Duokan Reading System

[Emily]

Hi! I saw that there wasn't a topic here about Duokan and thought it'd be nice to share about it. I'm personally using the system now and it's wonderful as I can finally read epubs and other ebooks without having to use calibre all the time.

Are there anyone else using the system?

Here's the information about the system:
http://flip.netzbeben.de/2010/11/duok...

[Betsy]

Couldn't connect to that link.

[stormhawk]

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/show...

I don't know that I'd want to do that.

[Betsy]

Me either. Sounds risky.

[Ralph Gallagher]

I'm fairly sure installing that on your Kindle will void your warranty as well.

[Eric_W]

Emily wrote: "Hi! I saw that there wasn't a topic here about Duokan and thought it'd be nice to share about it. I'm personally using the system now and it's wonderful as I can finally read epubs and other ebooks..."

I was not aware of this project. Sounds quite interesting.

[Paul]

Very interesting project - thanks to this thread I've been trying it out.

Things I liked:

- I liked the layout and the way the menus worked. Especially having single key shortcuts for things.
- the ability to rate books is nice
- the ability to mark books as read and sort on that (something I currently use Calibre for) is handy.

Neutral things:

- the ability to open epub and doc files is moot for me as I'm able to convert with Calibre.
- the extra options for viewing PDFs - the particular PDFs I've had issues with it didn't help with. Those that it displayed well, so did the normal Kindle software.
- the mp3 player is fine. It has I suppose a couple extra controls than the Kindle one but nothing to write home about.

things I didn't like:
- I couldn't seem to turn off right-justification which spoilt the flow of some text files.
- unable to view my Amazon-purchased ebooks i.e. AZWs

This last is a deal-breaker for me. The few features I liked weren't enough to counter balance this. If it could display my "problem" PDFs well I might have kept it for that but it didn't so I uninstalled it.

[Lamont]

"I'm able to convert with Calibre.", This is true only for non-DRM Epubs - since conversion is by definition copying, DRM mucks with the conversion - as Calibre says in its own help file.

If you need to use a DRM'd Epub, then Duokan is a simple solution.
It is very polite software; it asks before updating the firmware, and has a 'remove' menu option .

Basically, it's a second Linux Distribution for the Kindle Hardware. Understand that the Kindle OS is also a Linux Distro, or as my Kindle said

# uname -a
Linux [192_168_15_244] 2.6.31-rt11-lab126 #1 Fri Sep 2 19:00:58 PDT 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux