10 ms·

How Ebooks Have Poisoned Electronic Ink

114 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

skybrian 5y ago
It's weird how this article calls buying an ebook from Amazon "unethical." If you're okay with their restrictions I don't see it as harming anyone?
blowski 5y ago
Seems like the author is saying Amazon has poisoned ebooks, rather than ebooks poisoning books in general.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  > Reading Ethically > So how do I use my Kindle? I suggest the author starts by not buying Amazon hardware and expecting good ethics.
  - ebiester 5y ago
    That's explicitly what the author is asking for at the end - a reader that respects the ethics of the author.
    - f1refly 5y ago
      That's pretty much every reader not made by amazon. My kobo takes any epub without complaining.
      - Finnucane 5y ago
        What's funny is that now Amazon asks publishers to send files as epubs. When we send them a file, they're getting the same file that all the other vendors get. Amazon, however, will still sell that file with their proprietary wrapper.
        f1refly 5y ago
        Ebook formats are interchangeable anyway - and why wouldn't they be? There is only so many ways to represent the same text with the same metadata, the only marginal differences are compression, organisation and the possibility for digital restriction management.
    - dheera 5y ago
      I use a Boox tablet, it can open up the open source formats, and since it runs Android it can also just run the official Kindle app and basically be a Kindle at the same time.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Yes it does. Funny how the real meaning of the article is totally different like that.
30367286 5y ago
The author seems to have missed KoReader (http://koreader.rocks http://koreader.rocks) and Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato), both of which are not user-hostile and work on Kobo and ReMarkable.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  KOReader is my weapon of choice on my Boox Nova 3. This article does a good job of explaining the sins of Onyx Boox, but unfortunately there isn't much competition in the Android e-ink space and this was the best hardware I could get.
  - sydd 5y ago
    Same. I just made a new Google account for it, I'm afraid to give my real details. But AFAIK its bootloader is unlocked, so one can root it and remove the chinese spyware/viruses
    - dont__panic 5y ago
      While losing the e-ink screen optimizations and drivers that handle refreshes/OS control over those refreshes. It would be really awesome to see Lineage, Graphene, or Calyx support Boox devices in the future. But I wonder if the drivers are proprietary and not reasonably reverse-engineerable.
      - robinsoh 5y ago
        > I wonder if the drivers are proprietary and not reasonably reverse-engineerable. They are not. They are typically open source. https://gitlab.indel.ch/thirdparty/linux-indel/-/blob/41ef0dd13b7b52588e5353180a9127f08f2b9aba/drivers/video/fbdev/mxc/mxc_epdc_v2_fb.c https://gitlab.indel.ch/thirdparty/linux-indel/-/blob/41ef0d...
- tokamak-teapot 5y ago
  Yep, using KoReader on a kobo here. It’s wonderful.
disintegore 5y ago
A few years ago I bought a Kobo device. Not sure what it's called. I fired it up and it immediately asked me to create an account, with no option to skip the process. I thought to myself "screw that" and plugged it in so I could flash something like okreader instead. KDE automatically recognized it as a storage device, so I decided to take a look. Turned out that the root folder contained a sqlite database. I opened it up, looked at the schema and inserted a new user manually. It worked just fine. No problems since. I have no idea if the new devices are any different but given the overall quality of the thing I wouldn't be surprised if they made it so trivial to bypass their online service integration on purpose.
- blowski 5y ago
  Kobo devices work really well with Calibre for exactly this reason. I've got a Libre H2O, it works great. My son has the Clara.
- perihelions 5y ago
  - "I have no idea if the new devices are any different" They changed that last month (as a software update, so it's retroactive to existing devices): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30037152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30037152 ("Kobo unveils Sideload Mode to their e-readers ")
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    I guess you meant they decided to ease the open up and access by mere mortal, not hacker.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  They absolutely have left that door ajar on purpose. Presumably they calculate that by being the de facto go-to reader for the people who want to install their own software, they can both sell more devices and don't need to splash a lot of money up the security wall playing cat and mouse with motivated hardware hackers (who would become pretty motivated if they found there were no open platforms). It's not as if people who would install koreader would just roll over and start throwing money down on Kobo store books. They'd just never buy a Kobo at all. I have a Clara HD and it's a fun little Linux device (no android nonsense, just a good old shell), Koreader is pretty great (a few rendering bugs aside) and I can even ssh into the thing _and_ pull files down from my computer with WebDAV though the koreader UI.
rr808 5y ago
I really thought e-ink was going to be great but keep getting disappointed. I really prefer tablets with their color IPS screens now, some combination of the color with fast CPUs is much more appealing. PDFs look great as well as epubs. Reading outside in the park or on the beach really doesn't happen anyway thank goodness.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  A 10 inch tablet is definitely streets ahead for PDFs, which are usually authored for A4ish paper anyway. Shrinking that down to 6 inches is pretty horrible, even with a hiDPI eink screen, and if you zoom and pan, the update speed is dreadful. However, I do far prefer reflowable text on an ereader. I just had to give up on the idea of one device fulfilling both use cases: you can't have a 100g, one handed, two week battery device that you can read in a sunbeam as well as a device that can handily render a PDF and allow smooth zoom, pan and searching.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Yes. And the smooth scrolling is a whole experience in its own.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I have an older Paperwhite and I rarely use it. If I'm traveling I probably will have my tablet with me anyway and if I'm hanging out waiting for someone I already have my iPhone with me and that's good enough for a short read.
- dole 5y ago
