A Love Letter to KOReader

I enjoy reading books. I very much enjoy reading printed books, but they’re heavy, you can’t read them in the dark, and unlike my phone or ereader, I don’t have them on me all the time. So, I read a lot of ebooks. And with most ereaders, reading novels is fine, at least if you read reflowable document types like epubs. But as soon as you start reading PDFs, all bets are off. At least, until I discovered KOReader

If you’re unfamiliar, it’s an open source ereading app that started out as a replacement for kindles and kobos and has since turned into a multi-platform reading app with support for a wide variety of formats. Granted, it’s user interface is a bit strange at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s great.

So why am I writing a love letter to KOReader? Because it’s so good and I have to tell people how good it is and how I enjoy reading with it in the hopes they might give it a try too.

Let’s start with the platform support, boring, I know, but having the same app available on several different machines and environments is pretty great. I can open it on my android phone, my Linux desktop, or my Boox tablet. It works and looks and feels the same on each platform. It can even synchronize reading progress between all instances of the apps, something that I find most useful.

It offers a few gestures and they’re freely configurable. For example, I can open the table of contents with a two finger swipe. In technical books that’s really useful. There’s a gesture for refreshing the screen, something that’s useful on eink screens. And, any gestures are freely configurable, so if you don’t like them, you can change them.

And then we get to the really useful PDF features. KOReader has great support for reading text that’s formatted in columns or flows in any other non-linear way. For example, this page from the excellent paged out magazine has two columns. Readability with a window of this size is acceptable, but on smaller devices it becomes quickly too small to read comfortably.

Luckily KOReader can automatically zoom in on a part of the document and even adjust in what way the next page action traverses the document. In the following screenshot I’ve configured KOReader for 2 vertical columns flowing top to bottom. This makes reading PDFs on my tablet such a breeze that I feel compelled to tell the world about it.

How great is that? And if you feel like you need to navigate the book quickly, you can either use the table of contents or the skim widget. Or if you feel more visually inclined, the book map let’s you quickly get an overview over the pages. It shows a kind of treemap over the structure of a document quickly outlining sections:

And because that’s still not enough, it’s open source. You can read the source code. You can write your own plugins in lua if you wish to. Or you can use many of the existing plugins. You can even, as I’m currently doing, build your own server side components to synchronize data and enhance your reading experience. It supports OPDS so you can pull documents from a wide variety of sources. And so much more that I haven’t even touched on yet.

It’s such a good reading experience that I don’t want to miss anymore. You can tell this app was lovingly crafted by individuals that enjoy reading. I really appreciate all the work that goes into it, and, if you enjoy reading, that you try it.