For the unaware, there is an existing solution that integrates with Kobo's native software (Nickel).
It has been maintained for years, and it supports every Kobo AFAIK.
It's called NickelMenu, and it's great. I'm in the Kobo ecosystem because of NickelMenu and Plato.
One note if you're thinking about getting a kobo due its relative openness: consider getting a two-core device. I did not do my homework and got a Clara BW because I don't want the color display. Later I found out that color is the only one with the two-core CPU.
Hey, author here. NickelMenu is terrific and Cobalt uses it to show the menu item in the default Kobo menu. It's just that Cobalt and NickelMenu are not the same in terms of project goals.
I created this as I could not find anything existing that gives the capabilities I wanted. I read several things downloaded over web apart from books on my Mac and phone, which I would prefer to do on an eInk display. Search papers on arxiv and read them offline later, Substack, even spending a lot of time on chess puzzles, monitor my Claude/Codex remotely, generate explainer audiobooks and listen to them on my bluetooth speaker etc.
The longer battery and the display makes some use cases really shine and I wanted to create apps for my own Kobo and potentially helpful for others as well.
Very nice project. I looked at it with the aide of Claude. I was interested in porting the Chess game that Claude helped me make for NickleMenu that runs on my Kobo Elipsa Gen1. From my understanding of Claude's analysis it would be difficult to port the chess game because each Cobalt app is sandboxed, and my app would not be able to spawn the Stockfish engine that my Chess (Nickle menu) game needs to run.
Is that an erroneous conclusion?
Also I probably could not port my Tailscale client to Cobalt for the same reasons.
I kinda creates a separation. Perhaps that is by design: Cobalt = very secure, Nickle = more open but more risk.
Finally the Elipsa Gen1 does not seem to be included in the supported platforms.
Thanks. Cheers from Canada!
Thank you for the kind words. I will add a page to the project explaining the differentiation.
NickelMenu is a mature project and perfect at what it does, we just have different goals. NickelMenu is designed to extend Kobo's stock interface. Cobalt is designed to be an app platform like Android has for example. I wanted app creators to just write their app logic and not build things like a UI toolkit for their apps, app lifecycle and rendering support (framebuffer drawing, partial eInk refreshes, touch input handling etc.), bluetooth handling, sensor and more. Anything launched through NickelMenu like KOReader or Plato have to implement these on their own.
AFAIK NickelMenu command actions spawn arbitrary shell cmds that inherit root from Nickel, we avoid it by running apps as separate unprivileged processes with declared capabilities like network, storage, audio, fronlight etc.
I also wanted to provide ability to quickly build apps with the SDK and our simulator to test apps on before putting it on the real device, an app store to get new apps over the WiFi after the initial USB install.
This was more oriented on making my life easier, say I have an app idea that I want on my Kobo tomorrow and how quickly can I bring it live on the device. The 'you can run apps' I wrote was meant to signify anyone can now create apps using the SDK without bothering about the device specific bits and publish them and install it via Cobalt's app store. I hope this clarifies things.
This kind of "purity" argument is absolutely toxic. We've seen it with the vietnam paper comparing ORMs to SQL, etc. etc. Please stop this. You didn't hire him, you certainly aren't willing to give him a salary for him to live off of.
If you want to complain about LLMs used in software, advocate for a voluntary LLM disclosure published in the docs someplace, so people can make informed decisions.
No, not really. If you used an LLM you didn't actually make anything. It's like if one commissions a work of art: yes, it wouldn't exist if not for your actions, but no, you didn't make it.
Oh my. Don't you think that code generated by an LLM has nothing to do with "hackers"? And once/if you realize that, don't you immediately see that they're right? Maybe not in the way they say it, but otherwise - they're absolutely right.
I mean, just think about cameras and photography. there's talented photographers, they know how to adjust cameras, they understanding lighting and composition, and yet the camera is what is actually producing the photo... but it's not taboo at all, for anyone to claim credit for taking a photo, no matter their skill level or the quality of the result. It's generally accepted that 'using the tool' is part of the process.
if someone said "i created this photo" it might sound like an odd choice of words, but you wouldn't find the need to 'set them straight' by explaining their camera is actually what created the photo.
you can be a hater all you want, but you're just as annoying as the thousands of vibe-coded projects that are annoying you.
I haven’t had a chance to compare side by side, but people say that if you primarily read books/prose, the BW version is better because the screen is more crisp compared to the color version, which is still a bit blurry when you read books. That’s why I ordered BW. Did anyone compare these two side by side in real life for simple text?
I'm happy with my Kobo Clara Colour. As far as the specs go, both are 300 PPI when displaying black and white. I took a picture of my screen from as close as my phone would allow - the lens was basically touching the e-reader [1]. My eyes can't really focus at this distance anyway, so I can't complain. I don't use the colour screen much, but seeing the book covers in colour is fun for me.
It is maddeningly impossible to get an ereader with all three of these features: b&w screen for maximum crispness; physical buttons for reliable page turns; modern processor for speed.
It runs Android. It's a Chinese company and comes with a bunch of pre-installed apps, but I just blocked its abilities to phone home and use Koreader. It's been great for me
Yeah thinking about an pocketbook era lite but apparently can feel a bit sluggish. Might have to unfortunately wait and hope for kobo to release something along the lines of a vision bw.