  I feel like this is another major factor on the poor implementation and adoption of eBooks that doesn't get bitched about enough; the infernal eInk display patents. I shudder to think what kind of display world AND publishing world we'd have today if they hadn't sat on it for this long...
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > the infernal eInk display patents. I shudder to think what kind of display world AND publishing world we'd have today if they hadn't sat on it for this long... what infernal patents are you talking about? Your claims are fairly typical of what I see on HN around this topic and if you look at my comment history, you'll see how no one seems to be able to provide any substance or evidence. You'll also see how I've explained that it is PHYSICS that limits the performance of electrophoretic displays.
Syonyk 5y ago
> So how do I use my Kindle? No WiFi, no signing into amazon.com, load all books over USB. To acquire books ethically, I first look at an author’s homepage. Direct purchase is the best option. No need for a middleman. For example, the author Cory Doctorow offers direct distribution. So, basically, turned into a crappy Kobo. They're far better for this sort of use, the hardware is solid, you can hack it however you care, and it chews on just about everything.
nescioquid 5y ago
I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today. Had the concept not been given a prior place in our minds, the very idea seems otherwise inconceivable in contemporary society dominated by corporations. The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend. The author's solution is to apply duct tape and glue to arrive at "ethical reading" (really, it sounds more like ethical vending). However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required. Being choosy about where you buy your ebooks is fine, but we didn't get better automotive safety standards by just being choosy about the kind of cars we buy in the first place. It was a political -- not a consumer -- process that brought about change.
- aaron_m04 5y ago
  > However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required. You're right, but it's very hard for me to believe even halfway decent legislation will be passed. It's clear that the political process is not working for the common people, at least not in the US.
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    Then we're even more in agreement. Political corruption is at the root of so many of our problems today. Every time I see a mutual-aid solution for a societal problem or a duct-tape-and-glue coping mechanism (like the one espoused in this article), I like to remind myself of the fundamental problem.
- rapind 5y ago
  > The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend. I wholeheartedly agree, and it snowballs. The way I see it is: 1. One time purchases are the least lucrative. 2. Subscription fees, and therefore control of device, are more lucrative than one time purchases. 3. Advertising (tracking, privacy invasion) is more lucrative even than subscription fees. 4. Both subscription and advertising combined is more lucrative than on their own. 5. There are a bunch of other upsell type models depending on the industry. This includes accessories, warranties, in-app purchases, etc. Hard to generically categorize these, but they are almost always more lucrative than one time purchases. It's easy to see where an unfettered market will gravitate over time. This could be solved via regulation if (big if) we had enough uncaptured legislators (and voters that held their feet to the fire), however we now have large swaths of the economy who's business models are complete non-starters if sufficiently regulated. So we'll at best end up with some inn-effective watered down regulation that has the appearance of doing something, and probably not for a while still. It's a slow moving disaster that everyone sees, but only a minority care enough about or even want to try and fix. You know, like artificially low interest rates.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
It's funny how piracy solves pretty much all of the problems, while being the free variant.
- throwaway705132 5y ago
  > You don’t own the book. You cannot lend the book. Renting Kindle-compatible eBooks from the library is arduous and limited by artificial constraints; you literally need to return a book before another person can rent it. The first thing I do when I buy or borrow a book from Amazon is strip the DRM. I don't share the DRM-free file with anyone - it's just for me - but it lets me read when and where I want.
  - criddell 5y ago
    The latest Kindle DRM still isn't reliably broken. It's a cat-and-mouse game now. If you don't care about typography improvements that come in the newest version, there are ways you can download the file in an older format that is thoroughly broken. I don't understand why some publishers ever agreed to let Amazon apply their DRM to book files. It locks their readers to Amazon and thus gives Amazon a tremendous amount of power over publishers. They should have at least demanded Amazon license their DRM to other bookstores and e-readers or, even better, never bothered with DRM. There are publishers on Amazon who do not use DRM. Tor is a big one, but there are others.
black_puppydog 5y ago
> The biggest growth market in audio is podcasting, which is even more open than the music ecosystem. And an ecosystem that spotify and others (most recently the BBC...) have been trying to wall off like everything else. I had a very long, and surprisingly frustrating discussion with two non-technical friends about what a "podcast" really is, and the notion of an "open standard" doesn't figure into the average person's understanding of that word at all. I say "surprisingly" because of how visceral my reaction to this was. Spotify's move to wall off podcasts was the main driver for me to cancel my 10-year subscription. I'm bracing for the day the BBC News Quiz will become irrelevant because from what I gather it will be released as a real podcast only 30 days after the fact (if at all, we'll see?) and then what's the point?
- dont__panic 5y ago
