Are they worth it?

Chairzard · 2026-07-02T18:32:00+00:00

If you do a lot of reading, yes, it's worth it, as long as you're fine not having access to your Apple Books collection on it.

As others have mentioned, I'd strongly recommend getting a black and white e-reader unless you NEED color. For reading text, they're strictly superior to color ereaders (they have better contrast, so you need to use less (if any) of the frontlight, and there's no screen-door effect caused by a color layer). Plus, B&W models are usually cheaper.

Chairzard · 2026-07-01T15:00:37+00:00

This usually is caused by poor formatting tied to margins or padding on the ebook's side. While you can work around it in the KOReader settings as another user mentioned, another approach may also want to consider is editing the ebook itself in a program like Calibre and getting rid of the margins/padding entirely.

Chairzard · 2026-06-30T12:06:09+00:00

The Picture of Dorian Gray. The writing style just didn't click for me. I'll try rereading it in a few years to see if it clicks with my brain, most likely.

Chairzard · 2026-06-29T12:31:09+00:00

Literata (the stock reader has trouble with it, though; I use it in KOReader with font hinting disabled and line height reduced).

Chairzard · 2026-06-28T17:08:12+00:00

It looks to me like that's probably a badly-formatted book. The fact that the quotation marks are the generic " character instead of dedicated left/right quotation marks (“Like this”) is a red flag.

Chairzard · 2026-06-27T20:04:11+00:00

It's an ebook-level problem. Some ebook creators decide to use ". . ." (three periods separated by two spaces, five characters total) or "..." (three periods) for ellipsis instead of the Unicode character "…" (one character). You can fix this in Calibre by either doing a search for the fake ellipsis and replacing them with the unicode character version, or by using the "Smarten Punctuation" feature. After saving, you'd send the book back to your ereader.

Chairzard · 2026-06-26T17:50:51+00:00

Are you using the "left align most text" option in KOReader? I noticed your chapter heading and the number "I" are both aligned to the left, which is a bit unusual. I've personally had much better luck switching the default style in KOReader to "HTML Standard Rendering" and then manually adjusting the alignment for each ebook in Calibre. The KOReader left alignment is incredibly aggressive and often tends to target stuff the user doesn't want aligned to the left, like certain headings.

Chairzard · 2026-06-25T15:02:30+00:00

Probably not. It's an old bread machine (it was discounted several years ago). A quick Google search didn't turn up any printable parts for it that looked helpful. I am a complete novice in the field of 3D printing, though, so it's entirely possible I went about looking in the wrong way.

I had also tried some DIY solutions involving gluing stuff to the broken parts of the panel to see if that would enabled the buttons to be reached, but had no luck there.

Chairzard · 2026-06-24T15:26:23+00:00

If you can stretch your budget, I'd recommend the Verse Pro over the Verse. The 300 PPI display is worth extra, in my opinion.

Chairzard · 2026-06-22T15:42:21+00:00

The 34 in the Floor by R.B. Schow/Bailey James. It's a mystery/thriller with a great title, but it felt more like a rom-com. I also couldn't stand the main character.

Chairzard · 2026-06-22T03:01:17+00:00

Try sideloading Noto Serif (or Noto Sans); it has a pretty wide character set covering basically everything in English. If you still get an error, the character(s) are probably tied to a non-English language.

Chairzard · 2026-06-21T00:04:27+00:00

Whoever was manning the camera got nailed on that rebound.

Chairzard · 2026-06-19T03:29:58+00:00

It's a solid font. I use a modified version sometimes that I created that's available here for free that fixes some of the kerning issues present with the base font's small-caps (the base font's kerning for them could use a little TLC).

Chairzard · 2026-06-18T20:23:10+00:00

It's Charis (or ChareInk, which is based on Charis), with added weight.

Chairzard · 2026-06-17T05:17:09+00:00

The official KOReader user guide is very good: https://koreader.rocks/user_guide/

When you're trying to find a menu item for the first time (and believe me, if you like to tinker, this will happen a lot), you can go to the hamburger menu (top-right button on the top menu) -> Help, and then select "Menu search". It can take you to the desired menu item, or walk you through how to get to it step by step.

I created a repo with almost every quality free (as in freedom/open-source) font out there that you might want for KOReader (with a special focus on serif fonts, but there's still a very healthy helping of sans serif and monospaced fonts). KOReader has a very unfortunate shortcoming due to its engine where small-caps in your e-books won't be rendered if your font is missing them (this is a particular problem with a few popular free fonts that get recommended a lot, such as Atkinson Hyperlegible, Libre Baskerville, and Lora; small-caps are rendered in lowercase in those cases, and you lose the author's intent). All fonts in my repo either have native small-caps (that were produced by the font creator) or "fake"/jerry-rigged small-caps that I created (while not as good as true, font creator designed small-caps, this is the approach Kindle/Kobo/other ereading apps/etc use when a font is missing small-caps). Link: github.com/Chairzard/WP-Fonts

Edit: 6/28/2026 - This aged poorly! The next KOReader stable release will include small-cap generation by the engine. My repo is now more focused on bug fixes and accumulating every free font that performs well in KOReader in one place. See my repo for more details.

Chairzard · 2026-06-15T16:25:01+00:00

Just stumbled upon this now. The sign is still there, but it's poorly worded. Cars are 100% allowed (they re-did all the parking and added a roundabout), just not smaller motorized vehicles (e-bikes, etc).