I personally use a Moaan 7. Android and does everything i ask it (I just use FDroid apps though). But do bear in mind it doesnt seem to run apps in the background at all. Just whats onscreen. Battery life is extremely long (probably not unrelated)
I rage quit the Boox because the page turn buttons were the same for both landscape and potrait, which meant that one direction was illogical. There were user patches but it just made me so annoyed that when a friend expressed interest in mine, I just gave it way. Maybe it's fixed now but so damn infuriating.
https://goodereader.com/blog/product/onyx-boox-go-7-bw
"The Onyx Boox Go 7 is a dedicated e-book reader with a black and white e-paper display. This device has the same specifications and software as the Go 7 Color Gen 2, except that this model doesn’t have a Kaleido 3; instead, it uses the latest generation Carta 1300 e-paper panel, which increases responsiveness. The key selling points of this model are the physical page-turn buttons and Google Android 13, as well as full access to the Play Store. For those of you who want an e-reader that doesn’t lock you into a specific ecosystem, this deserves a look."
I use a bw Boox device, a colleague has the colour version of the same device. The colour version does not show text more blurry, rather, the contrast is significantly lower. I personally prefer the bw device.
The C is sharper but the L looks more like a real book/paper. I believe as an artifact of the colour screen and it’s called “screenshot effect”. In the end, once you use either for 10 minutes it becomes “the new normal”.
I have a Libra 2 and a Libra Colour. I generally don't notice a difference in crispness, though the effective resolution of the colour's screen is lower. There is a huge difference in the contrast, and you will probably want to use the frontlight even in a reasonably bright environment.
Yes, I replaced a B&W Sage with the Libra Colour, and used them for a bit side-by-side. Contrast (not sharpness) of B&W text is slightly worse with the color one, but not by so much that you'd notice it if you weren't comparing them next to each other. The resolution of actual color is worse, but obviously you can't get color at all on the B&W one, so hard to argue that this is a downgrade.
Unless you're a real contrast freak, I think most people would be slightly happier with the color than the B&W; but it's definitely not worth paying extra for.
I had a Kobo Libra 2. It broke and I replaced it with a Kobo Libra Colour. The biggest difference is that the Libra Colour is unusable without the backlight turned on, since the screen is so dark. The Libra 2 had a pretty white background without the backlight, whereas the Libra Colour has a grey background. I don't know if the Clara Colour also has a really dark screen or not.
It's the same, just a smaller 6" Kaleido 3 screen VS. 7". Personally I find the Libra Colour fine in a lot of conditions without the front light. Kaleido 3 is darker than BW screens but it's like bad newsprint vs. good newsprint.
I compared. On the color version, the text seems to have a slightly fine mesh or rippled texture. There's no huge difference, but I prefer the black-and-white version
> Did anyone compare these two side by side in real life for simple text?
Yes, I have - I have a Kobo Libra 2 (BW), Boox Go 7 II (Color - same screen as color Kobos) and Boox Note Air 3 (Color).
The issue isn't crispness really - when rendering B&W content the crispness is about the same. However, there's a massive issue with contrast - the Color screen background is very dark and they're basically unusable (for me) without driving them constantly at 80-100% backlight (even during the day). Even at 100% backlight, the page background is darker than the BW reader at like 30% backlight.
This makes the reader eat more battery while being less pleasant for text reading. Moreover, in dark mode (light text on black background) the color screens all show severe ghosting artifacts which don't appear as much on BW screens.
Having said that - reading comics and color books (e.g. programming books) looks great on the color screens. There's just something about that slightly less vibrant "papery" look that's very attractive.
I got the color one and wasn't very happy with it. The color one has a darker screen and less contrast than the bw one.[0]
It also wasn't really big enough for comics. So I'm not quite sure what the selling point is.
It definitely looks cool the first time you see it though.
(Also I thought the whole appeal of Kobo was that you don't need an account, but it wouldn't let me do anything without making an account, which I had to do thru a national partner, whose site was offline...)
--
[0] I also heard something about color e-ink having a lower effective resolution? But I'm not sure.
but also note that a color e-reader will have significantly worse contrast than a black and white model, which negates the usefulness of the device to people like me.
I encounter freezes mostly when I enable Bluetooth/wifi. Haven't tried on a multi-core kobo but I imagine the UI thread can keep running there.
When reading, agree on it being more than sufficient.
My recommendation is partially because the price can be identical when they have a sale. That was the case when I got a BW--it was the same price as the color.
I should also mention I run quite a few things on my kobo: boringtun to connect to my home network, a fetcher to sync my books and feeds, Plato and its article fetcher whenever I update my Wallabag articles. I'm beyond pleased with my reader experience. The extra processing power would just be icing on the cake.
Likewise. I'd had a Kobo Glo HD for more than 10 years and it was still going strong. I looked at the new color screens and they didn't look as clear to me, though it was a subtle difference. Only got the Clara BW because I wanted to use the BT remote.
I do like my BW kobo, but it's on the slow side, even just when switching pages on the stock app ; and that's annoying. Sometimes because it's stuck it doesn't register the page change, and then it will highlight text instead. That's breaking the reading flow and I really hate that.
