Good ereader for technologically savvy user

[LoganW]

Thanks Pajamaman, that's very helpful.

One of the things I found nice about KOReader several years ago was the ability to do just that: strip out publisher formatting. Right now I'm pretty finicky about good formatting so I'll sometimes get a Kindle book from Overdrive, hate the hard-coded font size or gaps between paragraphs or some other thing and load it into Calibre, break the DRM, convert to epub, open it in Sigil, fix the CSS and any other stuff I want to do, load it into Kindle Previewer, export to mobi, and load on my Kindle. Perhaps I'm overcomplicating it (I sometimes format with Calibre but that's limited). But all of that just gets old.

If I can save myself the time and still be satisfied with the book's formatting by letting KOReader do it for me, then I can live with that.

Kobo Libra is looking like it's the best fit.

[Sirtel]

Just curious, in what way is Calibre editor limited? Personally I have not found it so.

[LoganW]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Just curious, in what way is Calibre editor limited? Personally I have not found it so.

Perhaps you can do things like this in Calibre but if so it would likely be more cumbersome, but for example I like my paragraphs to have no space and to be indented by 1.2em EXCEPT when following a chapter heading, in which case it will not be indented at all. By modifying the stylesheet in Sigil I can set up something like

h2 + p {text-indent: 0em} and correct it throughout the document.

Or setting up blockquotes to have appropriate margins on all sides.

Or hand-tuning page-breaks.

Or any kind of find+replace like turning double-dashes into proper em-dashes.

Like I said, I'm finicky about typography. I'm a LaTeX guy

[LoganW]

It also bothers me on some level at how many styles Calibre creates, in most cases unnecessarily. It's not aesthetically pleasing markup. But I admit that's probably my problem!

[PeterT]

Not meaning to get into a religious war here but you can make those exact same changes in the calibre editor (and I don't mean conversion or polish)

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Not meaning to get into a religious war here but you can make those exact same changes in the calibre editor (and I don't mean conversion or polish)

Yes, that's what I meant. I do them myself in the calibre editor all the time. So I wondered about the limited comment.

[LoganW]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Not meaning to get into a religious war here but you can make those exact same changes in the calibre editor (and I don't mean conversion or polish)

Thanks for the information. I'm more than happy to learn, if it makes things any easier for me. I admit to having much to learn about Calibre (I haven't even dug into most plugins).

The formatting I'd done with Calibre had consisted mostly of removing spaces and indenting paragraphs as part of a format conversion, which was pretty limited. Knowing the editor can do that too is helpful, thank you.

I'd looked at the editor when I first started using Calibre. 2011 or 2012 maybe? I don't remember it being nearly this polished and hadn't used it since.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by LoganW

Thanks Pajamaman, that's very helpful.

One of the things I found nice about KOReader several years ago was the ability to do just that: strip out publisher formatting. Right now I'm pretty finicky about good formatting so I'll sometimes get a Kindle book from Overdrive, hate the hard-coded font size or gaps between paragraphs or some other thing and load it into Calibre, break the DRM, convert to epub, open it in Sigil, fix the CSS and any other stuff I want to do, load it into Kindle Previewer, export to mobi, and load on my Kindle. Perhaps I'm overcomplicating it (I sometimes format with Calibre but that's limited). But all of that just gets old.

If I can save myself the time and still be satisfied with the book's formatting by letting KOReader do it for me, then I can live with that.

Kobo Libra is looking like it's the best fit.

Your welcome. Koreader really is impressive. I used to read alreader on an Android ereader, and liked it a lot, but I'm blown away by how well Koreader removes all publisher formatting. There are tons of option as to what formatting you can remove. It strips it all out. It's incredible. And I recently discovered you can just set your preferences as default. The people in the koreader sub-forum here are very responsive and answer all my questions. Just as well as there is no manual I'd write one if I had the time.

Regarding the kobo hardware, someone that knows a lot about it was telling me that the current generation of kobo and kindle run on pretty much the same stuff, so they should be comparable. Personally I've never had much luck with Kobo, but they were older models. Based on my own experience (PW2) I prefer Amazon kit, but if I can't jailbreak it, I won't touch it. I nearly got a PW4 when they were on sale, but I wasn't sure it could be jailbreaked. What was a deal-breaker as well was that it has no orange light. I have to have the orange light.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by LoganW

It also bothers me on some level at how many styles Calibre creates, in most cases unnecessarily. It's not aesthetically pleasing markup. But I admit that's probably my problem!

I've found that if you dig into the original document, calibre creates a style for any difference in the original style no matter how trivial. As an example, one ebook I looked at used indents from 25 to 46 px for it's indented paragraphs uisng inline styles and so calibre created 22 different styles in the stylesheet. Another good argument for the use of regex search and replace.

[HLS]

I can't wrap my mind around jailbreaking and the desire people have for it. You buy a book then you read it. Period lol

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by HLS

I can't wrap my mind around jailbreaking and the desire people have for it. You buy a book then you read it. Period lol

Jailbreaking? What's jailbreaking? Is it something like rooting? Ain't that what the hogs do?

As a Kobo owner, I prefer editing the epub using Sigil or/and calibre's editor so no jailbreaking, rooting, patching or installing alternative apps required.

Compared to a few years back, quite a few publishers now do a half decent job of formatting their ebooks but there are still quite a few that are downright ugly enough that I feel the 15-20 minutes to clean up the formatting is worth while. For what my opinion is worth, I think that most apps that do not follow publisher styles are crap. Takes me back to the bad old days of reading a text document.

So for the most part, I buy a book and read it, there are times when the workflow goes buy the book, start reading, pause to retch, edit and then complete reading the book.

[pazos]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Jailbreaking? What's jailbreaking? Is it something like rooting? Ain't that what the hogs do?

As a Kobo owner, I prefer editing the epub using Sigil or/and calibre's editor so no jailbreaking, rooting, patching or installing alternative apps required.

Compared to a few years back, quite a few publishers now do a half decent job of formatting their ebooks but there are still quite a few that are downright ugly enough that I feel the 15-20 minutes to clean up the formatting is worth while. For what my opinion is worth, I think that most apps that do not follow publisher styles are crap. Takes me back to the bad old days of reading a text document.

So for the most part, I buy a book and read it, there are times when the workflow goes buy the book, start reading, pause to retch, edit and then complete reading the book.

Very well said! I'm in the other boat: I like to read books without tweaking css in calibre or sigil, so my perspective is the opposite: any app that doesn't allow me to set the css style I want is not suitable for me.

I use sigil to remove corporative BS in the books I buy (yeah, ebooks in spain came with corporative stuff like "you might want to read these other few titles that we publish") and to tweak css in the documentation I write but not for remove css on a book I buy.

So jailbreaking, rooting, installing apps is just about choice. As e-readers use the same underlying oses than general purpose computers, they're -sometimes- capable of running other software.

But yeah, even if I'm a geek I wouldn't recommend my workflow to others, unless others ask me directly: how do you deal with x?

[random42]

Similar situation of the OP, I'm tech saavy. Want an e-ink device that I can send webpages/articles to; seems like the options are these two?

- Kobo
- Pocketbook

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by random42

Similar situation of the OP, I'm tech saavy. Want an e-ink device that I can send webpages/articles to; seems like the options are these two?

- Kobo
- Pocketbook

Kindle too, via the Send-to-Kindle app.