  I similarly killed my Spotify subscription largely because of their disgusting behavior of exclusifying podcasts. I think this is largely a PR thing: there are obvious benefits to open standards once you understand the pros and cons. But most people don't want to learn anything about how podcasts are distributed, or how messages are sent, and with corporations pushing people to proprietary solutions, most folks will just... do what the corporations tell them to do (see Google Chrome's adoption as well -- sure, it was a fast, sexy browser at first, and word of mouth helped the rep... but let's be honest, the real reason Chrome became the most used browser in the world is because grandma and mom and uncle bob all got annoyed to death on the Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail web pages that "the best experience is on Chrome"). I've tried to explain to friends and family why I prefer open standards, like RSS, and they smile and nod but I know damn well they don't get it and think it's weird that I care so much. These are the same people who don't seem upset or annoyed that the Spotify subscription they pay for constantly shoves podcasts in their face even if they don't listen to podcasts and have no intention of ever listening to them. So I guess the answer is that most people just do not know enough, do not want to know more, and do not care enough to bother. Open standards are amazing, and the internet is going to fragment and fall apart if we keep drifting from them. Or, at the very least, turn your online experience into a dystopian nightmare where you can't control anything, even things you bought, in your own home, on the internet connection you pay for. We really need a good PR campaign to keep open standards alive and improving. Because they're really better than proprietary solutions that milk you for every last dollar and drop of attention. We just have to show the aforementioned grandma and mom and uncle bob.
Ishmaeli 5y ago
My problem with ebooks has always been the typos introduced by imperfect OCR. I look forward to wider availability of graphic novels on color e-ink displays, though.
- 30367286 5y ago
  >My problem with ebooks has always been the typos introduced by imperfect OCR. I'm the same. Unless it's a native epub, where it wasn't converted from print, it's frustrating. I wish there were some system whereby these typos could be corrected and the results committed to, i.e., a GitHub repo. Does any project like this exist?
polskibus 5y ago
Just install koreader and be happy. I’ve been using it on my Kobo Aura One for several years, its pdf app is better than the native app. Koreader supports many devices.
kragen 5y ago
The really interesting thing about e-ink for me is having a low-power, high-resolution computer screen; an old Nokia 84×48 LCD uses about 3 mW, a megapixel-class Amazon Swindle uses 100–300 mW during active use, and a modern megapixel-class cellphone screen uses about 1000 mW. Unfortunately, you just can't get high-resolution, low-power e-ink screens unless you're an ebook manufacturer; not only are the manufacturers uninterested in talking to hobbyists (or distributors like Digi-Key!) rumor has it they stop talking to you even about volume buys if they find out you're not making an e-book device. So I thought this article was going to be about that! Last year I learned that there's a kind of LCD that has even lower power consumption (during active use) by virtue of printing a whole flip-flop onto the glass at each pixel, called the "Sharp Memory LCD": https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 not cheap at US$45 but available, and 400×240, a high enough resolution for everyday computing tasks. There are a variety of sizes available, but this particular display advertises “50 μW static, <175 μW dynamic”, that is, 0.05–0.175 mW, which is a really substantial improvement over 100–300 or even 3. And it's transflective so you can read it in the sunlight. At last, something you could plausibly build a battery-free portable computer with! And, as a bonus, it updates fast enough to play video games on. Pulling once on a pullstring to wind up your computer yields potentially about 25 J. At 300 mW that yields a minute and a half of usage. At 3 mW, two and a half hours of usage. At 0.2 mW, 34 hours of usage. So below 1 mW you're into solar-calculator territory; I disassembled one of those solar garden lights with an LED and a rechargeable battery in it and measured its 38 mm square panel at 8 mW.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  I think those memory LCDs are what Pebble used to use for their watches. My Pebble Time Round still holds up to this day, shows me notifications promptly, lets me control music, and the hardware hasn't failed yet. Great screen and a great product.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Nice! It's really sad what happened to Pebble. Do you know how much power the watch uses?
mynameisash 5y ago
I know this post is talking about the ebooks themselves (format, DRM, retailers, etc.), but I'm continually frustrated by the lack of different e-ink format devices. I would love to get a large, low-power device that I can hang on my wall. There was so much promise for both the ebook format and device, but it seems to have fallen flat.
JadeNB 5y ago
I'm surprised not to see any mention of Tor (https://publishing.tor.com/ https://publishing.tor.com/) among the ethical e-book distribution platforms.
eggsome 5y ago
I was bitten by this. While staying in the US I setup an Amazon account in 2010, and ordered a Kindle2 with 3G connectivity. It was fantastic! I could purchase books anywhere in the world - no WiFi! At some point however the renewal of my US credit card did not get delivered to my Australian address and I kind of forgot about it for a while. Last month I sorted out my credit card issues and went to buy a book, but could not - my Amazon account was locked. Support staff refused to fix it, apparently if you haven't logged in for over a year then they won't send you a password reset (I still control the associated email address!). The only option they presented to me was re-creating the account with the same email address. I lost all of my books and all of my wishlists :(
speeder 5y ago
I am a fan of a particular book series that is right now mostly self-published by the author. One of the few places selling his books legally to Brazillians was a site named "Fictionwise". I bought a lot of copies there, I would have bought physical copies if they existed, but that wasn't an option. The one day, Barnes and Noble bought Fictionwise, and just batantly said if you don't live in US you can't use the site anymore, and you won't be able to download the books you paid for, unless you are from US. Lesson hard learned, never again I bought an e-book. My kindle is just collecting dust.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Surely the lesson is to only pay for epubs and open platforms so it doesn't matter if the vendor decides to stop serving you? Most of the ebooks I've paid for were through Humble Bundle, and if HB closed shop tomorrow I'd still have my books locally.
dwheeler 5y ago
I often just buy the physical book. It's easy to do, and it's not possible to take the book from me later. I think it should be illegal for sellers to say you can "buy" a book when you have not bought it. It's fraud. Call it a rental or something else more honest. If I bought it, then it cannot be taken away, I can give it to someone else as long as I don't retain it, I can use it as many times as I want, and no one monitors my use without my express consent. It's not that rental and leasing is necessarily wrong, but it should be clear to customers that that is what is happening.