Another didn't-do-my-homework mistake: Beware of buying one of the waterproofed models if you want to hack/mod your Kobo. On un-waterproofed models, the case is easily opened, and the main storage SD Card (IIRC - maybe it was a different kind of flash card) can be removed/replaced easily. On waterproof models, the SD Card is under the waterproofing layer, which would have to be cut through to remove the card.
My experience is over 2 years old, so I'm sure some details have changed.
I also have the Clara BW and haven't done any modding on it but it's been on my todo list. Would you be willing to briefly describe issues you've run into with it?
I recommend enabling ssh (native kobo feature) so it's easier to modify the config without needing to plug in, though obviously this is optional.
If you connect over SSH, I would recommend not touching system files. The new kobos don't have a removable SD card so if you corrupt the system files and it can't boot, you need to either do some PCB surgery or get a new mainboard.
i've used nickelmenu and it's always felt incredibly janky, especially maintaining the config, but also the way it integrates with the native side menu. you end up jamming so much stuff in there it's hilarious
Is there any way to recover a "bricked" Clara color? I bricked mine while trying to install nickel and koreader. Haven't been able to recover it since.
It does. I don't know about bluetooth but it doesn't work with a usb-c keyboard. At least on the Clara BW the experience is bad, as there is a subtantial delay after each keypress and any keys pressed during it are dropped.
Apparently the "Sage" (which is what I have currently) has a quad-core, but Kobo discontinued it. Sigh, too bad - this was my favourite to-date (needs a power-cover though...).
Off topic, but I don't understand Rakuten's current product strategy. They discontinued their two best devices: the 8" Sage and the 7" Libra 2. What's left are two unfortunately sized B&W readers (the tiny 6" Clara and giant 10" Elipsa) and a couple of color readers that no one should buy unless they absolutely NEED color (I've tried them, and the screens look terrible compared to the B&W versions).
I believe that this is your opinion, but my own opinion (having also tried them, and used multiple generations of B&W ones before this) is that the screens look just fine, and that the slight downgrade of contrast isn't a big deal at all.
Very bad battery life. Maybe 8hrs of reading with wifi off, BT off and only low screen backlight. I need to charge it daily or every other day at best.
Physical buttons are comically bad and often don't register presses.
Built-in book reading app is slow, lacks some critical features and hangs in many epub books. I replaced it with KOreader which finally made the device usable.
It's a great screen size though (9" would be even better).
> Very bad battery life. Maybe 8hrs of reading with wifi off, BT off and only low screen backlight. I need to charge it daily or every other day at best.
This seems like a wildly different experience than I have with it. I don't read 8 hours per day, but typically 1-2 hours per day, and charge it every 2-3 weeks.
Yeah, I mean I'd be interested... but you've got wifi/BT off, so I don't even know what would be taking up much battery otherwise.
My light levels are probably 50/50 6% (at night in bed) and ~33% (other times). I did briefly buy a Kobo remote and found that having bluetooth on for that was very bad for my battery life.
This is something I've considered wanting, and I'm glad it exists, but after some thought it's absolutely not at all what I want my Kobo to do. Much like how I wouldn't bring headphones or a Bluetooth speaker with me on a hike, or a laptop with me camping, I don't even want the option of games or anything other than a good reading experience when I'm using my e-reader. I'd assume this is a redundant take, but I don't even know if my Kobo can produce sounds, and I'd like to keep it that way.
What's tricky is that although I don't want it to be an unconstrained app platform, I do want the ability to integrate with services that host my things to read. Karakeep, RSS, Google Play Books or Internet Archive, etc.. but I think that could be handled in a more narrow fashion.
I agree. One of the things I love about my Kindle is that it’s a single-use device, functionally equivalent to holding a paperback in my hands. There’s nothing to distract me or tempt me away from reading. Apps would risk breaking that spell.
Yup. I was tempted to even just install KOReader on my Kobo so I could sync progress with my phone, but I realised I would just get distracted tinkering with it and it's meant to be my distraction-free device.
FWIW, some Kobos can run PostmarketOS. I built this UI for my Clara - https://www.github.com/bjesus/air . It runs Firefox, Syncthing, KOReader, and basically anything else you can run on Linux.
My wife bought a kobo as it allows her to use the local libraries ebook collection, rather than spending hundreds of pounds at amazon for the kindle.
It was starting to die and had screenglitches. After a bit of debug, it turns out that hacking the kobo is dirt simple. You open up the back, and replace the SD card. thats it.
There is a large community that have created toolchains and guides. there is of course a port of koreader (https://koreader.rocks/) which has a lua interface for making your own apps.
Wow. This is rad, well done. I've been trying to find an alt OS for my Clara Colour and this looks great. Being able to author apps means I can finally add a way to review my highlights/quotes and search them with ease.
Edit: damn, just saw the BW note. It looks like the Clara Colour would be blocked by Cobalt...
There's a contingent of enthusiasts who, once they find out a device runs Linux or can run Linux, seems determined to expose a terminal on it. I don't know why someone needs to SSH into their toaster, but damned if they're not gonna do it, just because they can.
I always assume it's more for the challenge and accomplishment than anything practical. The results are always neat, but rarely anything you'd actually use for general-purpose computing.
As other noted, apart from us being on HackerNews, if my toaster does and/or can run Linux, I want to have full control over any software running in my home.
If a toaster needs to just be a good toaster, it sure as hell does not need a SoC than can run Linux, and I might give it the benefit of the doubt and consider its FW closely tied to HW.