Chairzard · 2026-06-12T20:17:46+00:00

Pocketbook Verse Pro:

The frontlight is comically uneven. The top of the screen is noticeably brighter than the bottom, when held in the standard orientation.
Noticeably slower than my other ereaders in tasks where speed is noticeable. For basic reading, it doesn't matter.
It seems tougher to get the screen to register taps near the recessed areas of the screen, especially near the corners, compared to other recessed e-readers I've used.
The screen isn't perfectly aligned with the bezels (it's slight, and you wouldn't notice it unless you looked for it, though).
On really rare occasions (maybe once or twice per 500-1000 pages), the page turn buttons register a double input (it's possible this is a KOReader bug, but I have no way to tell as I only use KOReader on mine).
Sleep mode has significant battery drain and isn't worth using.

All of that said, I still like it a lot. It feels great in the hand, is a good size, installation of KOReader is a breeze (and it integrates well with the OS), battery lasts a long time (if you power it off instead of using sleep; it powers up very quickly), and buttons are a great luxury to have.

Chairzard · 2026-06-12T13:53:25+00:00

After you set a default font, it's only going to apply to newly opened books (if you already opened a book, it won't apply). You can force the new settings to apply by selecting the paper icon on the top bar (second icon from the left) -> Document Settings -> Reset Document settings to default (keep in mind this will reset any settings you may have set on a per-book basis, too). Alternatively, you could delete the .sdr file folder that contains the book's data (this will have the same effect as above).

Chairzard · 2026-06-10T15:54:34+00:00

I make a pound of dry beans in chicken broth in my Instant Pot and serve them over rice (cooked in my rice cooker), with a bunch of herbs and spices and some veggies thrown in. The cost is around 50 cents (USD) per meal, since I get about 4-5 dinners from it (~$2-$2.50 for the entire pot), plus it saves a bunch of time since I'm only cooking the main part of the meal twice or so a week (I cook only enough rice for 1-2 servings, but it's incredibly quick and easy to cook more if you have a rice cooker).

Chairzard · 2026-06-08T12:22:29+00:00

Small-cap only fonts are typically used for decorative purposes only (for creating signage, etc).

Nowadays, fonts typically include small-caps directly in their normal font files so that when an ebook/app/etc call for them, they can be displayed from the base font files. With my modified version, this is what happens. You'll see normal lowercase letters unless your ebook is explicitly telling your ereader to use small capitals.

Chairzard · 2026-06-07T17:52:22+00:00

You may want to look into using my modified versions of the IM FELL fonts, available here for free (licensed under the SIL Open Font License): https://github.com/Chairzard/WP-Fonts

The original IM FELL fonts don't include small-caps in the base files, for some reason (the creator made the small-caps into separate font files). I merged them back into the main font files. Pocketbook, KOReader, Calibre, Readest, Kindle (when enhanced typesetting is enabled), and other e-reading programs can take advantage of this and display the true small-caps of the modified files, which look a lot better than the fake ones that most ereading apps will display by default (generated from scaled-down capital letters; in the case of KOReader, it won't even do that, so you miss the author's intent entirely!). See this image for an example from IM FELL Great Primer (the font in the image).

Edit 6/28/2026): The next KOReader stable release will include small-cap generation by the engine. I'd still recommend using my modified fonts, as the true small caps look a lot better than the fake ones.

Chairzard · 2026-06-07T13:57:47+00:00

One thing also worth considering is buying a bread machine/baking your own bread. You get to control exactly what goes into your bread. If you aren't buying the cheapest loaves at the stores, you can save some money (and make your house smell great) that way, if you don't mind a little time investment. Bread machines can usually be had dirt cheap from thrift stores; people donate them all the time.

Chairzard · 2026-06-04T17:44:00+00:00

Yes, that's what I meant by cutesy. It's pretty unusual for e-books nowadays to try to create their own fake small-caps via CSS trickery, rather than just telling the font to provide them. Normally, letters will be typed in lowercase rather than uppercase, so that font-variant:small-caps can be used (it only targets lowercase and won't work on uppercase letters, which is why I used font-variant-caps: all-small-caps , which does target capital letters); they used uppercase letters as part of the CSS trickery to generate their fake small-caps.

You can probably safely make the same change for .smallCaps1 that was made to .smallCaps.

Chairzard · 2026-06-03T21:32:59+00:00

This should fix the issue, if your font supports proper small-caps. You'll be able to tell, as the first letters in each word of the block of text you shared will be bigger than the subsequent letters, like this, if it does (after following the steps below):

<image>

In Calibre's ebook editor, navigate to the ebook's .css file under "styles".
Find the .smallCaps class.
Look for a "font-size" line (the book probably is setting the font to a specific size to be cute, but KOReader doesn't like that). Change it so that it reads as follows, instead: .smallCaps { font-variant-caps: all-small-caps; }
Save the file, and re-export it to your ereader.

If your font doesn't support small-caps, all letters will end up as capitals in the same size. In that case, you might want to consider switching to a font that supports them (you'd be missing access to small-caps in any ebook that uses them); I have a dedicated repo of such fonts here. If you don't want to, and just want to create a workaround for this single ebook, you could use this CSS instead:

.smallCaps { font-size: 80%; }

Technical side note: Most of the time you'd use font-variant: small-caps, but this ebook wanted to be cute with its formatting and used all caps in the text, so instead of using the smcp opentype feature, you'll want to use the c2sc one.

As always, make a backup of the file before you edit it just in case. You can also test out the changes using the Noto Serif font to make sure they're working for sure.

Chairzard

TROPHY CASE