E-readers

What you get

Standard Reader publishes an OPDS catalog — the same thing a library or a bookstore hands an e-reading app. Point an app at it once and your shelves appear on the device: Unread, Saved for later, Subscriptions, each of your lists, and every publication you follow. Open any of them and each article has a download button.

The files are built when you ask for them, from the same article bodies the reader shows — images pulled in, footnotes as real endnotes, a link back to the original at the end of every piece. Nothing is trimmed to an excerpt. A whole publication, a list or a collection can also come down as one book, with a table of contents.

Comics come down as CBZ as well, so comic apps get their page turns and their scrubber instead of a reflowable book that fights them.

Setting it up

1. 1
   Copy your catalog URL. It is in Settings under E-readers. It is yours — it carries your subscriptions and your saved articles.
2. 2
   Add it to your reading app. In KOReader that is Search → OPDS catalog → +. Foliate, Marvin, Aldiko, Thorium, Panels and Chunky all have a similar “add catalog” screen. Paste the URL and leave the username and password blank.
3. 3
   Browse and download. Your shelves are the top level. Tap an article to pull the EPUB onto the device.

Sending one article

You do not need a catalog for a single piece. Every article's share menu has Download EPUB — and Download CBZ on a comic. A publication's … menu has Send to e-reader…, which offers its recent articles as one book and shows the catalog URL for that publication on its own.

Keeping your place

KOReader can sync your reading position through Standard Reader, so picking up a book on a second device puts you where you stopped. Settings → E-readers has the three values it wants: the sync server URL, your username, and a sync key.

1. 1
   In KOReader, open Tools → Progress sync and choose Custom sync server.
2. 2
   Paste the sync server URL, then log in with your handle and the sync key. There is no separate account to register.
3. 3
   Turn on Sync every N pages if you want it to happen without asking.

Your position also flows back here: read half of something on the Kobo and the article shows as half-read in the app, and in Continue reading. That direction is one-way. A position on a device is a place in that device's rendering of the file, and there is no honest way to turn a percentage back into one, so the app never sends a position out to a device that did not record it.

What will not be there

A few articles on the network are really link posts — a headline and a URL, bridged in from somewhere else, with no body to package. Those are left out of the catalog rather than offered as a file that would open to nothing. You will still find them in the app, where they link out to the site that has the writing.

Downloading does not mark anything read, and reading on a device does not remove it from your unread shelf until KOReader syncs a position back. Polls, signup forms and other live embeds become links — a book cannot run them.