This isn't Normie News! I think you are on the wrong site!
The street finds its own use for things is the excitement that we don't know what is possible, and that we ought be free to try. The amazing suite of software here sure looks like self evident proof about how exciting it is when we can go further, to me. I love the LLM prompt sidekick; super neat as an ambient display.
It's really sad how HN is so vocally anti-hacker, is so conservative, shows up so regularly to declare alliance to anti-possibility, to anti-features. For some people, they don't only fail to be interested, they are expressly anti interested, the only thing they want is for everyone else to have to live as constrained and unexplorarive and unthoughtful as they are. I don't get it. Conservatism is a wicked disease, imo.
I think the distaste is more against feature bloat. This sub-thread is reacting to dedicated e-readers succumbing to becoming full-fledged app-running devices. Is the refresh rate on an e-ink display even suitable for general computing?
Plus, isn't it fairly old hat to get root access on a Linux consumer device and then running whatever you want on it? Oh, it makes for a neat party trick you could make an Action Retro YouTube video out of. But perhaps people are just jaded since they've seen it done on a million types of devices by now. Maybe there are more interesting ways, and things, to hack.
That's their point though. The hacker ethos doesn't ask "should I do this" it asks "can I do this", and that's kind of beautiful when it's not scaled up to a corporate level.
"Bloat" people strike me as similar to wikipedia "notability" concerned people. It's a whole realm of thinking focused on deleting. Which yeah, sometimes that's important too! That's a great way to assess architectures. But this feels like such a general field, of so much, and to be immediately putting up fences around what we will and will not consider: I'm not here for it. Worthless, anti-worth finding exercise. Just why?
In the case of the kobo, it is firstly a much more open platform than kindle. Secondly, existing projects have made much more performant reader apps than the stock one. Basic kobo (nickel) is a bit slow and can be even slower with a “bad” EPUB file (you will come across many online as they are often auto generated from other sources and are essentially a collection of html files). Installing a third party reader can make page flips and re-renders significantly faster and smoother as well as remove all unnecessary network processes
No, the whole point is the e-ink screen. Kindle has had a web browser since the very first version, and people have managed to read books on it just fine without distractions.
I went through a whole design phase with ChatGPT on the idea of using an old Kobo as a low-distraction TV remote for my dad. The idea is that it would interface with a computer media server thing, be more legible than a traditional remote, and not be an app on his phone that would immediately send him into his phone.
Ended up being more involved than the benefit it would bring, especially considering that these media server programs know how to interface with the traditional remote over HDMI (if you have the right graphics card or a dongle) and show the selection UI on screen like a smart TV.
Anyway, my response is "you don't necessarily have to complicate your e-reader, instead you have the option of making it not an e-reader."
Some people came for the compact package containing an eink screen, a moderately powered application board, and a reasonable amount of battery and storage. For some, it may be the perfect thin client.
Even if you want it for just books, there are benefits to installing things like KOReader (way better ebook reader than the default). This allows you to sync with Calibre, etc.
Years ago, it was practically a hobby of mine to go to my local Goodwill, and find an extremely cheap old used Kobo and find someone to donate it to. Now I'm thinking of getting old Kobos just for the eink display so I can run simple apps on it - while continuing to use my regular Kobo as an ereader.
In my personal experience, this can help in case the books are little technical and you have to switch to my laptop/mobile to get more information about the topic, which ends up consuming more time it should.
This is excellent - I’ve been looking for a reliable way to get a manga reader onto my Kobo for a while now, specifically one that can directly connect to sources like MangaDex. The alternative I’ve settled on is to download to my PC, bundle with KCC into a cbz, upload to Dropbox and then download onto the device’s local storage. It takes far too long. I’ve been considering writing something myself but I’m not familiar with the device hardware or OS… this is definitely going to save me a ton of time. I don’t care if this was created with LLM assistance, I’m just happy to have a viable alternative in an approximately closed ecosystem.
It would be very cool to have an Obsidian viewer or something.
On many occasions I have compiled notes, sometimes manually created sometimes LLM curated, and put them into a .epub file to send to my kindle so I can read as I am out walking.
It would be cool to skip a few steps there, and have "live" documents at the ready, particularly in markdown if possible, without having to sync/publish etc
For most of the use cases I would need an app for, koreader's plugin system works just fine for it. You'd be surprised the gems you can find for koreader.
Read the porting document - do we think this would be a difficult port to the Libra Color? I’m reluctant to order a Clara BW in addition, but also not sure I know enough about the ecosystem to contribute a working port. Anyone interesting in teaming up to take a crack at it?
As a flip phone enthusiast: you get much better mileage with just dumbing-down your current phone. Modern flip phones are riddled with the kind of headaches that don't actually benefit the minimalism aspect.
Having done all sorts of experiments with android in the past, i now prefer not touching my devices and getting into a rabbit hole. The optimisations never end and you get confused what you’re meant to do on your device. In this sense Apple does a good thing by locking down certain capabilities on the device that developers didn’t intend to.
It also has a cli to let you push docs over WiFi. Oh, and a HN reader. I have another repo with the user space I use, but need to clean that up before making it public.
I used KOReader for my Kindle and I never looked back. The software that Amazon ships is simply insulting. It's like when I installed Linux on my laptop instead of Windows. KOReader is a massive upgrade for any Kindle.
