Comment by joshstrange

10 hours ago

- Better and faster UI. I always thought the Kindle was just slow, nope, it's just really bad software

- Customise any/everything. Font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, margins, header/footer content, the list goes on

- Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats.

- LLM-integration through plugins like KOAssistant, highlight a word/phrase/passage to get it explained to you. This was invaluable for me when reading through a series from the 1950's about the late 1700's, lots of phrases I'd never heard. Many I could grasp the meaning from context but it was way more fun to hear the "why" behind the phrase. Same with historical events that I am less knowledgeable about than I wish. Let's me stay "in the book" instead of picking up my phone.

- Full control, some people don't care/need this but I love being able to SSH into my Kindle and do whatever I want. I love having my entire book reading experience end-to-end be fully open source and self-hosted.

Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats

I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.

  • Same here, I jailbroke my kindle just 1-2 months ago (when the PW5 JB came out) and I had been using BookOrbit for only a few weeks before then. Since then I've read over 15 books and been loving BookOrbit and KOReader.

Thanks for the BookOrbit hint. Seems very interesting.

I see it supports audiobooks and ebooks. Do you know if there is any way for keeping sync between an audiobook and ebook?

  • It does not have any sort of "whispersync" but, ironically?, I feel like whispersync could be recreated with things like Whisper and parsing the epub/whatever to line up progress. BookOrbit is in active development from what I can see (I'm not connected to the project, just a happy user) and it wouldn't surprise me if that was a feature in the future. It's something I've mulled over building for a while (even before Whisper).

    For my Audiobooks I don't use BookOrbit because my setup is:

    - Buy on Audible

    - Rip DRM off

    - Add to Plex

    - Use Prologue (iOS only) to listen

    And I freaking love that setup so I'm not looking to replace it currently.