[King-in-the-Nort]

Hi there,

I am deciding which reader to buy and using which software to use alongside it.

I used Calibre before with a cheap Trekstor reader. But I was never that into E-Books, since I love hardcover books. Back in university, I used Zotero as my reference management software.

Now I started a book club with my wife and some friends. Since my wife and I are both reading the books at the same time, I thought about buying an E-Book reader. This way we don't have to buy the physical book twice, and I am able to make notes and highlighting, since I would never write directly inside a hardcover book.

Since I mainly want to use DRM free EPUB files and I don't want to be locked in a proprietary ecosystem, I thought about buying a Toline Shine 3 (I live in Germany, where it is easier to get than the Kobo Clara HD) and using KOReader for that.
I was thinking to use Calibre for managing my EPUB (and maybe some PDF) library. But then I already don't know how well using Calibre and a Tolino Shine 3 with Sideloading play along.

Additionally, I would love to have a software where I can manage all my highlightings, quotes and add some notes to them. For that Zotero would have been my software of choice. But I don't know how well this works with KOReader and converting all my highlighting and notes from one to the other is tedious work I hope to avoid.

Finally it would be a huge benefit if I also could synch my reading progress as well as my highlighting and notes between my eReader and my smartphone and a software on my PC where I can manage all those things. I have a webserver which could be used for storing the data to be able to synch between one another.

Since I never used Calibre and Zotero in quite some time, I have no experience with KOReader whatsoever and I even didn't synch reading progress between reader and phone I don't know what is the most comfortable solution to be able to manage my E-Book library alongside with notes, quotes and highlights and synch them with the reading progress between devices.

Probably there isn't a perfect solution that meets all those criteria while being FOSS if possible. Therefore, I would like to know how would you realize this workflow and which software and devices you would recommend.