gumby 5y ago
The short-sighted e-ink patent forest has killed e-ink. The e-reader problems described in the article remain. But e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > The short-sighted e-ink patent forest has killed e-ink. Here we go again. A massive claim made with great confidence, and yet complete lack of any substance or evidence. > e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners. Sigh... see my comment history. HN repeats this ridiculous claim again and again.
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
Amazon has removed 1984, Onyx infringes on on GPL. Use Kobo or Pocketbook and be happy.
politelemon 5y ago
While there is a lopsided focus on Amazon's ecosystem, I also want to point out that the epub market, and even public libraries' lending programs are DRM-laden. In many cases you have to install Adobe Digital Editions DRM. Further, author points out a lawsuit filed against Amazon from 2021, but I believe they're missing a crucial piece of history. The ebook ecosystem was originally poisoned by Apple who was found guilty of collusion; unfortunately by the time the challenges and ruling was complete, the damage had been done and publishers had decided to entrench themselves. We are seeing the repercussions of it today. What could have been a thriving, open ecosystem was ruined by corporate greed, and there is plenty of blame to go around.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The E-Ink world is running though much the same dynamic server and personal computing software did, and may approach that of the mobile computing world. Effectively, there's what hardware can do, the economics of the hardware market itself, and what the content (software for PCs, books, articles, and audio for ebook players) producers and markets demand. In theory, and from a technical perspective, e-ink is pretty fantastic. I can carry well north of 1,000 books and articles in a form-factor the size of an A4 writing tablet. (The physical dimensions could of course be smaller, though that size works well with both human eyes and much printed material.) The capability to have multi-terrabyte storage currently exists (see high-end Apple iPad devices), and at a couple hundred TB, another few generations of storage development, you could literally carry the entire US Library of Congress around in your purse or satchel (roughly 200 TB at 5 MB per volume, ~42 million volumes). What we read and how and why has a huge impact on how the devices are used (I treat mine as a large reference library). And how the marketplace and property regime is structured has a huge impact on what the permitted capabilities of devices are. Our fundamental problem is that the business model the book-publishing market was built on is no longer at all compatible with technological capabilities. It's possible to locate and access any of millions of books within a few seconds. What introduces obstacles to this is the mechanism of markets and property rights, neither of which now serve the interests of either readers or authors. Information is a public good. It should be supported as same. This will create disruption, and the old giants will not go quietly. They will, I'm reasonably certain fall. I'm not sure what will rise in their place.
readreadread 5y ago
Kobo - great devices - I will always buy from them - great for family. As another pointed out you can bypass account creation using an sqlite query, depending on version (in KoboReader.sqlite). There are multiple configuration files list the api locations that beacon reading information regardless of how books were loaded. Though if you care about tracking you also have to find and replace any mention to facebook, google and a few other places (in eReader.conf). sed 's/$http$$.*$/http:\/\/localhost/g' Didn't see any more strings in the firmware binaries (checked last year). Other e-readers stop at nothing to sell your data. Kobo is reasonable.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
I've currently got a B&N reader (essentially a Lenovo M10 HD) which I don't like all that much as an ereader - a bit heavy, battery life isn't good. I had a Kindle in the past and really didn't like that closed ecosystem. I'd like to get an epaper reader and was looking into Onyx Boox - but after reading this article that's off the table. What's left? Kobo?
bhaak 5y ago
This blog post being on a .de url is somewhat ironic. The German ebook market is quite different. You can easily get DRM-free ePubs of most current books in German, most of the time only with a watermark. I don't know how large Amazon's market share is (I guess it is still very big) but you have other, viable options besides them. If you really want to read on a Kindle (it is a very well designed piece of hardware after all, only the software is gruesome) jailbreaking it and putting koreader on it, is an option: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases/ https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases/ But also tell the publishers whose books you wanted to buy that you would have bought from them if you got it DRM free. I can't understand why so few publishers to this. Their margin would much bigger and Amazon's DRM is just token security. It's easily broken. Calibre does this automatically for crying out loud).
fossebooker 5y ago
I have an Inkplate 6Plus[0] and I installed this[1] on it. It works for me. Open hardware, open software, it lets me read ebooks. [0] https://inkplate.io https://inkplate.io https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-6plus-w-enclosure.html https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-6plus-w-enclosure.html [1] https://github.com/turgu1/EPub-InkPlate https://github.com/turgu1/EPub-InkPlate
rramadass 5y ago
All i want is a cheap and large (A4 size +) ereader with just USB connectivity and software like "Moon+ Reader Pro". Everything else is optional. The only thing mandatory is an ability to read books/papers in various formats. Is that too much to ask of the Industry and all the Entrepreneurs? :-) PS: I use a Nexus 10 currently which is slowly dying on me.
rg111 5y ago
Before I purchase a book, I always download an .epub file from Library Genesis, and convert it to .mobi using Calibre. Then send it over to the Kindle using email. If I like a book after 50-60 pages, I purchase an .epub file and then convert it through Calibre and load it. Kindle is the worst device imaginable for reading research papers or technical books. It's black and white, for god's sake! And small. I have a separate tablet for reading papers, especially skimming new ones from arXiv. When, reading in detail, I do it through Okkular in my Linux desktop.

