Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.
Another option for some Kobos is Inkbox/QuillOS. It’s a full open source OS replacement and is very cool. It was very usable last summer when I tried it out on my Kobo Clara HD and is probably even better now.
you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.
There’s also an OPDS server option with calibre-web that you can use to load books from if you’re using koreader.
You can also use the Kobo server replacement option with calibre-web although I personally couldn’t get it to work at the time I tried it. But this will give you a sync option that works like the official Kobo server which is quite nice.
Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.
Another option for some Kobos is Inkbox/QuillOS. It’s a full open source OS replacement and is very cool. It was very usable last summer when I tried it out on my Kobo Clara HD and is probably even better now.
There’s also an OPDS server option with
calibre-webthat you can use to load books from if you’re usingkoreader.You can also use the Kobo server replacement option with
calibre-webalthough I personally couldn’t get it to work at the time I tried it. But this will give you a sync option that works like the official Kobo server which is quite nice.