Relio: manage your Kobo library from a browser, with its own status bar icon

[andronedev]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on Relio, an open-source add-on for Kobo e-readers. It adds an icon to Nickel's status bar, next to search. Tap it, scan the QR code with your phone, and your library opens in the browser. The page is served by the Kobo itself over your Wi-Fi, so there's no account and nothing in the cloud. From there you can send books to the Kobo, download or delete them, and edit your highlights and notes.

Books you send as EPUB are converted to KEPUB on the Kobo before it imports them. For that I rewrote pgaskin's kepubify (v4.0.4) in Rust and built it into Relio. The tests compare its output byte for byte with kepubify's on a set of sample books, so it should give you the same result as running kepubify yourself, without the extra step.

If you use KoboCloud to get books onto your Kobo without a cable, Relio does a similar job without a cloud service in between. The catch is that your phone or computer has to be on the same Wi-Fi as the Kobo.

I'm looking for testers. I've only tried it on my Clara Colour with firmware 4.46, and I'd like to know how it does on other models. If you install it, please reply with your model and firmware version, whether it works or not. When something goes wrong, .adds/relio/plugin.log is the first thing I'll ask for.

A few details on what it puts on the device. The daemon is a static ARMv7 Rust binary that reads and writes KoboReader.sqlite. A udev rule from KoboRoot.tgz starts it, so there's no launcher to install. The icon and the panel come from a Qt plugin, librelio.so, that Nickel loads from /usr/local/Kobo/imageformats. It doesn't depend on NickelMenu or NickelHook, and it's built with pgaskin's NickelTC toolchain. Pairing uses a 6-digit code that's valid for 3 minutes, and you can see and disconnect paired browsers from the Kobo.

Updates are checked about once a day when Wi-Fi is on. They're signed with minisign and verified on the Kobo, and a dot on the icon tells you one is waiting. An empty .adds/relio/no-updates file turns the checks off.

If the plugin ever makes Nickel crash at boot, it turns itself off at the next restart. You can also turn it off by hand with an empty .adds/relio/disable-plugin file.

Install page: https://relio.androne.dev. It installs from Chrome or Edge, or you can copy KoboRoot.tgz into .kobo yourself. The firmware only installs it when the battery is at 20% or more.
Source, under Apache 2.0: https://github.com/andronedev/relio

[PeterT]

Are you aware of kepubverto, another rust based kepub convertor? See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=375668