There are rumors that the entire Amazon Kindle lineup will be refreshed this year: more memory for AI, plus removable batteries to comply with EU regulation.
Hey—more Kindle hardware is good news. Yet, the reading experience on Kindles has felt stagnant for years, and after they discontinued the Voyage/Oasis line of e-readers, I moved off of their ecosystem entirely and started playing around with other e-reading devices.
It turned out harder than I initially appreciated to rebuild the same ecosystem. The flip side to a seemingly static product line is that it's also quite mature; the biannual hardware refreshes and OS updates have been incremental for years, but the foundation still does its core job of presenting a seamless reading experience. Outside of Kindles, I've been stitching together comparable functionality from independent services, open-source initiatives, and hobbyist projects.
Fortunately, while there are fewer and fewer people reading books, those who keep the habit are a passionate bunch.
So here are the areas where I took Kindles for granted, and their indie alternatives in 2026.
Form Factor Experimentation
The original Kindle Paperwhite perfected the e-reader form factor: black-and-white, 6" across, 300 dpi, touchscreen, light plastic casing with minimal bezel thickness. Subsequent Paperwhite refreshes, along with other major e-readers, converge onto this form factor.
Previously, I've played around with the Kobo Sage, a flagship 8" e-reader with hardware page-turn buttons that felt like the spiritual successor to the Kindle Oasis, and the Boox Palma, the innovator in using the phone form factor as an e-reader. I've even tried to make the reMarkable tablets and a Kindle Scribe into reading devices, but the 10"+ screens are unwieldy and are only useful when rendering college textbooks.
Instead, I've bought into the small, phone-sized form factor. Portability wins for actual usage, and taking an e-reader out of a side pocket feels much less daunting than fishing out a tablet from a backpack. The diminutive screen size translates to fewer sentences/paragraphs per page, but that has the positive effect of less effort to finish a page, and less text to scan when picking up my reading mid-passage. These advantages accumulate to less friction and lower activation energy to start reading.
My current e-reader is the ViWoods AiPaper Reader. Despite the name, I have no use for any of its AI features, and on its stock Android installation I load the minimalist homescreen/launcher app Before Launcher to keep it a single-use device[1].
All the Documents
E-ink Kindles run on a fork of Linux, which keeps its software simple and efficient. Their reader app is functional, though it's felt stuck in maintenance mode for a decade now.
For all other e-readers, the reading experience starts with KOReader.
KOReader is a fast document viewer designed explicitly to work well with e-ink devices; it's compatible with most document formats and handles most things you could throw at it. There are edge cases—large PDFs, oversized embedded images, font size changes that cause layout reflows—that I've seen crash other devices and their native apps, cases that KOReader easily handles. The app also runs on most e-readers, either as an Android app in the Google Play Store, or cleverly sideloaded onto Kindles and Remarkables and Kobos.
Functionally, running KOReader enables a pile of features not found in default reader apps. Hardware volume buttons can be remapped (e.g., to turn pages), swipe gestures can be defined (e.g., to control backlight intensity), and there is a library of plugins that target specific manufacturers and devices for further customization. Meanwhile, for people like me who enjoy adjusting the minutiae of font weights and paragraph spacing and applying the right set of progress bars, the rendered page is infinitely tweakable via extensive options and menus.
Yet, for all the bells and whistles in viewing documents, KOReader is barebones when it comes to managing books on-device. Plugins fill the gap to a degree, but slow e-ink screens and underpowered components make for a clunky experience. E-readers are amazing client devices, but wrangling a digital library is much easier on regular computers and servers.
Centralized Libraries
Of course, this was how ebook libraries have always been managed since the original Kindle. Amazon runs its own backend servers to sync purchased books, and provides another half a dozen ways to import content—all of which are seamless to users. The indie equivalents require a bit more effort.
Calibre is the OG library management app. It was originally written to transfer files to the Sony PRS-500, released back in 2006, and has added compatibility with pretty much every single commercial e-reader throughout these past two decades. It's the open-source Swiss Army Knife for digital libraries: it organizes folders, cleans up messy metadata, and converts between the handful of common ebook formats. Between the main app and its hundreds of plugins, everything that you'd want to do with an ebook is covered.
That said, the app does show its age. The UI is sprawling and messy, with options tacked on through generations of active development. In particular, Calibre was designed as a desktop app, running on top of a local filesystem and database—a quaint setup, in a networked world of APIs and multiple clients and integrated services. For a while, I ran Calibre-Web, a modern web front-end designed to work in conjunction with the Calibre library database, for a nicer interface, but the integration was always finicky, particularly across multiple Docker containers, a last-generation Synology server with a slow CPU, and both apps reading and writing to the same database.
