I've had my Kobo Clara HD for almost 8 years and I still use it daily with KOReader.
It's so easy to install KOReader and it's really repairable. I replaced the SD card at one point, and another time I thought it was broken or needed a new battery but came back to life after reseating cables.
Before that I had a kindle and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to install KOreader, and I remember you had to be careful not to upgrade the firmware so it could be jailbroken.
Like I said I've had the Kobo for 8 years, so I hope this is still the case.
KOReader works just as easily, and just as well, on my much newer Kobo Clara BW. I'm not unhappy with the built-in reader software, but keep KOReader installed just in case I want or need it.
Calibre web support, opds catalogue, wallabag, ssh. And it supports so many file formats.
I'd imagine the built in reader has improved a lot over the years, but at the time reading technical pdfs on it was not feasible. KOReader allowed me to rotate to landscape and reflow the pdf text.
I almost got the Clara BW for Christmas, I thought my Clara HD was dead, wasn't sure if it was the battery or screen but it was failing to properly clear and update the screen. Someone actually bought the BW for me but I ended up returning it after I managed to recover the Clara HD.
I was kind of looking forward to the waterproofing, but seems my old one is not yet ready to give up.
Had a few kobos, very good readers, then bought a Box color go 7 ii, mainly because it runs android, so you can used it for so many things. Shame the company is based in china.
I (author) live in Brazil. Kindle is the only E-Ink device on sale here by its official manufacturer. We can import a Kobo or Boox or Bigme, but importing taxes are very steep.
Not all Kindles can be jailbroken. It's a constant cat and mouse game, and if you get a Kindle with up-to-date firmware, there's a good chance you cannot jailbreak it for now. Once jailbroken, you need to make sure it doesn't auto-update the firmware. And personally, I think one should rather support open devices. Even if Amazon loses money on a jailbroken Kindle (which I doubt), in the end, it still hurts open alternatives.
Because you still paid Bezos and then have a bunch of extra work to do to not make it a strictly interior to a Kobo. Tailscale+Koreader+Kavita on my Kobo Libra Color gives me access to my entire library at all times from anywhere. I read a lot more now after getting one.
Not only that but KOReader has native support for OPDS feeds, which the OPs read-it-later service Readeck also natively supports.
I have been using it like this for a while and it is absolutely bliss to be able to view a catalogue of my inboxed articles on my kindle, with annotation (exports of which are also supported in KOReader).
I missed my oasis dearly but I couldn’t wait anymore and got a Kobo Libre (not sure the exact model, th color one); it’s pretty much as good, only thing i miss is the dual battery system.
Koreader is well supported and has all the features you mention.
I have a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. I’ve been able to upload pretty much any relevant media, primarily epub, pdf and images. I just use send to kindle via web or email. It’s not censoring or rejecting content. Not sure what benefit jailbreaking would have.
It’s infuriating that Amazon abandoned the Oasis form factor. I love having a safe area on the side to, ya know, hold the damn thing. And physical buttons are so much more reliable for page turns. Every once in a while, tapping the screen to turn the page does something unexpected, and suddenly I’m futzing with my kindle instead of being immersed in my book.
I was a happy Oasis user until last year when I used a new Kindle and saw how much faster they’ve gotten. That started a very frustrating search for a kindle replacement. I ordered and returned many units before settling on the Kobo Libra Color. I didn’t want color, but I don’t notice the lower resolution now unless I’m using it side-by-side with a B&W screen. I do miss whisper sync, which I’d occasionally use to read a few pages on my phone. The Instapaper integration is awesome— I used to pay for KTool to accomplish something similar.
There's something really satisfying about these kinds of personal pipelines. You stitch together a few tools that weren't designed to work together, automate the glue, and end up with something that fits your workflow better than any single product could. I love it.
I've built a few of these for myself -- a bridge that exposes Apple Notes
over HTTP so I can access them from a Linux VM, a sync tool that pulls Notion
pages down as local markdown. None of them are "products" but they're some of
the most useful things I've built. The common thread is always the same: take
something locked into one device or ecosystem and make it accessible where you
actually want it.
