Yup, another one of these. Help an open-source vigilante?

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by p_a_smith

I have an original Kobo with a Vizplex screen and a Kobo Touch with a new Pearl screen. For artwork (i.e magazines and illustrations) the Pearl is superior and you really notice the difference. If you just want to read text I personally don't find that great a difference. Yes the Pearl is a superior screen but for just text you can get used to the Vizplex quite easily.

I've been looking at the Kobo Touch as well. How do you like it?

[p_a_smith]

Originally Posted by SmokeAndMirrors

I've been looking at the Kobo Touch as well. How do you like it?

I like mine. The unit is smaller than my previous one and with the case I got is easy to travel with. It is fast and responsive and the battery life is quite good. The touch screen is nice and with the micro sd card slot I never have to worry about running out of space. I do find that it handles pdfs better than the original Kobo I had (I still prefer epubs but at least now I don't automatically exclude pdf's when I find one in the library.)

It might be worth your while to go to the Kobo forum and ask this question to get some other responses (both the pluses and the minuses).

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by p_a_smith

I like mine. The unit is smaller than my previous one and with the case I got is easy to travel with. It is fast and responsive and the battery life is quite good. The touch screen is nice and with the micro sd card slot I never have to worry about running out of space. I do find that it handles pdfs better than the original Kobo I had (I still prefer epubs but at least now I don't automatically exclude pdf's when I find one in the library.)

It might be worth your while to go to the Kobo forum and ask this question to get some other responses (both the pluses and the minuses).

That's good to hear about PDF's - I'd still like to be able to read my mini-readings for class on it, which are in PDF format.

Thanks!

[vishcompany]

I do sympathize with your points of view regarding open source.

I'm sure you read Richard M. Stallman, so you won't mind accepting less comfort for the sake of openness or freedom.

There are readers, which can be updated with openinkpot firmware, some companies even provide the sources for the bigger part of the firmware, eg. Pocketbook claim to do so (they are of course not allowed to show the sources of ADE).

When it comes to books: You anyway can buy any book from any store. If you feel strongly about DRM, just don't buy DRMd books. It has nothing to do with the reader, actually.
You might have to accept less comfort, until the book is finally on your reader, but it is possible.

As soons as you strive for comfort and ease, you will very quickly find yourself in some kind of walled garden. That's just how the situation is at the moment and the more I appreciate your persistence.

If you ever happen to come across a book, which is only available with DRM and you need it for whatever reason, calibre with some plugins will be your friend here. By the way, calibre is licenced under GPL, it's a fantastic library software and makes administration and conversion (if necessary) as easy as possible.

To make a long story short: If openness and freedom are predominant, get a reader which can be upgraded with openinkpot. If you want some extras (pearl screen, touch), get any of the recent readers (doesn't make much of a difference) and still buy only DRM-free books. Oh, before I forget: Get calibre.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by vishcompany

I do sympathize with your points of view regarding open source.

I'm sure you read Richard M. Stallman, so you won't mind accepting less comfort for the sake of openness or freedom.

There are readers, which can be updated with openinkpot firmware, some companies even provide the sources for the bigger part of the firmware, eg. Pocketbook claim to do so (they are of course not allowed to show the sources of ADE).

When it comes to books: You anyway can buy any book from any store. If you feel strongly about DRM, just don't buy DRMd books. It has nothing to do with the reader, actually.
You might have to accept less comfort, until the book is finally on your reader, but it is possible.

As soons as you strive for comfort and ease, you will very quickly find yourself in some kind of walled garden. That's just how the situation is at the moment and the more I appreciate your persistence.

If you ever happen to come across a book, which is only available with DRM and you need it for whatever reason, calibre with some plugins will be your friend here. By the way, calibre is licenced under GPL, it's a fantastic library software and makes administration and conversion (if necessary) as easy as possible.

To make a long story short: If openness and freedom are predominant, get a reader which can be upgraded with openinkpot. If you want some extras (pearl screen, touch), get any of the recent readers (doesn't make much of a difference) and still buy only DRM-free books. Oh, before I forget: Get calibre.