When I finally decided to try something else, I was pleasantly surprised to see the breadth of open-source digital library management systems in active development. There were projects designed for simplicity; apps targeting digital comic books and manga; a few services with heavy social elements; and generalist apps that take the most commonly used functions of Calibre and implement them on top of modern frameworks. Of the latter, I found two good candidates in Grimmory[2] and BookOrbit.
I went with BookOrbit. The interface and functionality echo what I saw with Grimmory, but BO runs significantly faster on common import tasks and day-to-day use. I was also encouraged by the speed of development; they bumped a minor version in the six weeks I was testing Calibre successors, and that release included a dozen new features and twice as many bug fixes[3].
Everything in Sync
Where BookOrbit shines is its API and integrations into the rest of the ebook ecosystem. For fetching and downloading books, the app supports the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), a feed that lists book collections with accompanying metadata and download links. It does an even better job syncing with Kobo devices, by emulating Kobo's sync backend and replacing it with your self-managed library[4].
Once the books are copied to the device, BO offers a native KOReader plugin to keep progress, notes, and annotations synced across all instances. This is a non-trivial task; book formats aren't standardized and metadata is often messy, so systems fuzzy match titles and authors and ISBNs to correlate media across devices and servers. From my own use, it mostly does work and I get to see fine-grained reading stats as I page through my latest sci-fi short-story collection.
I took this one step further, and asked Claude to find a way to integrate my typing practice into BO. I've been using Entertrained to "read" books by typing them out, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter—exercising my fingers on real-world passages as opposed to asdf typing tests.
And dammit, I wanted credit for all that typing. So through some API sniffing and localStorage splunking, I wrote a UserScript that sends immediate progress back to the library for tracking, marking percentage progress with every paragraph typed. The only downside is that this integration tracks me as a very slow reader.
The Social Element
Amazon acquired Goodreads in 2013. It's a loose social network for readers, featuring user reviews and recommendations, plus surveys, polls, and discussions centered around books. Its social data fits perfectly with the Kindle ecosystem, but, since it's the biggest community attached to the biggest bookstore, the platform has not changed much since the 2000s, and its seeming neglect remains a sore point for its users.
As with everything else we've talked about so far, there are alternative services, though most of the ones I found offer free and paid subscriptions. Here, I checked out three generalist sites: The StoryGraph, Fable, and Hardcover. They all track reading stats (which I already have, in finer detail, with BookOrbit), and aid in the discovery of new books via social recommendations and sometimes personalized AI. Their reviews are periodically useful, though quantities are limited compared to Goodreads since Amazon's site has an order of magnitude more users than its competitors.
I'm sticking with Hardcover for the time being. Of the top social reading networks, it has the most nerd cred by offering free and easy GraphQL access for querying user and book data. Those APIs make it possible for the rest of the stack—BookOrbit, KOReader, other reading apps like Readest on my iPad—to pass data back and forth in the background and keep the apps tightly integrated. Admittedly, though, these are external sites and this part of the e-reader stack is most likely to break from incompatibilities and updates.
Latent Complexity
Whew! That's a lot of components to replicate the functionality that Amazon Kindles enjoy out of the box.
Honestly, this is not worth the effort for most people. There are a bunch of moving pieces, and stitching services together still requires some coding and debugging. And there are other areas—audiobooks, for instance—where this entire complex setup still falls short of Kindle's multifaceted ecosystem. For me, though, the breadth of different hardware choices has genuinely enabled new ways to read, and it's been a ton of fun to tinker with these open-source alternatives. Now, it'd just feel claustrophobic to go back to the closed reading garden.
I'm currently reading the popular Atomic Habits, and I'm employing its idea of associating the ViWoods Reader solely with reading. ↩︎
Grimmory is a community-supported fork of another project called BookLore, which underwent its own drama a few months ago when its sole developer unilaterally decided to end the project, after some controversies around AI coding and plans for monetization. ↩︎
Normally I'd value stability over activity when selecting a core service, but with everything self-hosted and the code open source, I'm finding that it's very easy to point Claude or ChatGPT at the instance and probe it to debug issues. All the code is straightforward, the databases are easily backed up and modified, and Claude has helped write a handful of migration scripts already to tackle edge cases. ↩︎
To be fair, Calibre-Web also implemented this feature, which was how I found out about the app when I had my Kobo Sage. It did have a tendency to time out with more than 50–60 books, though, hence the finicky experience. ↩︎