114 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

It's weird how this article calls buying an ebook from Amazon "unethical." If you're okay with their restrictions I don't see it as harming anyone?

blowski 5y ago

Seems like the author is saying Amazon has poisoned ebooks, rather than ebooks poisoning books in general.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
> Reading Ethically > So how do I use my Kindle? I suggest the author starts by not buying Amazon hardware and expecting good ethics.
- ebiester 5y ago
  That's explicitly what the author is asking for at the end - a reader that respects the ethics of the author.
  - f1refly 5y ago
    That's pretty much every reader not made by amazon. My kobo takes any epub without complaining.
    - Finnucane 5y ago
      What's funny is that now Amazon asks publishers to send files as epubs. When we send them a file, they're getting the same file that all the other vendors get. Amazon, however, will still sell that file with their proprietary wrapper.
      - f1refly 5y ago
        Ebook formats are interchangeable anyway - and why wouldn't they be? There is only so many ways to represent the same text with the same metadata, the only marginal differences are compression, organisation and the possibility for digital restriction management.
  - dheera 5y ago
    I use a Boox tablet, it can open up the open source formats, and since it runs Android it can also just run the official Kindle app and basically be a Kindle at the same time.
swayvil 5y ago
Yes it does. Funny how the real meaning of the article is totally different like that.

30367286 5y ago

The author seems to have missed KoReader (http://koreader.rocks http://koreader.rocks) and Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato), both of which are not user-hostile and work on Kobo and ReMarkable.

dont__panic 5y ago
KOReader is my weapon of choice on my Boox Nova 3. This article does a good job of explaining the sins of Onyx Boox, but unfortunately there isn't much competition in the Android e-ink space and this was the best hardware I could get.
- sydd 5y ago
  Same. I just made a new Google account for it, I'm afraid to give my real details. But AFAIK its bootloader is unlocked, so one can root it and remove the chinese spyware/viruses
  - dont__panic 5y ago
    While losing the e-ink screen optimizations and drivers that handle refreshes/OS control over those refreshes. It would be really awesome to see Lineage, Graphene, or Calyx support Boox devices in the future. But I wonder if the drivers are proprietary and not reasonably reverse-engineerable.
    - robinsoh 5y ago
      > I wonder if the drivers are proprietary and not reasonably reverse-engineerable. They are not. They are typically open source. https://gitlab.indel.ch/thirdparty/linux-indel/-/blob/41ef0dd13b7b52588e5353180a9127f08f2b9aba/drivers/video/fbdev/mxc/mxc_epdc_v2_fb.c https://gitlab.indel.ch/thirdparty/linux-indel/-/blob/41ef0d...
tokamak-teapot 5y ago
Yep, using KoReader on a kobo here. It’s wonderful.

disintegore 5y ago

A few years ago I bought a Kobo device. Not sure what it's called. I fired it up and it immediately asked me to create an account, with no option to skip the process. I thought to myself "screw that" and plugged it in so I could flash something like okreader instead. KDE automatically recognized it as a storage device, so I decided to take a look. Turned out that the root folder contained a sqlite database. I opened it up, looked at the schema and inserted a new user manually. It worked just fine. No problems since. I have no idea if the new devices are any different but given the overall quality of the thing I wouldn't be surprised if they made it so trivial to bypass their online service integration on purpose.

blowski 5y ago
Kobo devices work really well with Calibre for exactly this reason. I've got a Libre H2O, it works great. My son has the Clara.
perihelions 5y ago
- "I have no idea if the new devices are any different" They changed that last month (as a software update, so it's retroactive to existing devices): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30037152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30037152 ("Kobo unveils Sideload Mode to their e-readers ")
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  I guess you meant they decided to ease the open up and access by mere mortal, not hacker.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
They absolutely have left that door ajar on purpose. Presumably they calculate that by being the de facto go-to reader for the people who want to install their own software, they can both sell more devices and don't need to splash a lot of money up the security wall playing cat and mouse with motivated hardware hackers (who would become pretty motivated if they found there were no open platforms). It's not as if people who would install koreader would just roll over and start throwing money down on Kobo store books. They'd just never buy a Kobo at all. I have a Clara HD and it's a fun little Linux device (no android nonsense, just a good old shell), Koreader is pretty great (a few rendering bugs aside) and I can even ssh into the thing _and_ pull files down from my computer with WebDAV though the koreader UI.

rr808 5y ago

I really thought e-ink was going to be great but keep getting disappointed. I really prefer tablets with their color IPS screens now, some combination of the color with fast CPUs is much more appealing. PDFs look great as well as epubs. Reading outside in the park or on the beach really doesn't happen anyway thank goodness.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
A 10 inch tablet is definitely streets ahead for PDFs, which are usually authored for A4ish paper anyway. Shrinking that down to 6 inches is pretty horrible, even with a hiDPI eink screen, and if you zoom and pan, the update speed is dreadful. However, I do far prefer reflowable text on an ereader. I just had to give up on the idea of one device fulfilling both use cases: you can't have a 100g, one handed, two week battery device that you can read in a sunbeam as well as a device that can handily render a PDF and allow smooth zoom, pan and searching.
Koshkin 5y ago
Yes. And the smooth scrolling is a whole experience in its own.
ghaff 5y ago
I have an older Paperwhite and I rarely use it. If I'm traveling I probably will have my tablet with me anyway and if I'm hanging out waiting for someone I already have my iPhone with me and that's good enough for a short read.
dole 5y ago
I feel like this is another major factor on the poor implementation and adoption of eBooks that doesn't get bitched about enough; the infernal eInk display patents. I shudder to think what kind of display world AND publishing world we'd have today if they hadn't sat on it for this long...
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > the infernal eInk display patents. I shudder to think what kind of display world AND publishing world we'd have today if they hadn't sat on it for this long... what infernal patents are you talking about? Your claims are fairly typical of what I see on HN around this topic and if you look at my comment history, you'll see how no one seems to be able to provide any substance or evidence. You'll also see how I've explained that it is PHYSICS that limits the performance of electrophoretic displays.