I remember when my PaperWhite glitched while I was attempting to jailbreak it and got stuck with the screen inverted. It was great! I can't believe I have to jailbreak a reader to get that simple functionality for better in-the-dark reading. (epilogue: I let it run out of battery and the inversion was gone upon boot)
It is a somewhat newish feature, I think pre-2020 models don't have dark mode, afaik (and I have no idea how are old devices supported on kindle, I assume launch and forget, could be wrong though).
It seems Amazon has financial and legal incentive to keep older Kindles (it is so many of them still) updated to avoid them getting jailbroken and not having Kindle store at their fingertips :)
Not sure if they cut it off at some point, but they can surely keep updating 10 yo devices.
I'm like yours, But there are things that makes me angry. I cannot for example read Farsi books. I cannot put a new e-pub into my kindle and I have to send it over the web; there are many things like these. And so I just want to have a nicer reader that I myself control.
Not to defend amazon but you can remove the ads by paying to remove them, they sell one model ad supported and another that doesn't have ads if you buy the ads supported you can remove it later.
Depends on what you consider "ads": I have always been paying for ad-free experience, but I regularly end up on the screen where there are ads for books I do not care about (they probably say that's just the store homepage, but I do my shopping on the laptop).
Your Kindle is an appliance you have little control over, the Kobo in this scope is a multitool. More choice is better than less choice as it relates to device ownership and control, imho.
Along with choice comes complexity. More things to break, security problems, distractions, etc. Purpose-built devices like the Kindle and Switch do one thing well; this looks like it does a lot more things but mostly poorly.
Everyone already has at least one multitool, the smartphone. Most also have a tablet and/or a laptop. While this project looks like a cool hack, I don't see much practical use for another multitool with a weak CPU, laggy screen, and poor input.
Cool, this is the Kobo model I have. I did install some homebrew on it in the past to get Koreader, but quickly realised I prefer the no frills integration of the official reader. I still use Koreader to read old magazines on an old Android tablet.
Very cool and definitely useful. I'm not the audience but I'll say: I like my ereader to just have books that sync. That is all. It's my library room and peace time, the last thing I need is Claude to distract me.
Has anyone built a dedicated OPDS client for the Kobo?
I've experimented some with the Kobo ecosystem since I got my Clara BW, I've played with NickleMenu, Plato, and KOReader. KOReader has a built-in OPDS client, but KOReader is a bit heavyweight and it would be really nice to have a dedicated stand-alone client (especially one that supports credentialed OPDS feeds like calibre-web exposes)
I am enjoying the recently trendy Xteink e-readers that can't do anything but read books. An app store and the internet would just make an e-reader feel like a "worse phone" to me.
It can read books quite okay if it’s mostly text. With photos it’s sluggish. I personally like it but there are other better optionsnout there for a little extra $.
I find LLM copywriting revolting, especially Claude's and it is pretty obvious that it is Claude, and even though I might find the software interesting since I own a Clara 2E, it puts such a sour taste in my mouth that I don't want to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole.
If your software is mostly written by the slop machine, fine. I don't have to be upset about it unless I think about contributing and then notice the uncanny nature of the source code. But a website and a README is directly user facing and it is a major disservice, and in my opinion, lack of respect, to generate your website copy with an LLM.
My reaction was perhaps not as strongly felt as yours, but I agree that it discourages me from reading further when it's obvious I'm reading slop rather than something a human considered.
"These are photographs of the device, not simulator captures" is the kind of total throwaway verbiage that a human would never even pause to consider writing because it "clarifies" something that in the totality of context is beyond obvious. It makes the writing more fatiguing to read, and creates a terrible first impression for a project.
are you saying that you can do a better job than frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic and Google when it comes to coding something that is free from zero days and exploits while matching its ability to ship feature at the rate a competent SWE with agents can?
not sure why you are being so cynical, lot of seasoned SWE use AI assisted development now.
I think a lot of people still have this caricature vibe coder image but competent and serious engineering companies and big and large have embraced agentic coding.
you certainly would not get hired and would come across as highly egoistical if you insisted on writing every piece of code by hand in 2026.
Frontier models from OpenAI/Anthropic/Google make tons of mistakes. I work with them every single day and you really have to verify everything if you don’t want to end up with overengineered spaghetti code full of bugs.
I’ve got only 1 big complain about Kobo: there’s no way to control the tickness of the pencil when writing on PDFs, and the size is too tick to take notes. There’s for epub but not for PDF.
Suppprt told me they are not going to fix that.
I wish there was more interest in bringing new things like this to the ReMarkable 2. There are some projects, but they are not great, and mostly I just want to get a good book-reading experience. Maybe I should try it myself, or well, have Claude try.
> Tested on one device: the Kobo Clara BW (N365, device code 391), firmware 4.45.23697. Every device write is gated on an exact match of framebuffer identity, geometry, device code, serial model prefix, firmware version and kernel release, so a different reader is refused rather than guessed at.
I can't stop reading "gated" on LLM output lately.
I can't and don't want to maintain all software I use. I need to be picky.
There's a big difference between putting money or time into a community of builders and learning in the process (myself or growing others) and maintaining a vibe coded project. That's why I want to know right away which projects are vibe coded so that I don't put any effort into them.