The author's point about not needing a new device is the right instinct. The best version of this stuff is almost always "what can I do with what I already have" before reaching for new hardware.
Btw, I have my own Kindle Oasis, so want to give this a shot!
Nice. I quit my job to build a product[0] to solve this exact problem.
I’m not interested in news but I love reading blog posts, newsletters and interesting technical discussions on HN or reddit.
So I built KTool as a “read it later on Kindle” solution. It supports web links, newsletters (via email forwarding) and RSS. I also added the ability to compile multiple articles into one magazine/ebook and deliver them at a specific time.
Hopefully condoned plug for a service I built, Polyreader (https://polyreader.app), which lets you quickly send articles to your Kindle.
It supports (multiple simultaneous) collections, send via email, saving new articles from links while reading on your Kindle, and little niceties like sending yourself a reminder note at the end of an article ("tell mom this was interesting").
made something with vibe assistance, for generating ebooks from the guardian.com.
the approach here is to self host a web service and download the books from the experimental browser as .mobi for kindle use. These are then fully local and easy to delete after.
https://github.com/tomesparon/guardian-rss-mobi-maker
Love this approach — using existing hardware creatively instead of buying new gear. The Readeck + Calibre pipeline is clever, especially since Readeck can export directly to ePub.
One thing worth noting: if the "requires a computer" limitation bothers you, KOReader (an open-source reader that runs on Kindle) can fetch RSS feeds and even Wallabag/Readeck content natively over wifi. Might close that last gap without needing a new device.
I also just did this! My solution was to automate creation of a set of static html pages that I view in the “experimental” kindle browser. It’s set to scrape a paper and build the site at 6am every morning. That was I don’t have to mess with the file transfers, and it’s there waiting for me when I wake up. Also I can mess with the layout a bit easier. Only downside is that I have to have next/back buttons rather than tapping on the screen.
Might be personal plug but I just wanted to read substack on my kindle.
I built readry to solve this issue. It's completely free for forwarding your emails to kindle along with qr codes for images and links so i can open up on my phone if needed
I tried to put together something similar… I guess it is reassuring that others are struggling to find a nice e2e setup as well.
I was intending to vibe code the whole pipeline then stumbled onto Readwise, $10/mo is currently cheap enough to prevent me from building my own.
(I splurged on the Boox so I could easily use/build Android apps on the reader/collection side.)
It does feel like there is a big OSS gap here, and I wish Readwise luck on commercializing too.
From my side the remaining piece is building my own recommendation / crawling pipeline to expand my set of RSS feeds, feels like a good project to add on and Readwise seems quite extensible so it’s a good base to build on.
After a couple of attempts I settled on a a different approach for my old Kobo.
It can connect to Dropbox so I deployed a small app in Fly.io which takes a link, bundles it as an epub and uploads to the right folder. Day-to-day all I use is a bookmarklet
I did something similar. My computer crawls lite.cnn.com each Saturday. I feed it all into Gemini who composes a "front page" with links in HTML. Then the whole thing is converted to a PDF and uploaded to my Google drive with the day's date as the title. My Boox reader (some Chinese company) is synced to my Google Drive and I just open it from there. I didn't even code any of this, Gemini did.
It's a nice thing to read on Saturday morning with a coffee.
I faced the same issue, but I wanted to use my Kindle to read RSS feeds without relying on my PC, phone or Amazon, so I built a FOSS web-based RSS reader compatible with the Kindle browser. It may make your life a lot simpler.
A while ago I made this to get content from websites for reading in pdf. With what I use (Supernote) you can have an automated script to pull articles in the morning and put them in a dropbox folder that automatically syncs with the device.
This setup feels cumbersome, since you also have to manually track which items you have read. Kobo seems to offer better features in this sense (better than a jail broken kindle), however I like the build of my Kindle Oasis 2 too much.
Any idea why the extension failed? I go to great lengths to make my blog a good web citizen (semantical, working without JS etc.), and that it isn't parseable would be a thing I need to fix.
i created my own rss reader + bookmark list website that i just access through the kindle browser (i dont have it logged into any amazon account though). yours is a cool internet-less idea though!