Syonyk 5y ago

> So how do I use my Kindle? No WiFi, no signing into amazon.com, load all books over USB. To acquire books ethically, I first look at an author’s homepage. Direct purchase is the best option. No need for a middleman. For example, the author Cory Doctorow offers direct distribution. So, basically, turned into a crappy Kobo. They're far better for this sort of use, the hardware is solid, you can hack it however you care, and it chews on just about everything.

nescioquid 5y ago

I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today. Had the concept not been given a prior place in our minds, the very idea seems otherwise inconceivable in contemporary society dominated by corporations. The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend. The author's solution is to apply duct tape and glue to arrive at "ethical reading" (really, it sounds more like ethical vending). However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required. Being choosy about where you buy your ebooks is fine, but we didn't get better automotive safety standards by just being choosy about the kind of cars we buy in the first place. It was a political -- not a consumer -- process that brought about change.

aaron_m04 5y ago
> However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required. You're right, but it's very hard for me to believe even halfway decent legislation will be passed. It's clear that the political process is not working for the common people, at least not in the US.
- nescioquid 5y ago
  Then we're even more in agreement. Political corruption is at the root of so many of our problems today. Every time I see a mutual-aid solution for a societal problem or a duct-tape-and-glue coping mechanism (like the one espoused in this article), I like to remind myself of the fundamental problem.
rapind 5y ago
> The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend. I wholeheartedly agree, and it snowballs. The way I see it is: 1. One time purchases are the least lucrative. 2. Subscription fees, and therefore control of device, are more lucrative than one time purchases. 3. Advertising (tracking, privacy invasion) is more lucrative even than subscription fees. 4. Both subscription and advertising combined is more lucrative than on their own. 5. There are a bunch of other upsell type models depending on the industry. This includes accessories, warranties, in-app purchases, etc. Hard to generically categorize these, but they are almost always more lucrative than one time purchases. It's easy to see where an unfettered market will gravitate over time. This could be solved via regulation if (big if) we had enough uncaptured legislators (and voters that held their feet to the fire), however we now have large swaths of the economy who's business models are complete non-starters if sufficiently regulated. So we'll at best end up with some inn-effective watered down regulation that has the appearance of doing something, and probably not for a while still. It's a slow moving disaster that everyone sees, but only a minority care enough about or even want to try and fix. You know, like artificially low interest rates.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

It's funny how piracy solves pretty much all of the problems, while being the free variant.

throwaway705132 5y ago
> You don’t own the book. You cannot lend the book. Renting Kindle-compatible eBooks from the library is arduous and limited by artificial constraints; you literally need to return a book before another person can rent it. The first thing I do when I buy or borrow a book from Amazon is strip the DRM. I don't share the DRM-free file with anyone - it's just for me - but it lets me read when and where I want.
- criddell 5y ago
  The latest Kindle DRM still isn't reliably broken. It's a cat-and-mouse game now. If you don't care about typography improvements that come in the newest version, there are ways you can download the file in an older format that is thoroughly broken. I don't understand why some publishers ever agreed to let Amazon apply their DRM to book files. It locks their readers to Amazon and thus gives Amazon a tremendous amount of power over publishers. They should have at least demanded Amazon license their DRM to other bookstores and e-readers or, even better, never bothered with DRM. There are publishers on Amazon who do not use DRM. Tor is a big one, but there are others.

black_puppydog 5y ago

> The biggest growth market in audio is podcasting, which is even more open than the music ecosystem. And an ecosystem that spotify and others (most recently the BBC...) have been trying to wall off like everything else. I had a very long, and surprisingly frustrating discussion with two non-technical friends about what a "podcast" really is, and the notion of an "open standard" doesn't figure into the average person's understanding of that word at all. I say "surprisingly" because of how visceral my reaction to this was. Spotify's move to wall off podcasts was the main driver for me to cancel my 10-year subscription. I'm bracing for the day the BBC News Quiz will become irrelevant because from what I gather it will be released as a real podcast only 30 days after the fact (if at all, we'll see?) and then what's the point?

dont__panic 5y ago
I similarly killed my Spotify subscription largely because of their disgusting behavior of exclusifying podcasts. I think this is largely a PR thing: there are obvious benefits to open standards once you understand the pros and cons. But most people don't want to learn anything about how podcasts are distributed, or how messages are sent, and with corporations pushing people to proprietary solutions, most folks will just... do what the corporations tell them to do (see Google Chrome's adoption as well -- sure, it was a fast, sexy browser at first, and word of mouth helped the rep... but let's be honest, the real reason Chrome became the most used browser in the world is because grandma and mom and uncle bob all got annoyed to death on the Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail web pages that "the best experience is on Chrome"). I've tried to explain to friends and family why I prefer open standards, like RSS, and they smile and nod but I know damn well they don't get it and think it's weird that I care so much. These are the same people who don't seem upset or annoyed that the Spotify subscription they pay for constantly shoves podcasts in their face even if they don't listen to podcasts and have no intention of ever listening to them. So I guess the answer is that most people just do not know enough, do not want to know more, and do not care enough to bother. Open standards are amazing, and the internet is going to fragment and fall apart if we keep drifting from them. Or, at the very least, turn your online experience into a dystopian nightmare where you can't control anything, even things you bought, in your own home, on the internet connection you pay for. We really need a good PR campaign to keep open standards alive and improving. Because they're really better than proprietary solutions that milk you for every last dollar and drop of attention. We just have to show the aforementioned grandma and mom and uncle bob.

