Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner.
I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software ā random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. ā and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out.
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.
And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I canāt help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.
it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling.
Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
"Please buy the next version to see if we fixed your bug?" is peak Adobe.
Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;)
Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only.
/dates me
> heisenbugs
gold
A well-established term of art dating to 1983:
Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
I also learned this term pretty recently, loved it. Another fav tech term is automagically :-)
I'm guessing you are very young!
Fnord gold
23 skidoo.
Fnord Knox
As someone who has spent a good deal of time trying to build ereader software, eventually I decided to try to deal with the devil and build on top of RMSDK.
There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well.
There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not even so much as a "Thanks for your interest" or a "We will get back to you".
I messaged a former colleague who worked there to try to see what the process is to get access to rmsdk. He said he tried to find internal docs about it and couldn't find anything.
I tried to find people on linkedin who might be associated with rmsdk and ask them and similarly found nothing.
Meanwhile publishers only distribute most of their titles with one of their known drm vendors ie Apple, Amazon, or Adobe. The other two are entirely closed off.
If this isn't anticompetitive trust behavior, I don't know what is.
I used the FBReader app to read a ton, they make their SDK available for other apps to use.
The last time I looked into this, readium lcp drm wasn't something US publishers were comfortable distributing their titles with, although it seems like this may be changing, which is good insofar as readium is at least open source and free to build with.
Hello, I'm building https://merrilin.ai, could I pick your brain about the problems you faced?
Sure thing. I've actually been working on the spoiler-free resource angle as well. I can book a call to talk. Distribution is the killer problem here though.
I thought about building this too! Love that both of you are pursuing it as I haven't had the time to start. Don't give up.
Yay! Please do, or email me at mail [at] stonecharioteer.com
When using Kobo readers, using Calibre and Kobo utilities, which transparently "upgrades" your ePUBs to KePUBs without altering the copy on your disk is a must, and a huge win.
Kobo's added features on top of ePUBs are nice, and their renderer is much better than Adobe's standard pipeline.
So, it's a free upgrade with a terrific local library added on top.
AIUI, Kobo devices have a more advanced rendering engine if you name the file with .kepub.epub. (I think it's based on ePub 3?) Not sure if it would fix the problem here. But I personally run ePubs through kepubify (https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/try/) before transferring them to my Kobo.
Yes, I do that for everything too. Also publishers like Standard ebooks provide a kepub download - as they explain here they have problems with the Adobe reader too. https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...
I love my Kobo (clara colour) and really, if they just removed the Adobe reader, it'd be perfect. And yes, I've tried KOreader, but never switched to it because I like my Overdrive library books and Kobo Store.
Unfortunately, epub and epubcheck isn't the great uncontroversial resource the author makes it out to be. When W3C, Inc. took over maintenance of the EPub spec around when 3.1 was current, they just referenced WHATWG HTML and other ever-expanding browser specs ([1]). Being "living standards", these have no versioning or QA. As a consequence of being based on a version of HTML that redefined headers and sectioning, Epub 3.2 just made existing epubs non-conforming. Which is why Calibre and other tool still recommend 3.1 or better yet 2.
The case mentioned where the CSS min() function is rejected is another place where bulk import of the extremely complex CSS spec is just not helpful. Ebook readers aren't evergreen browsers after all.
Yes, it is widely known in the epub space that targeting 3.1 or 2 is the more sane option.
With EPUB compatibility issues CSS should always be suspect number 1. Using "modern" CSS features and complaining about missing flex boxz grid, etc is a web developer's mindset.
Just because EPUB shares some of the stack with the web doesn't mean they perfectly overlap (or even should).
Hardly any e-ink embedded e-reader devices use a browser for rendering, they all use purpose built HTML/CSS parsing and rendering toolchains, are baked into firmware and updated once in a blue moon. (If you're interested look at koreader's crengine or Crosspoint reader which runs on an ESP32!)
The blog post reeks of overly confident AI prose. But don't be fooled.
BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists:
https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/
More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached.
[EDIT]
Great experience blogs on the PineNote
https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/
https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...
Have you tried the PineNote yourself? It $400 and says that it's "aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux." The community provided firmware they link for it hasn't been updated in over a year.
The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.
I have a PineNote but also (had a Remarkable 1 a while ago) a Remarkable2 and RM Pro. I also gifted a PocketBook Verse Pro and installed Koreader on it.
