of the books, that you can select from to open in the reader. [The series one is the more useful.]

Luck;
Ken