MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Your opinion about a built-in KOreader

pazos · 01-10-2021, 01:45 PM

KOReader, as is, serves no purpose for Kobo/Rakuten. Most of the magic of the program are a bunch of lua scripts that make most things configurable (and almost everything hackable).

The libs which KOReader uses could add value to Nickel, specially MuPDF and djvulibre, but their licenses are incompatible with keeping Nickel closed source. MuPDF itself has commercial licenses available for purchases, but Kobo made a pretty good job making PDF rendering a mess, so their users won't demand any significative change on that field.

So, nope, not possible without huge costs for the company, no benefit. If they wanted a really customizable epub renderer they could built one on top of qtwebkit, but they are fine following a subset of the Epub3 specs as anybody else, and leaving customization to desktop programs like Sigil.

01-10-2021, 01:45 PM	#10
pazos cosiñeiro Posts: 1,406 Karma: 2451781 Join Date: Apr 2014 Device: BQ Cervantes 4	KOReader, as is, serves no purpose for Kobo/Rakuten. Most of the magic of the program are a bunch of lua scripts that make most things configurable (and almost everything hackable). The libs which KOReader uses could add value to Nickel, specially MuPDF and djvulibre, but their licenses are incompatible with keeping Nickel closed source. MuPDF itself has commercial licenses available for purchases, but Kobo made a pretty good job making PDF rendering a mess, so their users won't demand any significative change on that field. So, nope, not possible without huge costs for the company, no benefit. If they wanted a really customizable epub renderer they could built one on top of qtwebkit, but they are fine following a subset of the Epub3 specs as anybody else, and leaving customization to desktop programs like Sigil.