Basically if you want a "product" to use right now and still want to tinker, RM gives you ssh access to a system you can tinker with. RM2 has the best community support for now though.
PineNote works... but yes you will have to be ready to tinker. It's heavy and think but powerful, all the way to having a browser, audio, microSD, etc.
Meanwhile the PocketBook Verse Pro just works, no tinkering, but also tiny and not get for sketches IMHO.
Can highly recommend the pocketbook. If you just want to read i think itās the best option and a fraction of the price of pinenote
> More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached.
This note was in the original comment, did you read it? The fact that it is $400 (more expensive) and has less out of the box software is literally mentioned to alert people to that.
> The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.
This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175
So much so that QuillOS which used to be Kobo focused rewrote to support the PineNote
https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill
The point is to buy hardware that is built for you to freely modify and fully own, from the start.
My post was to make sure everyone knew the PineNote was an option, because I certainly did not know it until someone on HN made me aware.
Could you maybe make your point more concrete? Are you attempting to completely dissuade people from using the PineNote because it may not be easy to side load apps to it on hacker news?. Obviously different people have different propensities to do hacking, and some may not be able to afford the PineNote due to how expensive it is, but it's not clear what the goal of your comment was.
If your goal was "invest in Kobo instead of PineNote", I disagree with that. I'm not interested in investing (whether money or time) in an ecosystem that is just going to rug pull me eventually, over nickels and dimes.
BTW for those who agree, another great option is XTeink -- very hackable, and I've bought one myself:
And there's a Linux phone out there which looks pretty encouraging too:
https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1splus/
Graphene is likely still the easier more polished option, but it's great to have options these days.
> This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development: > > https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175
Thanks for the link on mobileread. I was not aware of current development in direction of secure boot / chain of trust.
Not OP, but when I was looking for an e-reader, I looked up the Pinenote. I could not find easily a lot of information on its software state. I could find a lot on Kobo hacking. I notably found https://anarc.at/hardware/tablet/kobo-clara-hd/ and this motives me to get a second hand Clara HD for less than 100$. It was way cheaper than starting with 400$ and unknown software state.
> Could you maybe make your point more concrete?
I hadn't heard of the Pinenote before looking at your comment, so I looked at the site and saw some things that made it seem unfit for purpose as an ereader. I made my comment because I was interested in hearing your impressions if you were using it as a daily driver.
> The point is to buy hardware that is built for you to freely modify and fully own, from the start.
Personally I view stuff like this as a nice-to-have, not a must-have. If it means I can't have an interface where I can buy books and then download them to my ereader, or I can't have an iphone app where I can read books and have my progress synced between my ereader and my phone, or it's unstable, or the battery life isn't good, then I would rather go with the Kobo. I understand that different people have different priorities, but those are mine. Stuff like this is why I'm interested in hearing more detailed information about what exactly the tradeoffs are for going with something like the Pinenote.
> This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development:
I think you can still sideload KOReader on them, but that's a shame that they're making it harder to replace the stock OS entirely. I hadn't heard about that prior to now so thanks for bringing that up. I only have a Sage I bought a few years ago.
Also worth checking out, this guy's Open-Source 60hz e-ink screen: [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4
Thanks for this call out. I have not checked on Pine devices much since a disappointing early Pinebook.
No worries, and thanks for your service -- people buying possibly-disappointing early devices definitely enables the newer devices to exist :)
Kobo is actually in the process of completely rewriting their e-reader software (you can download the beta in the EU), and Iām pretty sure itās no longer based on RMSDK. Adobe basically handed the EPUB DRM market to LCP on a silver platter by being a poor maintainer and then selling off to a third party that had botched the migration and further angered end users and platforms, that are switching off Adobe faster than ever
Only in EU because of the Accessibility Act[1]. Copywrong holders are allowed to disable screen readers elsewhere because that allows them to sell more audiobooks. You will apparently also lose many other features, among them Asian scripts and developer mode.
[1] https://www.kobo.com/kobo-writing-life/blog/our-commitment-t...
Have you tried the beta? Have you found it to be substantially better?
Iām not in the EU so I have not, this is based on the technical changes mentioned, and what Iāve heard from people. Feel free to try if you are in the EU: kobo.com/update
Interesting news! Though I'm on https://koreader.rocks/ like most people here, I suppose.
EPUB: the open standard where "valid" and "will render correctly" are two separate hobbies.
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