Episode: 4207 Title: HPR4207: Re: The Kindle/Kobo Open Reader (KOReader) Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4207/hpr4207.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:22:53 --- This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4200 and 7 for Tuesday the 17th of September 2024. Today's show is entitled, Read the Kindle Kobo Open Reader, KO Reader. It is hosted by DNT and is about 9 minutes long. It carries a clean flag. The summary is, a response to Hacker Public Radio 1949 about the KO Reader. You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio. Hello my friends and welcome to another exciting episode of this Hacker Public Radio. I'm your host DNT. So today I'm posting a response show to a show by John Culp, which was posted. A while back is kind of an old show. I listened to it because I was searching to see if anyone had ever talked about KO Reader and turns out John Culp has. I have something to add to his show and that's why I figured I'd record a show. First of all, excellent show by John Culp there. I very much appreciate all the pains you have taken for the typography of the books you're reading in your e-reader. And yeah, I have appreciated KO Reader for many of the same reasons. John Culp cited in his show, including how it uses more of the space on the screen. It doesn't enforce such a thick border and also of course it's not the stock Kindle application. And yeah, let me backtrack a little bit. So I installed KO Reader on my Kindle touch, which is kind of an old one I've had for a very long time. The number one reason, I actually I first installed KO Reader on the Android. And yeah, I was just pretty intrigued with the idea of replacing the stock Kindle firmware software with something else that is free, right? And something that can read EPUB also would be interesting. So then yeah, I finally got around to doing that on my Kindle touch and I have really liked it so far. So the interface is a little bit different. You have some more options about some things and you get to read EPUBs. There's no ad at the bottom of the screen. And even if you leave Wi-Fi on, there won't be ads in the lock screen. Because they're usually are with a regular Kindle, right? If you turn on Wi-Fi, Amazon starts sending you their crap and then it shows up on your lock screen. That's if you paid a little less when you bought your Kindle. I don't know if that's still the case with current Kindles. I've had this for a really long time. So anyway, the thing that John Koch touched on quickly was the Calibre or Calibre. I'm not sure how we pronounce that, but he actually let's sort that out first, right? We want to take care of that kind of thing. So let's see what it says on the Wikipedia article about this application. It doesn't say anything. So let's just do a duck, duck, go search. Bear with me here for a moment. Yeah, I don't think I might be able to do this while this here is rolling. So let's get, let's forget about this. So I'm going to say Calibre. So, there's an option in KO reader that says Calibre and then it says connect, right? And I was, I actually host a Calibre library on the computer here at home that I access when I'm on the wire guard VPN. So I first, at first I thought that would be what it would do. So I tried that. I put in the local network IP and it wouldn't connect. So anyway, finally I figured out that it's, and you know, this is probably in their documentation in the KO reader documentation, I would imagine. So what it's actually talking about is not the, what's called the Calibre content server. It's just the wireless device connection. So if you go to your Calibre on the little kind of ribbon thing, right? As they say in Microsoft application UI terminology, here in the ribbon you have connect slash share. And then if you open, if you click there, one of the options you'll see right below the start content server, which is the one where you start an actual HTTP server to look at your library, there's an option to start wireless device connection. So you click there, then it'll show you what local IP address is you're connected to or as or whatever. You can enter an optional password. You can also tell it to start this connection automatically when you start Calibre, which is what I do. It also shows you what port you're on. So that's what you want to do. So note those that IP address, then put that in as the IP address for your Calibre on the KO reader. And then when you click connect on the KO reader, you will see your computer will act like you just plugged in your e-reader. So maybe to some people who don't have a Kindle or have some other device, this is not interesting, but yeah, I had never been able to do that before. So basically now I can send books to my Kindle without having to plug it into my computer. And I think that's nice. So then, yeah, so that's that about that feature, about the Calibre feature that John called briefly touched on, but he didn't know what it did. So that's what I did, that's what I had to offer here. I'll say a couple other things that are really good about the KO reader. One of them is you can search Wikipedia pretty nicely, even when you're in the middle of you're reading a book, you can just highlight some words and then do a search on Wikipedia. And in KO reader itself, you can download dictionaries and there's a million options, there's kind of too many options to be honest. So I scrolled through until I found WordNet dictionary, which is the one used by an EMAX package that I use for finding word definitions in buffers. So I downloaded that one, it's pretty decent. And honestly, you got any dictionary, whatever is not in the dictionary, you're very likely to find it on Wikipedia. So you pretty well covered there, right? So anyway, that was KO reader, really good stuff. If you have a candle, I beg you to jailbreak it and install this thing, because it's really worth it and you will never have to look at Amazon's face again, all right? So thanks for tuning into this one, get a microphone or something, a recorder, and then record your own show. Whatever has occurred to you today, whatever you've thought about, something you've learned, something you've been doing for a long time, you can just get a recorder or something, talk about it for a bit and post it, we'll be glad to listen to it, all right? 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