You're free to apply different criteria to software you use, but we're talking about having information to make an informed decision here.
I am actually hoping this is a future where it does become possible. At least on top of what is generally more-than-good-enough (Linux kernel, base GNU system with the compiler toolchain, basic desktop environment...).
So I'd like to have fully reproducible builts for a dozen or two apps I use seemlessly integrated into my laptop and phone update mechanisms. And yes, my smart TV, router, ereader and note-taking apps...
However, infinite forking also means harder to benefit from others' improvements.
I'd definitely be interested in moving towards such setup if I could reliably and easily accomplish it. There are already people who vibe code all the tools they need.
Personally, so far I got best results by carefully selecting a small number of apps and devices with good track record and community around them (think Emacs that's been around for decades, but also KOReader, Linux, AntennaPod on Android and many others) and supporting those in various ways. I might vibe code an extension or config for the apps, but then I still understand what it does and why.
AI is yet to change that. I use LLMs daily at work, but software maintenance remains problematic. Producing stable software in unstable times is actually what pays my bills.
Edit: And yes - if you fork, upstreaming is a problem. It's unfair for original software maintainer to need to review, test and integrate vibe coded code.
Was it the "AI Command Center" app that gave it away? That could actually be pretty cool. Read a book on the deck with the vibemill running in the background.
The only “Kobo” I know of is a game which was popular around 1993, a remake for X11/Unix of the old 1981 Bosconian arcade game. A recent active fork can still be installed on modern systems as “Kobo Deluxe”.
an e-reader running apps feels like putting a treadmill in a library. next thing you know it's nagging you with a notification badge for 'you haven't read in 3 days'.
I mean I got a laptop, e ink laptop would be cool but this certainly isn't it and who needs a book with Claude code agent? You either read or you do what exactly with that linux pc on a book hardcover? Just grab your laptop like a normal civilized person
does this only work on a kabo device? like im kind of understanding this to be kind oflike an opperating system. do you have it for kindle? or am i mistaken? Thanks!
> Install it once over USB. Every app after that installs, updates and removes on the reader itself, over Wi-Fi. A reboot returns to the stock Kobo reader.
Jesus christ folks. Is it really a big effort to have a human proofread the first paragraph in your product launch?
It has been maintained for years, and it supports every Kobo AFAIK.
It's called NickelMenu, and it's great. I'm in the Kobo ecosystem because of NickelMenu and Plato.
One note if you're thinking about getting a kobo due its relative openness: consider getting a two-core device. I did not do my homework and got a Clara BW because I don't want the color display. Later I found out that color is the only one with the two-core CPU.
I created this as I could not find anything existing that gives the capabilities I wanted. I read several things downloaded over web apart from books on my Mac and phone, which I would prefer to do on an eInk display. Search papers on arxiv and read them offline later, Substack, even spending a lot of time on chess puzzles, monitor my Claude/Codex remotely, generate explainer audiobooks and listen to them on my bluetooth speaker etc.
The longer battery and the display makes some use cases really shine and I wanted to create apps for my own Kobo and potentially helpful for others as well.
Nickelmenu deserves a mention in the opening paragraph and a differentiation of what this new piece of software brings to the table.
NickelMenu is a mature project and perfect at what it does, we just have different goals. NickelMenu is designed to extend Kobo's stock interface. Cobalt is designed to be an app platform like Android has for example. I wanted app creators to just write their app logic and not build things like a UI toolkit for their apps, app lifecycle and rendering support (framebuffer drawing, partial eInk refreshes, touch input handling etc.), bluetooth handling, sensor and more. Anything launched through NickelMenu like KOReader or Plato have to implement these on their own.
AFAIK NickelMenu command actions spawn arbitrary shell cmds that inherit root from Nickel, we avoid it by running apps as separate unprivileged processes with declared capabilities like network, storage, audio, fronlight etc.
I also wanted to provide ability to quickly build apps with the SDK and our simulator to test apps on before putting it on the real device, an app store to get new apps over the WiFi after the initial USB install.
This was more oriented on making my life easier, say I have an app idea that I want on my Kobo tomorrow and how quickly can I bring it live on the device. The 'you can run apps' I wrote was meant to signify anyone can now create apps using the SDK without bothering about the device specific bits and publish them and install it via Cobalt's app store. I hope this clarifies things.
Time to start a F.A.Q section on the website. You could that comment almost verbatims for the question : "How is that different from NickelMenu"
If you want to complain about LLMs used in software, advocate for a voluntary LLM disclosure published in the docs someplace, so people can make informed decisions.
I don't make the binaries. The compiler does. I just feed in specification called source code.
If there are bugs, etc., that's fair game. Declaring hate for folks because of their approach is not.
On my way to ask all academia and researchers to stop using LLMs for their research. As it's just llm doing the research, right?
the code is open source, why dont you show us what a quality test suite looks like?