What i did is, jailbreak [1] my Kindle Oasis, and install KOreader [2].
This gives you full access to upload whatever ebook you want (SSH, WebDav, Syncthing, ...) and it can fetch RSS feeds (i use it with FreshRSS.)
PS. The (very old) Kindle Oasis is still the best device there is to read on in my opion. Which is crazy, since it was released from 2016-2019...
It has 2 phyisical buttons to turn the page, and an ambient light sensor to auto adjust the brightness, and a 300 PPI display.
I'm still "waiting" for a better / equal device to be released.
[1] https://kindlemodding.org/kindle-models.html
[2] https://github.com/koreader/koreader
Or, even better, don't buy a Kindle in the first place but get something that doesn't need a jailbreak, like for instance literally any Kobo reader.
+1 for Kobo.
I've had my Kobo Clara HD for almost 8 years and I still use it daily with KOReader. It's so easy to install KOReader and it's really repairable. I replaced the SD card at one point, and another time I thought it was broken or needed a new battery but came back to life after reseating cables.
Before that I had a kindle and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to install KOreader, and I remember you had to be careful not to upgrade the firmware so it could be jailbroken.
Like I said I've had the Kobo for 8 years, so I hope this is still the case.
KOReader works just as easily, and just as well, on my much newer Kobo Clara BW. I'm not unhappy with the built-in reader software, but keep KOReader installed just in case I want or need it.
It's such a great piece of software IMHO.
Calibre web support, opds catalogue, wallabag, ssh. And it supports so many file formats.
I'd imagine the built in reader has improved a lot over the years, but at the time reading technical pdfs on it was not feasible. KOReader allowed me to rotate to landscape and reflow the pdf text.
I almost got the Clara BW for Christmas, I thought my Clara HD was dead, wasn't sure if it was the battery or screen but it was failing to properly clear and update the screen. Someone actually bought the BW for me but I ended up returning it after I managed to recover the Clara HD.
I was kind of looking forward to the waterproofing, but seems my old one is not yet ready to give up.
Had a few kobos, very good readers, then bought a Box color go 7 ii, mainly because it runs android, so you can used it for so many things. Shame the company is based in china.
what's the take on it being a shame that it's based in china?
being able to not care about GPL compliance, that's about it for me
I (author) live in Brazil. Kindle is the only E-Ink device on sale here by its official manufacturer. We can import a Kobo or Boox or Bigme, but importing taxes are very steep.
But why? You can get a Kindle with ads, jailbreak it and having Bezos pay the halb of your Device
Not all Kindles can be jailbroken. It's a constant cat and mouse game, and if you get a Kindle with up-to-date firmware, there's a good chance you cannot jailbreak it for now. Once jailbroken, you need to make sure it doesn't auto-update the firmware. And personally, I think one should rather support open devices. Even if Amazon loses money on a jailbroken Kindle (which I doubt), in the end, it still hurts open alternatives.
Because you still paid Bezos and then have a bunch of extra work to do to not make it a strictly interior to a Kobo. Tailscale+Koreader+Kavita on my Kobo Libra Color gives me access to my entire library at all times from anywhere. I read a lot more now after getting one.
In any case you are always the only one to pay they just reduce their margin with the ad flavored version.
Not only that but KOReader has native support for OPDS feeds, which the OPs read-it-later service Readeck also natively supports.
I have been using it like this for a while and it is absolutely bliss to be able to view a catalogue of my inboxed articles on my kindle, with annotation (exports of which are also supported in KOReader).
I missed my oasis dearly but I couldn’t wait anymore and got a Kobo Libre (not sure the exact model, th color one); it’s pretty much as good, only thing i miss is the dual battery system.
Koreader is well supported and has all the features you mention.
I have a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. I’ve been able to upload pretty much any relevant media, primarily epub, pdf and images. I just use send to kindle via web or email. It’s not censoring or rejecting content. Not sure what benefit jailbreaking would have.
It would be really interesting to join what you and the OG article talks about:
1. Self host readdeck, add articles to it
2. Have an ebook generated automatically each article saved/day/week/etc
3. Have the ebook be automatically pushed to your jailbroken kindle with KOReader
New side project unlocked, thanks!