Thank you.

Yup, I'm definitely willing to live with less comfort. Desktop Linux has come an amazingly long way, and I really don't feel the compromise now anywhere near as much as I did a couple years ago even, but it is inescapable that I run a minority OS. And that's just how it is.

I guess my main issue with the way some stores are run is 2 things.

1. The Kindle model - lock out the most common format, and support a proprietary format instead.

2. The Sony/Apple model - force DRM on all creators, if they want to sell through their store.

I admit I was wrong to lump the Nook in with that sort of behavior. I've now learned they don't do either of those things, and that's good.

Store? Fine. Optional DRM? Fine I suppose, I just won't buy those if I can at all avoid it. But the above shenanigans I don't want to support by buying their device.

I have actually just installed Calibre, and I'm going to give it a test-run on my Android phone. So far I'm really liking it. I've loaded a few books onto it, and done a file conversion from RTF to EPUB (no DRM, so I haven't had to deal with that issue yet).

I'm leaning towards the Kobo Touch pretty strongly at this point. It seems to hit the most points for me.

They do support Linux, and their firmware is indeed open source (or they have open source firmware available...? Not sure which), though it isn't OpenInkpot. On the more functional side, it seems to support a lot of formats, has touch, Pearl, and a really good price. It's looking very appealing to me.

Most of the others I've looked at that are even more "open-source purist" than that have had... a lot of technical issues to put it mildly. And/or they were way out of my price range.

I'm giving the Nook another look-over too, but it doesn't seem quite diverse enough for me. It has a couple extra bells and whistles, but honestly I don't think I'd use them.

Starting to narrow the field and get the hang of how this particular market works.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by SmokeAndMirrors

I admit I was wrong to lump the Nook in with that sort of behavior. I've now learned they don't do either of those things, and that's good.

They don't do those, things, but they have other issues.

They don't indicate on their site which books do & don't have DRM--it's a case of "buy it and maybe it's DRM'd; maybe it's not." (Amazon indicates indirectly--if the "device limit" is infinite, there's no DRM.) Also, B&N has a policy of "no returns on ebooks"--even when the book received is *not what was bought*, when they have put the wrong contents in the package. (Threats of lawsuit may have fixed this problem.) And their file-naming system is "LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_TITLE_O.epub"--32 characters, including .epub, which means multiple books in a series may write over each other in the folder. The only way around this is to download the book to a computer, rename the file, and sideload it to the Nook.

Early customer service was lousy. It's probably better now, but B&N's approach is very firmly in the camp of "What are you doing wrong with our bug-free product?"

I have actually just installed Calibre, and I'm going to give it a test-run on my Android phone. So far I'm really liking it. I've loaded a few books onto it, and done a file conversion from RTF to EPUB (no DRM, so I haven't had to deal with that issue yet).

Calibre doesn't natively deal with DRM, although since it's open source, some people have written plugins that cope with DRM.

I'm leaning towards the Kobo Touch pretty strongly at this point. It seems to hit the most points for me.

Glad you're finding something that you like, or that you think will be okay.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

They don't do those, things, but they have other issues.

They don't indicate on their site which books do & don't have DRM--it's a case of "buy it and maybe it's DRM'd; maybe it's not." (Amazon indicates indirectly--if the "device limit" is infinite, there's no DRM.) Also, B&N has a policy of "no returns on ebooks"--even when the book received is *not what was bought*, when they have put the wrong contents in the package. (Threats of lawsuit may have fixed this problem.) And their file-naming system is "LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_TITLE_O.epub"--32 characters, including .epub, which means multiple books in a series may write over each other in the folder. The only way around this is to download the book to a computer, rename the file, and sideload it to the Nook.

Early customer service was lousy. It's probably better now, but B&N's approach is very firmly in the camp of "What are you doing wrong with our bug-free product?"

Calibre doesn't natively deal with DRM, although since it's open source, some people have written plugins that cope with DRM.

Glad you're finding something that you like, or that you think will be okay.

That's very good to know. Thanks for that - not a huge fan of the approach of not knowing what you're buying until you've already bought it.