I mean, just think about cameras and photography. there's talented photographers, they know how to adjust cameras, they understanding lighting and composition, and yet the camera is what is actually producing the photo... but it's not taboo at all, for anyone to claim credit for taking a photo, no matter their skill level or the quality of the result. It's generally accepted that 'using the tool' is part of the process.
if someone said "i created this photo" it might sound like an odd choice of words, but you wouldn't find the need to 'set them straight' by explaining their camera is actually what created the photo.
you can be a hater all you want, but you're just as annoying as the thousands of vibe-coded projects that are annoying you.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/cszqi0F
It runs Android. It's a Chinese company and comes with a bunch of pre-installed apps, but I just blocked its abilities to phone home and use Koreader. It's been great for me
https://goodereader.com/blog/product/onyx-boox-go-7-bw "The Onyx Boox Go 7 is a dedicated e-book reader with a black and white e-paper display. This device has the same specifications and software as the Go 7 Color Gen 2, except that this model doesn’t have a Kaleido 3; instead, it uses the latest generation Carta 1300 e-paper panel, which increases responsiveness. The key selling points of this model are the physical page-turn buttons and Google Android 13, as well as full access to the Play Store. For those of you who want an e-reader that doesn’t lock you into a specific ecosystem, this deserves a look."
(slower by 2 minutes...)
The C is sharper but the L looks more like a real book/paper. I believe as an artifact of the colour screen and it’s called “screenshot effect”. In the end, once you use either for 10 minutes it becomes “the new normal”.
Unless you're a real contrast freak, I think most people would be slightly happier with the color than the B&W; but it's definitely not worth paying extra for.
Yes, I have - I have a Kobo Libra 2 (BW), Boox Go 7 II (Color - same screen as color Kobos) and Boox Note Air 3 (Color).
The issue isn't crispness really - when rendering B&W content the crispness is about the same. However, there's a massive issue with contrast - the Color screen background is very dark and they're basically unusable (for me) without driving them constantly at 80-100% backlight (even during the day). Even at 100% backlight, the page background is darker than the BW reader at like 30% backlight.
This makes the reader eat more battery while being less pleasant for text reading. Moreover, in dark mode (light text on black background) the color screens all show severe ghosting artifacts which don't appear as much on BW screens.
Having said that - reading comics and color books (e.g. programming books) looks great on the color screens. There's just something about that slightly less vibrant "papery" look that's very attractive.
It also wasn't really big enough for comics. So I'm not quite sure what the selling point is.
It definitely looks cool the first time you see it though.
(Also I thought the whole appeal of Kobo was that you don't need an account, but it wouldn't let me do anything without making an account, which I had to do thru a national partner, whose site was offline...)
--
[0] I also heard something about color e-ink having a lower effective resolution? But I'm not sure.
When reading, agree on it being more than sufficient.
My recommendation is partially because the price can be identical when they have a sale. That was the case when I got a BW--it was the same price as the color.
I should also mention I run quite a few things on my kobo: boringtun to connect to my home network, a fetcher to sync my books and feeds, Plato and its article fetcher whenever I update my Wallabag articles. I'm beyond pleased with my reader experience. The extra processing power would just be icing on the cake.
I got the BW over the Color only because I had read the color screen wasn't as sharp, though I've never compared them side by side.
My experience is over 2 years old, so I'm sure some details have changed.
I recommend enabling ssh (native kobo feature) so it's easier to modify the config without needing to plug in, though obviously this is optional.
If you connect over SSH, I would recommend not touching system files. The new kobos don't have a removable SD card so if you corrupt the system files and it can't boot, you need to either do some PCB surgery or get a new mainboard.
Very bad battery life. Maybe 8hrs of reading with wifi off, BT off and only low screen backlight. I need to charge it daily or every other day at best.
Physical buttons are comically bad and often don't register presses.
Built-in book reading app is slow, lacks some critical features and hangs in many epub books. I replaced it with KOreader which finally made the device usable.
It's a great screen size though (9" would be even better).
This seems like a wildly different experience than I have with it. I don't read 8 hours per day, but typically 1-2 hours per day, and charge it every 2-3 weeks.
My light levels are probably 50/50 6% (at night in bed) and ~33% (other times). I did briefly buy a Kobo remote and found that having bluetooth on for that was very bad for my battery life.
What's tricky is that although I don't want it to be an unconstrained app platform, I do want the ability to integrate with services that host my things to read. Karakeep, RSS, Google Play Books or Internet Archive, etc.. but I think that could be handled in a more narrow fashion.
Thanks for the clarification Claude
It was starting to die and had screenglitches. After a bit of debug, it turns out that hacking the kobo is dirt simple. You open up the back, and replace the SD card. thats it.
There is a large community that have created toolchains and guides. there is of course a port of koreader (https://koreader.rocks/) which has a lua interface for making your own apps.
Edit: damn, just saw the BW note. It looks like the Clara Colour would be blocked by Cobalt...
Me personally, I just want a reliable toaster.
If a toaster needs to just be a good toaster, it sure as hell does not need a SoC than can run Linux, and I might give it the benefit of the doubt and consider its FW closely tied to HW.
The street finds its own use for things is the excitement that we don't know what is possible, and that we ought be free to try. The amazing suite of software here sure looks like self evident proof about how exciting it is when we can go further, to me. I love the LLM prompt sidekick; super neat as an ambient display.
It's really sad how HN is so vocally anti-hacker, is so conservative, shows up so regularly to declare alliance to anti-possibility, to anti-features. For some people, they don't only fail to be interested, they are expressly anti interested, the only thing they want is for everyone else to have to live as constrained and unexplorarive and unthoughtful as they are. I don't get it. Conservatism is a wicked disease, imo.