Ishmaeli 5y ago

My problem with ebooks has always been the typos introduced by imperfect OCR. I look forward to wider availability of graphic novels on color e-ink displays, though.

30367286 5y ago
>My problem with ebooks has always been the typos introduced by imperfect OCR. I'm the same. Unless it's a native epub, where it wasn't converted from print, it's frustrating. I wish there were some system whereby these typos could be corrected and the results committed to, i.e., a GitHub repo. Does any project like this exist?

polskibus 5y ago

Just install koreader and be happy. I’ve been using it on my Kobo Aura One for several years, its pdf app is better than the native app. Koreader supports many devices.

kragen 5y ago

The really interesting thing about e-ink for me is having a low-power, high-resolution computer screen; an old Nokia 84×48 LCD uses about 3 mW, a megapixel-class Amazon Swindle uses 100–300 mW during active use, and a modern megapixel-class cellphone screen uses about 1000 mW. Unfortunately, you just can't get high-resolution, low-power e-ink screens unless you're an ebook manufacturer; not only are the manufacturers uninterested in talking to hobbyists (or distributors like Digi-Key!) rumor has it they stop talking to you even about volume buys if they find out you're not making an e-book device. So I thought this article was going to be about that! Last year I learned that there's a kind of LCD that has even lower power consumption (during active use) by virtue of printing a whole flip-flop onto the glass at each pixel, called the "Sharp Memory LCD": https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 not cheap at US$45 but available, and 400×240, a high enough resolution for everyday computing tasks. There are a variety of sizes available, but this particular display advertises “50 μW static, <175 μW dynamic”, that is, 0.05–0.175 mW, which is a really substantial improvement over 100–300 or even 3. And it's transflective so you can read it in the sunlight. At last, something you could plausibly build a battery-free portable computer with! And, as a bonus, it updates fast enough to play video games on. Pulling once on a pullstring to wind up your computer yields potentially about 25 J. At 300 mW that yields a minute and a half of usage. At 3 mW, two and a half hours of usage. At 0.2 mW, 34 hours of usage. So below 1 mW you're into solar-calculator territory; I disassembled one of those solar garden lights with an LED and a rechargeable battery in it and measured its 38 mm square panel at 8 mW.

dont__panic 5y ago
I think those memory LCDs are what Pebble used to use for their watches. My Pebble Time Round still holds up to this day, shows me notifications promptly, lets me control music, and the hardware hasn't failed yet. Great screen and a great product.
- kragen 5y ago
  Nice! It's really sad what happened to Pebble. Do you know how much power the watch uses?

mynameisash 5y ago

I know this post is talking about the ebooks themselves (format, DRM, retailers, etc.), but I'm continually frustrated by the lack of different e-ink format devices. I would love to get a large, low-power device that I can hang on my wall. There was so much promise for both the ebook format and device, but it seems to have fallen flat.

JadeNB 5y ago

I'm surprised not to see any mention of Tor (https://publishing.tor.com/ https://publishing.tor.com/) among the ethical e-book distribution platforms.

eggsome 5y ago

I was bitten by this. While staying in the US I setup an Amazon account in 2010, and ordered a Kindle2 with 3G connectivity. It was fantastic! I could purchase books anywhere in the world - no WiFi! At some point however the renewal of my US credit card did not get delivered to my Australian address and I kind of forgot about it for a while. Last month I sorted out my credit card issues and went to buy a book, but could not - my Amazon account was locked. Support staff refused to fix it, apparently if you haven't logged in for over a year then they won't send you a password reset (I still control the associated email address!). The only option they presented to me was re-creating the account with the same email address. I lost all of my books and all of my wishlists :(

speeder 5y ago

I am a fan of a particular book series that is right now mostly self-published by the author. One of the few places selling his books legally to Brazillians was a site named "Fictionwise". I bought a lot of copies there, I would have bought physical copies if they existed, but that wasn't an option. The one day, Barnes and Noble bought Fictionwise, and just batantly said if you don't live in US you can't use the site anymore, and you won't be able to download the books you paid for, unless you are from US. Lesson hard learned, never again I bought an e-book. My kindle is just collecting dust.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Surely the lesson is to only pay for epubs and open platforms so it doesn't matter if the vendor decides to stop serving you? Most of the ebooks I've paid for were through Humble Bundle, and if HB closed shop tomorrow I'd still have my books locally.

dwheeler 5y ago

I often just buy the physical book. It's easy to do, and it's not possible to take the book from me later. I think it should be illegal for sellers to say you can "buy" a book when you have not bought it. It's fraud. Call it a rental or something else more honest. If I bought it, then it cannot be taken away, I can give it to someone else as long as I don't retain it, I can use it as many times as I want, and no one monitors my use without my express consent. It's not that rental and leasing is necessarily wrong, but it should be clear to customers that that is what is happening.