TIL that oasis was discontinued. Now I’m sad I did not upgrade to the version with usb-c. I’ll hold onto mine for a while.
That said, I do most of my reading on a Books Palma 2 now. Smaller, so it fits better in a smaller bag or a pocket. And does have physical buttons.
No need to be sad: the Oasis never had a USB-C version.
fyi: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2026/02/20/amazon-selling-...
It’s infuriating that Amazon abandoned the Oasis form factor. I love having a safe area on the side to, ya know, hold the damn thing. And physical buttons are so much more reliable for page turns. Every once in a while, tapping the screen to turn the page does something unexpected, and suddenly I’m futzing with my kindle instead of being immersed in my book.
I was a happy Oasis user until last year when I used a new Kindle and saw how much faster they’ve gotten. That started a very frustrating search for a kindle replacement. I ordered and returned many units before settling on the Kobo Libra Color. I didn’t want color, but I don’t notice the lower resolution now unless I’m using it side-by-side with a B&W screen. I do miss whisper sync, which I’d occasionally use to read a few pages on my phone. The Instapaper integration is awesome— I used to pay for KTool to accomplish something similar.
There's something really satisfying about these kinds of personal pipelines. You stitch together a few tools that weren't designed to work together, automate the glue, and end up with something that fits your workflow better than any single product could. I love it.
I've built a few of these for myself -- a bridge that exposes Apple Notes over HTTP so I can access them from a Linux VM, a sync tool that pulls Notion pages down as local markdown. None of them are "products" but they're some of the most useful things I've built. The common thread is always the same: take something locked into one device or ecosystem and make it accessible where you actually want it.
The author's point about not needing a new device is the right instinct. The best version of this stuff is almost always "what can I do with what I already have" before reaching for new hardware.
Btw, I have my own Kindle Oasis, so want to give this a shot!
Nice. I quit my job to build a product[0] to solve this exact problem.
I’m not interested in news but I love reading blog posts, newsletters and interesting technical discussions on HN or reddit.
So I built KTool as a “read it later on Kindle” solution. It supports web links, newsletters (via email forwarding) and RSS. I also added the ability to compile multiple articles into one magazine/ebook and deliver them at a specific time.
Give it a try if you’re a Kindle owner.
[0]: https://ktool.io
I discovered KTool here when you launched and I love it! I hope you’re doing well
Thank you for your early support
FYI there are some styling issues on your landing page on Firefox mobile (dont see it on chrome)
Thank you. Working on the fix rn
I have a kobo and I use Instapaper. Is this similar?
I went the complete opposite and print one A4 every morning [0], so I don't have to touch any device.
[0]: https://github.com/bobek/rannich-5minut-denikn
Ohh, that's good! I have an underutilized printer on my desk. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow.
This is great! Love this project. Do you know of anything like this in English as well?
Hopefully condoned plug for a service I built, Polyreader (https://polyreader.app), which lets you quickly send articles to your Kindle.
It supports (multiple simultaneous) collections, send via email, saving new articles from links while reading on your Kindle, and little niceties like sending yourself a reminder note at the end of an article ("tell mom this was interesting").
It's also cheap (free tier or $1/month).
made something with vibe assistance, for generating ebooks from the guardian.com.
the approach here is to self host a web service and download the books from the experimental browser as .mobi for kindle use. These are then fully local and easy to delete after. https://github.com/tomesparon/guardian-rss-mobi-maker
Love this approach — using existing hardware creatively instead of buying new gear. The Readeck + Calibre pipeline is clever, especially since Readeck can export directly to ePub.
One thing worth noting: if the "requires a computer" limitation bothers you, KOReader (an open-source reader that runs on Kindle) can fetch RSS feeds and even Wallabag/Readeck content natively over wifi. Might close that last gap without needing a new device.
I also just did this! My solution was to automate creation of a set of static html pages that I view in the “experimental” kindle browser. It’s set to scrape a paper and build the site at 6am every morning. That was I don’t have to mess with the file transfers, and it’s there waiting for me when I wake up. Also I can mess with the layout a bit easier. Only downside is that I have to have next/back buttons rather than tapping on the screen.
