hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1949.txt

Episode: 1949
Title: HPR1949: The Kindle/Kobo Open Reader (KOReader)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1949/hpr1949.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:43:53

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This is HPR Episode 149 entitled, The Kindle's Ashkobo Open Reader, KO Reader, it is hosted
by John Kulp and is about 27 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk about installing an alternative Reader upon a nail-broken Kindle.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code, HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana, according another episode
during my Christmas holidays.
So today I'm going to talk about my Kindle.
You might think, man, this guy has talked about his Kindle so many times what in the world
is going to talk about this time with respect to a Kindle.
It's true.
My Kindles got three of them right now, but the very first one I got was a Kindle Paper
White and I want to say I've had it for 18 months now, 19 or something like that, about
a year and a half, maybe close to two years.
Somehow I have it in my head that I got it in spring of 2014.
So anyway, I've had it for about two years.
I've picked up two other Kindles since then.
Both of them, second hand, one was a Kindle Touch.
And why this chair I'm sitting in is kind of squeaky.
I wonder if I shouldn't sit in a different chair.
I'm at my office.
And the office chair that I sit in here is kind of squeaky.
So I think I'm going to get a different one, and I've got these two, I don't know if
they're leather or fake leather, but they've got brass tacks holding the upholstery on
there.
Got them at Goodwill for six bucks a piece.
Those are the chairs that I put on the other side of my new desk so that they can feel
like a little bit lower than me when I'm talking to them.
Anyway, I've got a different chair now, and it's a tiny bit squeaky, but not as squeaky
as my swivel chair.
Anyhow, I picked up a Kindle Touch from a pawn shop, and then I also bought a Kindle DX
online.
The Kindle DX is the very large one that's got nearly a 10-inch screen.
The Kindle Touch is the predecessor of the Kindle Paper White.
The Kindle Touch is the first one I believe to have a touch screen for navigation instead
of a little toggle wheel or something like that.
The Kindle Touch also had a speaker and text-to-speech capabilities and was a little bit more
hackable out of the box than some of the later Kindles.
What I'm going to talk about today is a hack that you can do to, I guess, all of the Kindles
as long as they meet certain requirements, and these requirements are a real moving target.
One of the problems that I ran into when I started researching this episode was that
the very first step you have to take before you can do any of this stuff to your Kindle
is called jail-breaking.
I guess that's a term borrowed from the Apple iPhone practice of getting root access on Android
we call it rooting a phone on Apple, they call it jail-breaking a phone, and it allows
you to do stuff to the device that was never intended by the manufacturers.
On Kindle they call this jail-breaking, jail-breaking the Kindle doesn't add any applications or anything
like that, all it does is allow you to start installing alternate applications and stuff
like that.
I first jail broke this Kindle close to a year ago, I guess, and the reason I wanted
to jail-break it was because I was trying to figure out how to install the open dyslexic
font.
I was interested in having more fonts available on the Kindle and how well this device
would function for accessibility purposes.
On older versions of the Kindle you could load up your own fonts in a specific fonts directory
and simply provide an empty text file, I think I did the touch command that says use alt
fonts in the file name and that would tell the Kindle to look in this specific directory
for user-supplied fonts.
Well, the Kindle paper white that I started out with did not allow this, it didn't support
this anymore.
Somehow they keep taking more and more steps to lock the device down and not allow users
any more control over it, not really surprising, I suppose.
But anyway, in my researching on how to use alternate fonts on the Kindle, I found that
you can do this if you jail-break it.
So I followed the steps to jail-break the Kindle and started installing fonts.
Well, these fonts were not available to the standard Kindle reader app, the standard Kindle
firmware, they were only available to the alternate reader that you could then install
called the KO reader.
And so I should say that I'm not in this episode going to attempt to tell anybody how to jail-break
the Kindle, it's way too complicated.
And it's not a complicated process that in general terms, what you do is you download
a file that someone has created, I think it's a .bin file, a binary file of some kind.
You put it on your Kindle in a specific directory, you go into your Kindle settings and choose
to run the software update.
And I think while you're doing this, you might have to make sure that your wireless is turned
off and all networking is turned off.
And when you run the software update, it finds this file that you've put there and runs
it and that jail breaks your Kindle.
And so it sounds very simple.
However, what gets complicated is that the files and the processes change slightly depending
on which Kindle you have and also which firmware you're running.
If you start looking around, like if you have a Kindle and want a jailbreak, start poking
around and finding how to do it, you're going to find that all of these files and processes
are described in user forums.
