I recently bought a new e-reader, the Kobo Aura 2 waterproof edition with the e-paper sheet and not a full-on LCD screen, with the intention of experimenting with its open-source nature, but I've also discovered something else: I've started to clear out my backlog of unread non-technical articles.
I have a list of bookmarks, hundreds long, of articles that I someday intend to read. Calibre is an e-book management program that runs nicely on Linux, although it's only usable with DRM-free books. Calibre has a number of plug-ins to help you manage your collections, some of those plug-ins will automatically collect news from a variety of sites, build them into EPUB documents, and notify you that they're ready to be transferred to your device of choice.
But if you want to read just one article on the web off-line, there are a few options: Pocket, Instapaper, Wallabag. But all of these seem to be, still, read it while you've got either a browser or a phone in hand. And as someone with a terrible distractability issue, having the browser or device available is a problem.
The Kobo has no web browser1, and the response time for flipping pages is about the same as actually flipping a physical page. Moving articles onto the Kobo was a chore that involved a lot of hand-steps.
Then I discovered Niklas Gollenstede's EPub Creator. This has been utterly life-changing. It's a browser plug-in that works fantastically with Firefox. If I find an article I want to read later (or have to, because it came across my feed while I'm at work), I just click the EPub Creator button and it automatically bundles the article and feeds it into Calibre, which sees the origin and automatically puts it onto the Kobo's "Articles To Read" shelf. The next time I plug in the Kobo, which has to happen regularly just to charge it, it syncs that shelf and the articles are there, ready to read.
And there's nothing else on the Kobo to distract me (except for, well, other books and articles, of course). So I've been plowing through them, highlighting the details I want to review (which, by the way, syncs back to the desktop so I can review them there and add them to my notebook manager). It's been nothing short of life-changing to actually make progress on my tsundoku pile, and to turn unassimilated information into working knowledge.
1 The Kobo actually does have a built-in browser, supposedly built on top of WebKit, the same engine in Chrome, but it's slow, terrible, and just does not do Javascript; it's mostly to help you get past the "sign up for X" pages on various libraries and bookstores.
I have a list of bookmarks, hundreds long, of articles that I someday intend to read. Calibre is an e-book management program that runs nicely on Linux, although it's only usable with DRM-free books. Calibre has a number of plug-ins to help you manage your collections, some of those plug-ins will automatically collect news from a variety of sites, build them into EPUB documents, and notify you that they're ready to be transferred to your device of choice.
But if you want to read just one article on the web off-line, there are a few options: Pocket, Instapaper, Wallabag. But all of these seem to be, still, read it while you've got either a browser or a phone in hand. And as someone with a terrible distractability issue, having the browser or device available is a problem.
The Kobo has no web browser1, and the response time for flipping pages is about the same as actually flipping a physical page. Moving articles onto the Kobo was a chore that involved a lot of hand-steps.
Then I discovered Niklas Gollenstede's EPub Creator. This has been utterly life-changing. It's a browser plug-in that works fantastically with Firefox. If I find an article I want to read later (or have to, because it came across my feed while I'm at work), I just click the EPub Creator button and it automatically bundles the article and feeds it into Calibre, which sees the origin and automatically puts it onto the Kobo's "Articles To Read" shelf. The next time I plug in the Kobo, which has to happen regularly just to charge it, it syncs that shelf and the articles are there, ready to read.
And there's nothing else on the Kobo to distract me (except for, well, other books and articles, of course). So I've been plowing through them, highlighting the details I want to review (which, by the way, syncs back to the desktop so I can review them there and add them to my notebook manager). It's been nothing short of life-changing to actually make progress on my tsundoku pile, and to turn unassimilated information into working knowledge.
1 The Kobo actually does have a built-in browser, supposedly built on top of WebKit, the same engine in Chrome, but it's slow, terrible, and just does not do Javascript; it's mostly to help you get past the "sign up for X" pages on various libraries and bookstores.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}