Might be personal plug but I just wanted to read substack on my kindle.
I built readry to solve this issue. It's completely free for forwarding your emails to kindle along with qr codes for images and links so i can open up on my phone if needed
I tried to put together something similar… I guess it is reassuring that others are struggling to find a nice e2e setup as well.
I was intending to vibe code the whole pipeline then stumbled onto Readwise, $10/mo is currently cheap enough to prevent me from building my own.
(I splurged on the Boox so I could easily use/build Android apps on the reader/collection side.)
It does feel like there is a big OSS gap here, and I wish Readwise luck on commercializing too.
From my side the remaining piece is building my own recommendation / crawling pipeline to expand my set of RSS feeds, feels like a good project to add on and Readwise seems quite extensible so it’s a good base to build on.
I would suggest to just jailbreak the kindle and automate the workflow with koreader or other "apps"
I've had Calibre running someplace and mailing me news every weekend for around... 15 years?
I keep waiting for Amazon to break mail-to-kindle, but fortunately that hasn't happened yet. Gmail, though... breaks every three months or so.
This should be a normal thing you can do on a kindle. I miss kindle magazines.
Nice write up!
After a couple of attempts I settled on a a different approach for my old Kobo.
It can connect to Dropbox so I deployed a small app in Fly.io which takes a link, bundles it as an epub and uploads to the right folder. Day-to-day all I use is a bookmarklet
That's so cool, I would love to have a less distracting experience while reading the news.
It could even be paired with an AI summary service that could summarize Reddit/HN activity, like Huxe does in it's generated podcasts.
I did something similar. My computer crawls lite.cnn.com each Saturday. I feed it all into Gemini who composes a "front page" with links in HTML. Then the whole thing is converted to a PDF and uploaded to my Google drive with the day's date as the title. My Boox reader (some Chinese company) is synced to my Google Drive and I just open it from there. I didn't even code any of this, Gemini did.
It's a nice thing to read on Saturday morning with a coffee.
I faced the same issue, but I wanted to use my Kindle to read RSS feeds without relying on my PC, phone or Amazon, so I built a FOSS web-based RSS reader compatible with the Kindle browser. It may make your life a lot simpler.
Link: https://inkfeed.xyz Repo: https://github.com/adhamsalama/inkfeed-reader
Interesting project! I’d love to self-host but can’t find the backend server code - could you share a link to its repo?
I discovered this post while reading Hacker News on my Kindle BTW.
A while ago I made this to get content from websites for reading in pdf. With what I use (Supernote) you can have an automated script to pull articles in the morning and put them in a dropbox folder that automatically syncs with the device.
https://github.com/lnenad/newser
This setup feels cumbersome, since you also have to manually track which items you have read. Kobo seems to offer better features in this sense (better than a jail broken kindle), however I like the build of my Kindle Oasis 2 too much.
That’s wonderful. And I can do that to my 1st gen Nook as well.
Quite ironically, readeck is not able to parse this article
EDIT: used the firefox extension to save it, pasting the link directly into readeck works :)
Any idea why the extension failed? I go to great lengths to make my blog a good web citizen (semantical, working without JS etc.), and that it isn't parseable would be a thing I need to fix.
Sorry I really have no idea :(
But I just tried again and now it saved it correctly.
On my first try it only showed a line of two of the main content, truncated by an ellipsis.
i created my own rss reader + bookmark list website that i just access through the kindle browser (i dont have it logged into any amazon account though). yours is a cool internet-less idea though!
Nice. I consumed Hacker News like this for a few weeks.
iPad with paper-like is a much more versatile device. Just turn the brightness now.
Uh, pretty sure the kindle paperwhites can import epubs natively now.
The devices themselves can't read epubs (last time I checked anyway), but the "Send to Kindle" service will convert epubs to Kindle-formatted files.
And that means you give your epub to Amazon to convert, and whatever else they feel like doing with it.
lol
And dare I ask… what do you think they’re gonna do with my epub?
He mentioned in the article that his Kindle is not connected to the internet (didn't explain why), so this is a no-go for him.
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