And there's all kinds of provisos and exceptions and you can't do it unless you're running
this firmware greater than or equal to 5.4.3 or something like that.
It can be a little bit overwhelming trying to figure out which one of these files you
should put on your Kindle and whether it's going to work or not.
And then it's further complicated by the fact that Amazon will periodically push out firmware
updates over the air to all of the Kindles that are out there in the wild.
And some of these updates will hose your jailbreak and so you'll be left with a Kindle that's
no longer jailbroken and you're alternate apps and so forth will no longer work.
And so then they come back with re-hacks for these unfortunate people whose Kindles were
unjailbroken and they'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to re-jailbreak your Kindle.
It can be a little bit frustrating.
Thankfully my Kindle has remained jailbroken, although I believe the last over the
year firmware update that Amazon sent out did break a couple of the applications that
I had installed because I no longer see them on the alternate menu when I look for it.
So after you have jailbroken your Kindle, the next thing you have to do is install
a launcher, an alternate launcher.
And the one that they recommend, there are a couple that you can do.
I use one called Kuall, K-U-A-L.
The Kindle Unified Application Launcher, I will have a link to this in the show notes.
And what it does is it gives you, when you look in your list of books on your Kindle,
one of the items there will be K-U-A-L.
And it looks like it shows up just like it's a book title, but if you tap on it instead
of opening a book, it opens up an alternate menu where you can launch other applications.
Right now the only application that I have on the Kindle jailbroken side is the KO Reader,
which is the Kindle Slash Kobo Open Reader.
The name would suggest that it's an open reader that runs on either Kindles or Kobos.
I don't have a Kobo, so I can't vouch for this, but I assume that it does.
You can also install games on the Kindle if you've jailbroken it.
You can install various other, I mean, some of the things I don't really understand
why you would want to do it on a Kindle when it works so much better on a phone or on
a tablet or something, but maybe people do it just because they can, it's that hacker's
mentality.
Let's just see if this is going to work.
And I get that.
I totally understand it.
But the only application I use on the jailbroken Kindle is the KO Reader.
And for the longest time, I didn't even really use that very much.
I mainly did it as a proof of concept to see whether it would work installing alternate
fonts.
And when it did, I said to myself, well, that's great, but I don't really like this alternate
reader all that much.
And so I'm just going to go back and read everything on the Kindle side, the standard Kindle
firmware.
And finally, however, I tried the alternate reader again.
And it was while I was reading, I'm still neck deepened actually, reading a limousine
robbed, the absolutely massive novel by Victor Hugo from the 19th century that's been
made into a musical and so forth.
But it's an awesome book, but man, is it long?
And I don't remember exactly why I wanted to try reading it in the KO Reader.
Maybe I was thinking about HPR episodes that I could do.
And I wanted to try out the KO Reader again so I'd have something more to talk about.
I don't remember, but anyway, I started reading this book on the KO Reader.
And there are a number of things about the KO Reader that are better than the standard
firmware.
For one thing, you can start the KO Reader in two different ways.
In one way, you leave the Kindle firmware running in the background.
And then there's another option to start it up in a way that they call without framework.
And if you start it without framework, that means it will turn off the Kindle firmware
and just run the Kindle Open Reader as a standalone thing.
And the advantage to this is that when you put the Kindle to sleep and then reawaken it,
there are no ads.
Now, some people might not have ads on their Kindles anyway.
I decided to buy the Kindle at a $20 discount with the proviso that they would be supplying
me with advertisements.
And I decided I could live with that because the ads really only show up on the sleep screen
and not while you're reading the book.
Anyway, when you have run the KO Reader without framework, though, you don't get any more
ads.
So it's not able to track your progress on the Kindle store or anything like that.
So you've turned off all snooping.
And so from a privacy standpoint, that's kind of cool.
The other thing that's great about the KO Reader is that it does word breaking or hyphenation
of words.
Now, I have no idea why, but for whatever reason, the standard Kindle book reader will not
hyphenate words.
And this is one of my biggest gripes with it.
And the main reason why I feel like I have to hack every book that I read on the Kindle
and the reason I do that is to provide left justification because I really don't like
the way a book looks when it's fully justified without hyphenating words.
Because what you get is on lines where there are some really big words or the words don't
fit just right.
You get these huge gaps between words that look really, really ugly.
And I don't like that.
It upsets me and I have to fix it.
And so I would rather have a ragged right margin and have the space uniform between all
the words than have a justified margin and have big gaps between the words.