[HarryT]

You've got me a little confused here, SmokeAndMirrors. You've said on a number of occasions that having an "open source" reader is a non-negotiable requirement. That surely implies getting a reader which has just that: open source reading software, does it not? The readers which fit your requirement would seem, therefore, to be those open source reading programs such as FBReader or CoolReader. That is, Pocketbook, Onyx, BeBook, etc. Those with Adobe ADE-based firmware cannot be described as "open source" in any way whatsoever; they are paying a licence fee to Adobe and the firmware is proprietary. Have you now dropped your "open source" requirement?

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You've got me a little confused here, SmokeAndMirrors. You've said on a number of occasions that having an "open source" reader is a non-negotiable requirement. That surely implies getting a reader which has just that: open source reading software, does it not? The readers which fit your requirement would seem, therefore, to be those open source reading programs such as FBReader or CoolReader. That is, Pocketbook, Onyx, BeBook, etc. Those with Adobe ADE-based firmware cannot be described as "open source" in any way whatsoever; they are paying a licence fee to Adobe and the firmware is proprietary. Have you now dropped your "open source" requirement?

For the 3rd time (possibly 4th? - but at any rate it's the last - pay attention), of the several ways in which open source couple be applied to e-readers, the single point that has been negotiable since the beginning is the firmware. That's mostly for practical reasons - same reason I have a small XP partition, which I only turn on about once a month.

In addition to that, I have also already said (twice on this one - seriously man, what gives?) that Kobo does appear to have open source firmware, either installed or available as a replacement from their lab.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by SmokeAndMirrors

In addition to that, I have also already said (twice on this one - seriously man, what gives?) that Kobo does appear to have open source firmware, either installed or available as a replacement from their lab.

All the various reading devices make the source code of the Linux kernel available - they have to, under the terms of the GPL. Does the Kobo do more than this?

[vishcompany]

Originally Posted by SmokeAndMirrors

I'm leaning towards the Kobo Touch pretty strongly at this point. It seems to hit the most points for me.

If the Kobo had been available in my reagion, it would have been my next reader. Very hesitatingly I got the Sony (still am angry with them for their DRM scheme on MD) and have to admit, I really really like it.
If you want to organize your books in "collections" (comparable to id3 tags in music files) Sony might be worth a thought. I do my books through calibre with tags, works like a charm.
They are launching a new model these days (weeks actually), seems to be close to the price range of kobo, nook & co.
For more information check this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=147920

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In what way? The Nook will read any ePub book. Buy from Kobo, B&N, Sony, BooksOnBoard, Waterstones - wherever you want - and the Nook will read it.

Segregating non B&N content into a separate, smaller space strikes me as at least similar to a wall in attempt.

[Caltsar]

On the nook simple touch the non-B&N content is on a separate space on the device, but you can add a microSD card to give you more space than you'd ever need. Also, from what I gather, it actually gives you more space for non-B&N content.

As far as the software goes, the nook touch actually segregates content from different stores much less than the original nook. You see everything together instead of needing to go to books or documents depending on where the content came from.

[Ankh]

I am not, really, an "OS vigilante", but once was looking for an eInk platform that has a potential to run pure OS once the official software support has ended.

Unless things change dramatically with PRS-T1, which I doubt, and if you are interested in platform that can run Open Source now, or in foreseeable future, you should definitely stay away from Sony. And I am not talking about PS3 fiasco, these are the words of one of OI developers outlining what Sony has done with Linux on (now ancient) prs 505:

Originally Posted by dottedmag

SD card driver is a loadable module => Sony did not release it in source code. And yes, we did not manage to obtain any documentation from the chip manufacturer or Sony.

Even worse is power management/keys controller chip, which is managed from userspace, using proprietary binary.

The proprietary part of the software, carefully crafted not to be in violation of GPL, has effectively prevented upgrade of the system software. The reader was popular and was hacked a lot... but the fact remains that Sony hardware is definitely not what one would call "OSS friendly".

[HarryT]

There's actually been quite a lot of customisation of the Sony. Look at "PRS+", for example.