gumby 5y ago

The short-sighted e-ink patent forest has killed e-ink. The e-reader problems described in the article remain. But e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robinsoh 5y ago
> The short-sighted e-ink patent forest has killed e-ink. Here we go again. A massive claim made with great confidence, and yet complete lack of any substance or evidence. > e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners. Sigh... see my comment history. HN repeats this ridiculous claim again and again.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

Amazon has removed 1984, Onyx infringes on on GPL. Use Kobo or Pocketbook and be happy.

politelemon 5y ago

While there is a lopsided focus on Amazon's ecosystem, I also want to point out that the epub market, and even public libraries' lending programs are DRM-laden. In many cases you have to install Adobe Digital Editions DRM. Further, author points out a lawsuit filed against Amazon from 2021, but I believe they're missing a crucial piece of history. The ebook ecosystem was originally poisoned by Apple who was found guilty of collusion; unfortunately by the time the challenges and ruling was complete, the damage had been done and publishers had decided to entrench themselves. We are seeing the repercussions of it today. What could have been a thriving, open ecosystem was ruined by corporate greed, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

dredmorbius 5y ago

The E-Ink world is running though much the same dynamic server and personal computing software did, and may approach that of the mobile computing world. Effectively, there's what hardware can do, the economics of the hardware market itself, and what the content (software for PCs, books, articles, and audio for ebook players) producers and markets demand. In theory, and from a technical perspective, e-ink is pretty fantastic. I can carry well north of 1,000 books and articles in a form-factor the size of an A4 writing tablet. (The physical dimensions could of course be smaller, though that size works well with both human eyes and much printed material.) The capability to have multi-terrabyte storage currently exists (see high-end Apple iPad devices), and at a couple hundred TB, another few generations of storage development, you could literally carry the entire US Library of Congress around in your purse or satchel (roughly 200 TB at 5 MB per volume, ~42 million volumes). What we read and how and why has a huge impact on how the devices are used (I treat mine as a large reference library). And how the marketplace and property regime is structured has a huge impact on what the permitted capabilities of devices are. Our fundamental problem is that the business model the book-publishing market was built on is no longer at all compatible with technological capabilities. It's possible to locate and access any of millions of books within a few seconds. What introduces obstacles to this is the mechanism of markets and property rights, neither of which now serve the interests of either readers or authors. Information is a public good. It should be supported as same. This will create disruption, and the old giants will not go quietly. They will, I'm reasonably certain fall. I'm not sure what will rise in their place.

readreadread 5y ago

Kobo - great devices - I will always buy from them - great for family. As another pointed out you can bypass account creation using an sqlite query, depending on version (in KoboReader.sqlite). There are multiple configuration files list the api locations that beacon reading information regardless of how books were loaded. Though if you care about tracking you also have to find and replace any mention to facebook, google and a few other places (in eReader.conf). sed 's/$http$$.*$/http:\/\/localhost/g' Didn't see any more strings in the firmware binaries (checked last year). Other e-readers stop at nothing to sell your data. Kobo is reasonable.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

I've currently got a B&N reader (essentially a Lenovo M10 HD) which I don't like all that much as an ereader - a bit heavy, battery life isn't good. I had a Kindle in the past and really didn't like that closed ecosystem. I'd like to get an epaper reader and was looking into Onyx Boox - but after reading this article that's off the table. What's left? Kobo?

bhaak 5y ago

This blog post being on a .de url is somewhat ironic. The German ebook market is quite different. You can easily get DRM-free ePubs of most current books in German, most of the time only with a watermark. I don't know how large Amazon's market share is (I guess it is still very big) but you have other, viable options besides them. If you really want to read on a Kindle (it is a very well designed piece of hardware after all, only the software is gruesome) jailbreaking it and putting koreader on it, is an option: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases/ https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases/ But also tell the publishers whose books you wanted to buy that you would have bought from them if you got it DRM free. I can't understand why so few publishers to this. Their margin would much bigger and Amazon's DRM is just token security. It's easily broken. Calibre does this automatically for crying out loud).

fossebooker 5y ago

I have an Inkplate 6Plus[0] and I installed this[1] on it. It works for me. Open hardware, open software, it lets me read ebooks. [0] https://inkplate.io https://inkplate.io https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-6plus-w-enclosure.html https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-6plus-w-enclosure.html [1] https://github.com/turgu1/EPub-InkPlate https://github.com/turgu1/EPub-InkPlate

rramadass 5y ago

All i want is a cheap and large (A4 size +) ereader with just USB connectivity and software like "Moon+ Reader Pro". Everything else is optional. The only thing mandatory is an ability to read books/papers in various formats. Is that too much to ask of the Industry and all the Entrepreneurs? :-) PS: I use a Nexus 10 currently which is slowly dying on me.

rg111 5y ago

Before I purchase a book, I always download an .epub file from Library Genesis, and convert it to .mobi using Calibre. Then send it over to the Kindle using email. If I like a book after 50-60 pages, I purchase an .epub file and then convert it through Calibre and load it. Kindle is the worst device imaginable for reading research papers or technical books. It's black and white, for god's sake! And small. I have a separate tablet for reading papers, especially skimming new ones from arXiv. When, reading in detail, I do it through Okkular in my Linux desktop.