How good are Kobos for pure sideload

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

How would I go about doing this? The line spacing problem has kept me from adopting the Kobo as my main eInk reader.

I use Sigil to clean up all my ePubs. But then, I have a boring life

Edit: You use Sigil too! That should solve problems from badly formatted books.

Calibre can edit ePubs as well and their editor is very similar to Sigil. But I still prefer to use Sigil directly for editing.

[the.Mtn.Man]

The library on my first gen Kobo Aura is 100% sideloaded, and it works great. It's the primary reason I will never consider another brand of e-reader.

[Amiieey]

I have nothing but sideloaded books on my Kobo Aura H2O. They work great!

[petercreasey]

All of my ebooks are sideloaded using Calibre or Adobe Digital Edition.

[Ripplinger]

Another Kobo user who sideloads all books through Calibre. It works out very well, and the added bonus is that Calibre will organize your collections as well when you transfer the books.

[stumped]

my expeience is that a good Kobo+ sideload requires you to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with code changes.
if you simply sideload retail epub books and library loans, you can expect many of them to be an unreadable mess on which your sliders have no effect
I ended up ( kobo Aura HD ) needing all 3 of :
1. code in root directory to override the default top & bottom page margins.

2. addins to force epub to kepub conversions when sideloading

3. manual css edits for almost every book I want to read in a layout of my choosing, so that the device sliders actually worked

kindle is far more forgving. it processed pretty much any retyail book into a readable state, no matter how stupid the publishers font / line space etc decisions were.

ditto for the Moon + app on tablets. By ignoring / replacing the dafter CSS, it turns a published mess into a readable version most of the time, with no manual intervention cannot say the same for the Kobo app unless it has greatly improved since I abandoned it

[PeterT]

I sideload all content and have never felt I had to edit books. I read them as they are supplied to me.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[stumped]

Maybe i am fussier. Or we read different stuff. What percent of your unedited and sideloaded retail books let you adjust line spacing and margins, on the device, do you estimate?
Have you never encountered annoyingly faint, grey, small publisher fonts

[JSWolf]

To answer the question posted as the topic of this thread...

Very Good!

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by stumped

Maybe i am fussier. Or we read different stuff. What percent of your unedited and sideloaded retail books let you adjust line spacing and margins, on the device, do you estimate?
Have you never encountered annoyingly faint, grey, small publisher fonts

Like PeterT, I just sideload all books as they are. Once in a great while I'll run into a mess of a book that was purchased where font size changes multiple times, sometimes within the same sentence, but that's very seldom.

100% of my books sideloaded let me adjust line spacing and margins. I use GeoffR's patches though, maybe that's why.

I've seen the light gray text you mention, but it's only the first letter or a few words at the beginning of a chapter where the publisher tried to do something fancier that probably looks great on a tablet, but doesn't work out well on an ereader. But as I said, it's just a letter or a few words only so I don't bother fixing those.

The patches might really be the difference, they do give you a lot more control.

[Polarpenguin]

Originally Posted by stumped

my expeience is that a good Kobo+ sideload requires you to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with code changes.
if you simply sideload retail epub books and library loans, you can expect many of them to be an unreadable mess on which your sliders have no effect
I ended up ( kobo Aura HD ) needing all 3 of :
1. code in root directory to override the default top & bottom page margins.

2. addins to force epub to kepub conversions when sideloading

3. manual css edits for almost every book I want to read in a layout of my choosing, so that the device sliders actually worked

kindle is far more forgving. it processed pretty much any retyail book into a readable state, no matter how stupid the publishers font / line space etc decisions were.

ditto for the Moon + app on tablets. By ignoring / replacing the dafter CSS, it turns a published mess into a readable version most of the time, with no manual intervention cannot say the same for the Kobo app unless it has greatly improved since I abandoned it

I side load all my books, using Calibre. Have never edited any of my books, or felt the need

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I sideload all content and have never felt I had to edit books. I read them as they are supplied to me.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Sadly, I find myself editing quite a few books. The latest was due to the creator's love for fonts. Here's what I found in the first of the 3 stylesheets.

font-family : serif;
font-family : sans-serif;
font-family : monospace;
font-family : "Goudy Old Style MT Std", serif;
font-family : "DIN Next LT Pro", sans-serif;
font-family : "DIN Next LT Pro Medium", sans-serif;
font-family : Rubens, serif;
font-family : "Charis SIL", serif;
font-family : "Times New Roman", serif;
font-family : "Verdana", sans-serif
font-family : "Trebuchet MS", serif;
font-family : 'Open Sans', sans-serif;

I'm not sure what they were intending their ebooks to be read on but for me since few of those fonts are available on my ereaders, I got the system serif and san-serif fonts which was probably better than the ransom note appearance the book had when I opened it on a Win10 computer. At least the ghodawful Fraktur style font that was used for the chapter headers was supplied as images that were rather tiny on my KA1.

[Ripplinger]

I can usually tell when an epub is loaded with a dozen different fonts by the size of the file. Those I will open up to look at why the file is so large and remove all the fonts. I do the same if I find large images (I once had a book with a 6000x9000 cover image that was over 7MB in size, I'll reduce senseless image bloat as well before sending to my reader).

[Blossom]

With the new firmware you can't download from the browser an epub over 2MB so I had to do this last night. I open it up on my Nexus tablet and deleted the fonts then sent it to Dropbox where it would finally download to my Kobo.

Sent from my XT1528

[Ripplinger]

Another reason I love sideloading only!