No, I just use the built in reader. I tried a couple of additional third party ones and my battery drain was pretty bad. Might have been a me problem though.
I have two android tablets, one 7" to read small books, and one 13" to read US Letter format books, I took the cheapest ones I found, disabled Google Play and installed F-Droid to install FOSS readers, and it just works perfectly. You really don’t need anything specific to just read text, you just want to make sure that you can display an entire page on your screen in a size you’re comfortable reading, otherwise PDFs becomes quickly insufferable.
I run Koreader on a Kobo Libra 2. I just connect to my OPDS catalogue on my Calibre-Web instance. It’s not exactly a sync setup; it just gives me access to my library whenever I need to download something, and that covers my needs. There are several other sync options; check out Koreader’s features here: github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki
If you like it and decide you want to it, go through the list of supported devices and see what sort of sync capabilities are available for them (support for Kobo devices seems to be the best/have the most options).
I used an Asus Android tablet (Android 7, it was OLD) with a giant SD card +& Moon+ Pro reader app. It syncs reading progress & bookmarks via Dropbox, WebDAV, or Google Drive. I moved to a Fire 10 that I added Google Play Services to. It can sync with my phone or any other Android device. I don’t bother with calibre-web as I don’t have a PC I can keep turned on 24/7 yet, so I just copy over my Calibre library to the SD card. 15k books, 512 GB SD card with ~300 GB left. Moon+ does take a bit to add new books to its database after I think 10k books.
I am very happy with my Pocketbook. Can easily install koreader (an ebook reader app) and connecting to a calibre server on my local network works very well.
Been enjoying using my Boox Nova Air that connects to my Kavita through Moon Reader+. I just download my epub or PDF to read. That flow has been working like a charm to me.
Keep in mind that it’s an e-reader, so it’s black and white only. May be fine with you or you may want an iPad or an Android tablet for color and speed
EDIT
Have read also from my Kindle and Kobo library as it is an Android device and have both apps downloaded
The Lumi is huge and works well for manga, especially considering the sad state of legally obtainable manga in the United States where everything requires proprietary Android apps, or if you want to do workbooks or something using the stylus. It’s surprisingly good, even for things you wouldn’t normally do an an ebook device. I’ve never used any of the smaller Boox devices so I can’t say whether it’s the same for all of them.
The Forma is a normal size so it’s much more portable.
Both of them have wifi and you can run your own software on them, but I think running your own software on Kobo devices is less well supported than running your own software on Boox devices.
I have a Paperwhite 2015 version that I got back in 2016 for only $30 when they had a big sale on them to unload for their new version. Looks like on eBay that 2015 version goes for $30-50 today.
I transfer books to it via a USB using Calibre. It doesn’t need nor do I connect it to WiFi. Newer models might also be able to work via USB only, I don’t know, but I know my 2015 works that way.
True,you dont need daily connection to an ebook server. I’m using an old kindle but I wish i could sync my progress across multiple devices without amazon.
Can you share your setup by any chance? Im using arr stack and its perfect, but failing with calibre + calibre web. I get to a point where I see books in calibre and can send test email, but calibre-web just hates me lol. I cant find a good guide that I can follow or just my skill level is not enough. Tried linuxserver images that usually work perfectly fine for me
My Kobo Libra works perfectly with my self-hosted Calibre-Web, it syncs directly with it in the same way as it would sync with their online platform. You can also use both as it uses the later one as fallback.
Agree, I would also recommend Kobo. In addition, at my Kobo I can also borrow books directly from our public library for free in Sweden. Very convenient.
I also use a Kobo with Calibre-web and it syncs fine. It’s been about a year so I can’t remember specifics. I remember modifying settings in my Kobo to point to my Calibre-web URL and in Calibre-web settings allow Kobo sync and then make a Kobo shelf. All the books in Kobo shelf are what it syncs too
Not really, I did have to install and setup kepubify and i always convert the epub files to kepub manually (from the Calibre-Web page) after I upload new books, so far I only had minor issues when removing books from Kobo and suffered a random reset of the reading hours stat.
as in it pulls everything you add to the calibre library on a schedule rather than pulling individually/manually like from OPDS? how do you pull this off?
You basically replace the URL that the reader uses to connect to their cloud platform with the one from your self hosted instance. Then the Kobo will just sync normally like it would do with their platform, the queries not understood by Calibre-Web (usually books not stored there or requests to the Kobo Store) are proxied by Calibre-Web to the Kobo Cloud.
wow, i completely missed this the last time i tried out calibre-web, if it was even integrated. awesome, thanks. i also found this guide: code.mendhak.com/kobo-customizations/#syncing-kob…