Plus, isn't it fairly old hat to get root access on a Linux consumer device and then running whatever you want on it? Oh, it makes for a neat party trick you could make an Action Retro YouTube video out of. But perhaps people are just jaded since they've seen it done on a million types of devices by now. Maybe there are more interesting ways, and things, to hack.
The goal doesn't have to be practicality.
Ended up being more involved than the benefit it would bring, especially considering that these media server programs know how to interface with the traditional remote over HDMI (if you have the right graphics card or a dongle) and show the selection UI on screen like a smart TV.
Anyway, my response is "you don't necessarily have to complicate your e-reader, instead you have the option of making it not an e-reader."
Years ago, it was practically a hobby of mine to go to my local Goodwill, and find an extremely cheap old used Kobo and find someone to donate it to. Now I'm thinking of getting old Kobos just for the eink display so I can run simple apps on it - while continuing to use my regular Kobo as an ereader.
(I'm talking $15 or less).
On many occasions I have compiled notes, sometimes manually created sometimes LLM curated, and put them into a .epub file to send to my kindle so I can read as I am out walking.
It would be cool to skip a few steps there, and have "live" documents at the ready, particularly in markdown if possible, without having to sync/publish etc
It also has a cli to let you push docs over WiFi. Oh, and a HN reader. I have another repo with the user space I use, but need to clean that up before making it public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ZliC82RtA
Not sure if they cut it off at some point, but they can surely keep updating 10 yo devices.
I can simulate it by staying on the "Library" tab, but it tends to forget halfway frequently.
It is not because you can install and run apps that you have to.
https://www.fulu.org/
HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Everyone already has at least one multitool, the smartphone. Most also have a tablet and/or a laptop. While this project looks like a cool hack, I don't see much practical use for another multitool with a weak CPU, laggy screen, and poor input.
I've experimented some with the Kobo ecosystem since I got my Clara BW, I've played with NickleMenu, Plato, and KOReader. KOReader has a built-in OPDS client, but KOReader is a bit heavyweight and it would be really nice to have a dedicated stand-alone client (especially one that supports credentialed OPDS feeds like calibre-web exposes)
If your software is mostly written by the slop machine, fine. I don't have to be upset about it unless I think about contributing and then notice the uncanny nature of the source code. But a website and a README is directly user facing and it is a major disservice, and in my opinion, lack of respect, to generate your website copy with an LLM.
"These are photographs of the device, not simulator captures" is the kind of total throwaway verbiage that a human would never even pause to consider writing because it "clarifies" something that in the totality of context is beyond obvious. It makes the writing more fatiguing to read, and creates a terrible first impression for a project.
You prefer AI-assisted development with errors and lacking features rather than something done by hand with errors and lacking features?
not sure why you are being so cynical, lot of seasoned SWE use AI assisted development now.
I think a lot of people still have this caricature vibe coder image but competent and serious engineering companies and big and large have embraced agentic coding.
you certainly would not get hired and would come across as highly egoistical if you insisted on writing every piece of code by hand in 2026.
I like that is a durable single use device. I wouldnt use it as general use computer at all.
Even my old kobo has experimental features like wifi and a web browser. They have been trying to break in to that market since forever.
What a great device.
Do you know of any alternative?
so it's not something you can daily drive just yet? Is this because of technical issues that prevent it from surviving a reboot?
https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
It took a lot of messing around trying to figure out how nickel fit together. This is much more … impressive.
> Tested on one device: the Kobo Clara BW (N365, device code 391), firmware 4.45.23697. Every device write is gated on an exact match of framebuffer identity, geometry, device code, serial model prefix, firmware version and kernel release, so a different reader is refused rather than guessed at.
I can't stop reading "gated" on LLM output lately.
Anyways, I wish this worked on my Libra :<
It's not that vibe coding is bad on its own, but it makes me worried about project's future (ease come, easy go).
Store-only by design: installing it proves delivery of an app the USB package never contained.
There's a big difference between putting money or time into a community of builders and learning in the process (myself or growing others) and maintaining a vibe coded project. That's why I want to know right away which projects are vibe coded so that I don't put any effort into them.
You're free to apply different criteria to software you use, but we're talking about having information to make an informed decision here.
So I'd like to have fully reproducible builts for a dozen or two apps I use seemlessly integrated into my laptop and phone update mechanisms. And yes, my smart TV, router, ereader and note-taking apps...
However, infinite forking also means harder to benefit from others' improvements.
Personally, so far I got best results by carefully selecting a small number of apps and devices with good track record and community around them (think Emacs that's been around for decades, but also KOReader, Linux, AntennaPod on Android and many others) and supporting those in various ways. I might vibe code an extension or config for the apps, but then I still understand what it does and why.
AI is yet to change that. I use LLMs daily at work, but software maintenance remains problematic. Producing stable software in unstable times is actually what pays my bills.
Edit: And yes - if you fork, upstreaming is a problem. It's unfair for original software maintainer to need to review, test and integrate vibe coded code.
> Charge a Kobo Clara BW (N365) and connect it over USB. Other models are refused, not guessed at.
I mean I got a laptop, e ink laptop would be cool but this certainly isn't it and who needs a book with Claude code agent? You either read or you do what exactly with that linux pc on a book hardcover? Just grab your laptop like a normal civilized person
Jesus christ folks. Is it really a big effort to have a human proofread the first paragraph in your product launch?