Comment by mackross
6 hours ago
moved to kobo (the nice one with colour screen) with calibre web running behind a cloudflare tunnel, getting books direct through smallest publishers/authors. Adds the tiniest bit of friction in book acquisition but reading experience, battery life, everything else shits on my kindle experience (and I’ve owned every one).
What software do you use on the device itself? I recently got a Kobo Clara HD, but software support seems to be a big issue.
On one hand, there's folks using the vendor's OS, which looks like an abandoned custom-made Linux distro, where compiling anything is a nightmare. It's not really made to be hackable, but just to read books purchased via their partners.
OTOH, there's a near-mainline kernel, which works nicely, and hacking on the device becomes much nicer, but e-reader-oriented software seems to commonly rely on kernel APIs only present in the vendor's abandoned fork, and won't work on a more mainline Linux. But this is a great target for actually developing stuff.
I'm tempted to write my own minimal e-reader-focused DE, but honestly, I don't want another project on my hands and would like to use something that's already there.
Please mention that color e-ink has significantly lower contrast than black and white. I thought I did enough research, but was bitten by this caveat- I would trade basically any feature for more contrast.
On the plus side, with your setup, you can have the lowest friction ebook experience possible on planet Earth by installing koreader, and then the z-library plugin.
There are some tablets with RLCD screens that have decent colors and contrast (not quite as good as 300dpi eink, but close, with color and fast updates), but most w/color screens lack proper frontlights for some reason, and they all run android so it's a bit of a mixed bag compared to a proper Kobo/Pocketbook/Linux eink tablet, but having a decent browser on a reflective display without having to cross-compile for 32-bit ARM linux is great.
Color (Kaleido) eInk screens can't show pure white, because the color filter is in the way. That makes the display significantly darker, and negates the entire purpose of eInk.
I sold my color eInk device after trying it for two days, and went back to B&W.