Libra Solution Reading Web Articles (Libra Colour)

[Defenderland]

After having wasted several hours with Pocket, I already had prepared the readeer to be sent back, because Pocket was omitting pictures on some articles (what never happened in years with Send To Kindle for my Kindle - and way to clever for Pocket developers, Send to Kindle or Mercury Reader also show a preview, so that you can check, if nothing important is omitted...).

And with KOBO support having no clue and infos how to use their color reader flagship (but really trying to be helpful) I decided a last time and tried all available ebook creating browser extensions for Brave/Chrome, and I have found a quite acceptable solution for me, which may be of interest for others, who want to read web articles on the LC:

Browser: Brave
Chrome Extension: EpubPress seems to work very reliably (at least on most of the pages I need).
Synch/sideload: Dropbox installed on the PC; I save the web article with EpubPress in the Dropbox/Rakuten Kobo subfolder

Kobo touting the Pocket app as solution to read web articles, while Pocket has problems with many webpages, is a bad joke.
But what is worse: that the management has not researched workarounds for this problem with the Pocket app and not given the info to their support team, tells me, that it's just another example of a company whose bad management simply does not use their own products and effectively has no clue about their products.

They better hope, that Amazon will not release a color Kindle that works as flawlessly as the current Kindle system works.

[Quoth]

Pocket is the problem, not Kobo. It's sold as an ebook reader.

The Kindle system is pretty useless without Amazon content and abysmal for local management of ebooks.

[Cactus Chef]

Your beef seems to be with Pocket, not so much with Kobo. I suppose you could argue that Kobo backed the wrong horse by choosing to integrate with Pocket, but there's not much competition left at this point for similar services. And it's unlikely that Kobo would offer the service at all if they didn't have a partner to provide the functionality.

One thing you can do to verify whether this is a "Pocket" problem or a "Kobo" problem is to open the article in Pocket on another device (preferably an iOS/Android device). If you notice the same problems on the Pocket app, then it's a Pocket problem. If it's fine in the Pocket app but displays poorly on Kobo, then it's a Kobo problem. The other thing to check would be to make sure that when Pocket displays the app that it's actually displaying it in article mode rather than in webview mode. If for whatever reason Pocket doesn't think the page is "an article" (meaning it couldn't find whatever semantic HTML it's looking for to pull out the bits), then it will fall back to webview mode, where it displays the page in the OS's embedded browser. Those "articles" will not display on Kobo at all.

[mantheron]

Based on this thread, it seems like Pocket on Kobo only supports jpeg files and other types aren't displayed. The thread includes a tool to convert all the images in the Pocket folder on your Kobo to jpegs. I'm not a heavy pocket user, but it did work well on my Libra 2.

[Quoth]

Pocket was poor before Mozilla bought it. They've progressively wrecked Thunderbird GUI and messed up pocket several times.

So I remove it and copy/paste to LO Writer, clean-up and make an ebook. Also lets you combine pages, even from different sites or browsers.

[SilentPartner]

Kobo is a Linux ereader, so open source I guess?

Pocket is owned by Mozilla. Open source company, Linux champion.

Linux is great for many reasons. It's also often bad for other reasons, one of them being the GUI. (It is getting better, I know.) I guess that for Pocket, the important thing was to read the content, the text, not the images. People should complain more to Pocket/Mozilla about that. Maybe Kobo could help?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by SilentPartner

Kobo is a Linux ereader, so open source I guess?

The operating system is open source. Most of Kobo's software is proprietary as are most of the addons such as the Adobe RMSDK renderer.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by SilentPartner

It's also often bad for other reasons, one of them being the GUI. (It is getting better, I know.)

The GUI is strictly not part of Linux and there are dozens, some on Wayland and most on X. There are at least 5 really good ones and it was about 15 years ago that Windows was a better GUI.

[SilentPartner]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The GUI is strictly not part of Linux and there are dozens, some on Wayland and most on X. There are at least 5 really good ones and it was about 15 years ago that Windows was a better GUI.

Look, pal, I've been a Linux user on and off for the past 20 years. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But you won't teach me anything on Linux distributions/desktops environments. We're just having a casual conversation here. Thank you.