So everything I read on the Kindle side of the device, I hack it to make it left justified.
On the KO reader side, I don't have to do this because it does excellent justification
out of the box because it's able to break words in half with the hyphens.
It has a little, you can install hyphenating dictionaries for lots of different language.
In fact, I think it comes with those by default.
But anyway, so the full justification looks really, really good.
It also helps that on the KO reader application, they use much more of the screen real estate.
For some reason, Amazon decided that you need about a one centimeter to half inch margin
all the way around the screen, which is already a pretty small screen.
And so the amount of text on the page is limited by the fact that they put this big margin
all around it.
On KO reader, I think right now I've got it on the widest margin they offer and it is
still really close to the edge of the e-ink display.
And so you can get more words per line and that also makes for better type setting.
Let's see.
Now other features, let's see, I made my show notes here that runs down somebody, oh,
the other nice thing about the KO reader is that it supports EPUB.
In fact, it doesn't support the AZW3 format that is what is standard for Kindles.
Now, it supports EPUB and lots of other formats.
So if you prefer reading EPUBs, you can read them on Kindles as long as you've got it jail
broken and are using something like the KO reader.
So it's got word breaking.
You can take screenshots.
Now, this is something you can do on the standard Kindle firmware as well.
If you tap the opposite diagonal corners in the standard Kindle firmware, it'll take
a screenshot and save it on the device.
On the KO reader, you swipe from one corner to the other diagonally and that will take
a screenshot.
It's kind of cool.
Let's see.
It will allow you to use user installed fonts.
By default, it will use the styling that the book has embedded in it.
However, you can turn off the book embedded styling if you want to.
At first, I didn't really want to.
But then I started trying it without just using the KO reader's preferred styling.
It looked pretty good, except for a couple of things.
I thought, well, I wonder if there's a style sheet in there that I could just go and hack
to make it look like I want.
So I started poking around and sure enough, I found in the file tree of the KO reader app,
I found the style sheets for all of the different book types.
So I went into the ePub.css file and changed a couple of values there.
I changed the margins around headers one and two and so forth because I wanted to have
a little bit more space below the header and a little bit less space above it.
But I also used a trick that Windigo told me about a long time ago that I've used
ever since.
And that is the sibling association for CSS.
What you can do is tell the eBook reader or web pages, too, for that matter.
By using the sibling, you tell it, how do I explain this?
But what I want is for the first paragraph after a header, one header, two header, three
or so forth, not to have any first line indent because that's the way publishers typically
do it.
The first paragraph of a new chapter is not indented.
All subsequent paragraphs are indented or after a section break, like if there's a scene
change or a section break, then the first paragraph, after that, also will not be indented
on the first line.
And I wanted that to happen on the KO reader as well.
And by default, the first paragraph was still indented.
And so I used Windigo's little sibling trick to tell it after a heading or whatever, the
next paragraph should have no indent.
So the way you do that is you go H1 plus P and then you give it the style rules.
And so I'd say text indent, text hyphen indent, colon, zero EM, semicolon.
And then you can also do it for other ones by separating by comma.
So in my style sheet, it says H1 plus P, H2 plus P, H3 plus P, HR plus P, all of those,
so there's a headings level 1 through 3 plus the horizontal rule, which in many cases
indicates a scene change, all of those, whenever you find one, the next paragraph should
not have first line indent.
And so as soon as I changed the KO reader's style sheet with that, the book looked like
I wanted.
And so now most of the time when I open up a new book in the KO reader, I choose to turn
off the books styling because I've already hacked the KO reader style sheet to look like
I want.
And for books that have sensible structure, in other words, they use real H2, H1 headings
for chapters, breaks, and so forth, instead of using direct formatting, I should say that
a lot of self-published books do this the wrong way.
They use a P tag when they should have used an H1 or an H2, and then they just apply
a bunch of direct formatting.
Now this is extremely frustrating, but whatever.
So as long as an e-book has a decent structure, you can use the KO reader's built-in styling
and it will look pretty good.
All right, so another cool thing about the KO reader is it supports PDF.
Now the Kindle firmware also supports PDF, but it doesn't do it very well.
If you try to read a PDF on this Kindle paper wide, it's really, really difficult because
it's so small that you can't see what's there.
And on the KO reader, they have a couple of extra libraries and stuff built into the,
I think all of the KO readers built on, is it Lua or Python or a combination, I don't
really know which, but they have something in there that will allow you to take a PDF
and reflow it.
You may have seen this on certain Android apps or other things, but what it does is it
takes the text of the PDF and reflows it to fit the screen.
