4/1/2025 at 1:38:44 AM
KOReader is an amazing program that has progressed at amazing speed over the past few years, particularly when it comes to the user interface. (It can still be overwhelming, because of the sheer number of features, but it is much better organized.)To give you an idea of how different it is from commercial products: it actually tracks reading in a useful way. It shows a chart of how long you have spent on each page, so you can figure out which parts of a book you have not yet read. That is really useful when jumping around technical books. If you are interested in tracking your general reading habits, there are handy views that shows which books you have read and when you read them (either by time of day or across a month).
As for reading PDFs, well, eInk has its limitations and KOReader does it's best to work around them. If you want to read a multicolumn paper on a small screen, you can configure it to go down one column then right back to the top of the next column. If you want there to be overlap between the screens when panning, you can configure that. You can also have it display which parts were overlapping, so you don't get lost when it displays the next part.
There is tonnes of other stuff in there. I just mentioned those two because I use them the most. Overall I would say it feels like KOReader was designed by people who want an amazing reading experience, rather than by people trying to sell novels.
by II2II
4/1/2025 at 2:48:17 PM
Have they really improved the interface? I tried it a few years ago and while it certainly has a lot of features I found it be sort of confusing to use compared to the built-in Kobo, Kindle, Boox options.Some of those features like the column panning are also available in Boox's default reader.
by goosedragons
4/2/2025 at 10:17:56 PM
In my opinion, yes. On the other hand, I have been using KOReader for many years. When I started using it, it was very rough. At one point there was a fairly significant overhaul. Since then, there have been smaller incremental changes (which amount to a lot across the years). Of course, opinions of user interfaces will vary.I am not going to claim that it is perfect. They cram a lot of functionality in there that serves a very diverse audience. The volume of options is going to have a negative impact is going to have a negative impact for anyone wanting a simple, to-the-point interface. The diverse audience bit means that virtually noone is going to be interested in a majority of the features, even though I suspect that a majority of users will interested in a combination of features that they won't find in other products.
While I may have been a bit unfair in saying that most commerical reading software is geared towards selling novels, I don't think that assessment is too far off base. Most software does appear to be designed for people who just read novels. KOReader is geared towards people who care about features that other reading software rarely provides.
by II2II
4/1/2025 at 8:25:58 AM
> If you want to read a multicolumn paper on a small screen, you can configure it to go down one column then right back to the top of the next column. If you want there to be overlap between the screens when panning, you can configure that. You can also have it display which parts were overlapping, so you don't get lost when it displays the next partThat's insane, I thought it was already good with a whole page, I will have to explore this more. Might need to update it as well, since I installed it a few years ago.
by exe34
4/1/2025 at 8:39:17 AM
It was the only thing I could find that works well on a Linux tablet. Other readers have poor controls for a touch screen.by graemep