And so it looks almost like a real e-book.
It's not perfect, but it's much better than trying to read the PDF in its original format
on such a small screen.
So that is, that's really pretty cool.
I'm going to go through some of the features here.
If you tap at the top of the screen, you get the menu options.
You can go to the Table of Contents.
You can make bookmarks.
You can tell it what page you want to go to.
What the next one over is where you can set the rendering style and you can choose from
a list of style sheets there.
You can change the font.
You can turn on hyphenation or turn it off.
You can set some highlighting preferences.
You can change it into night mode, which is something that you can't do on the Kindle
firmware.
You can change the amount of light that the front light emits.
I normally keep it if I'm reading a normal household light.
I keep it at about 14 to 16.
If I'm in broad daylight, I put it at zero.
And if I'm reading in the dark, I'll put it at about 10.
Let's see.
One more tab over.
You can look at history.
I wonder what history shows.
I've never looked at that.
Oh, yeah.
That's pretty cool.
So if you tap history under one of those things, it will show you the last several books
that you've been reading.
And that's nice.
I didn't know that before.
Next tab over is some kind of option to look something up in the dictionary to search
the full text of the book, to connect with Caliber wirelessly.
That's never worked for me.
I've tried that a couple of times and I couldn't make it work.
You can also sync up the KO reader with your Evernote account.
And that does work.
I have an Evernote account that I use all the time for various things.
And what it does is when you sync it up with Evernote, it will allow you to take all of
the highlighted passages and bookmarks that you've made in the book and export them to
Evernote so that you have them in rich text or HTML or whatever when you go there.
They have an option here called Progress Sync, but I think that requires you to have more
than one.
It's not syncing it with a central server, I don't really understand how it works.
I think you're supposed to have two different devices with the KO reader installed already.
And it will sync up between them.
I tried installing the Android KO reader on my phone and it installed, but it wouldn't
run.
It just kept crashing every time I opened it so I was not able to try this Progress Sync
thing.
Let's see.
It allows you to go to the File Manager, whoops, where have I done here.
And the File Manager itself has lots of options.
One of which is find a book in Calibre Catalog, I was not able to do that.
There's something about an OPDS Catalog, which I don't understand.
Just settings, I'm not going to go into that, I don't want to get back.
I'm not sure how to get out of the File Manager in that funny.
All right, let's go to there, over the air update.
Sorry, I'm poking around on my, you're not talking to you guys, I'm just going to reopen
my book.
And so those are all the menu items across the top.
If you press the whole icon on the far upper right, it will take you back into the Kindle
firmware on the other side, so it'll reboot into the other system.
Across the bottom are the options relating to the appearance of the app.
So one of them will allow you to switch from portrait to landscape mode.
Another one, let's see what this one does.
Okay, the next one, adjust line spacing and margin size.
You've got three options, small, medium, and large on each of those.
Next one over is font.
You can choose to go way up to a very large font or pretty small and then fine tune it
by hitting the decrease or increase button.
Then you can change the font weight and the contrast of the font with the next option
over.
And then finally, there's a view mode.
You can change it from scroll to page, I keep it on page.
You can change the size of the progress bar.
And you can also turn the embedded book style on or off.
And like I said right now, I normally keep it off.
I think that's about all I wanted to say about it.
You do have to install, like after you've installed KO reader, you have to install dictionary
files if you want to be able to look up words.
And this is not very hard to do.
They have a link on the wiki, the KO reader wiki that takes you to the dictionary files
and links to those.
And I did this, put the dictionary files for the English and Spanish languages on there.
And the next time I opened the book and long pressed on a word, it immediately gave me
a definition from the dictionary.
So it works really well.
You can also, if you want to have OCR capability for flat PDFs and other PDFs that were scanned
as images rather than as text, you can install Tesseract and it will do OCR on those PDFs.
So it's a very robust reader.
And if you have a Kindle and are a hacker by nature and want to try it out, I definitely
recommend it.
First thing you got to do, jailbreak your Kindle.
Good luck sorting that out, trying to figure out which version of firmware you have and
whether it's going to work or not.
But you can, you know, with persistence, you can do it.
And it's pretty cool to be able to do a boot your Kindle.
I like it.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed hearing about the KO reader and jailbreaking Kindles.
I will talk to you guys some other time about something else.
I don't know what yet, but maybe I'll get to record one more before the spring semester
starts and I've got to learn how to be a director.
Okay?
Take care, y'all.
Bye.
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