this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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KOReader is trivial to install but I would also say it is nowhere near as "required" as it used to be for the majority of readers.
In fact, a few months (year or two?) back when amazon started this bullshit in earnest, the main dev(s) behind Calibre finally picked up Kobos and DRASTICALLY improved support for the devices. Still some wonkiness with usually having to eject and re-connect to actually update metadata but everything "just works".
Yeah, the wonkiness is particularly apparent on .cbz files. I got a color Kobo to read comics, but .cbz files don’t natively support metadata embedding. (It’s basically just a .zip file, so you could embed the data in the file… But the Kobo wouldn’t read it without actually open in the file.) Getting the comics to actually list the author and series has been a big struggle.
Oftentimes, comics will outright disappear from the kobo’s book list in Calibre, meaning you can’t even manage them at all; Pushing the file again doesn’t help because it’s already on the device, but Calibre can’t read the database so it’ll try anyways. The only solution when it happens has been to completely factory reset the kobo. Which is… Not a great solution.
Yeah. CBZ files have no metadata (I think there is actually a semi-standardized way to add it but almost nobody does?) so it won't work well with metadata based systems. From discussions we had back in the day, the cbz/r/7z/tgz/whatever archives were mostly a necessary evil for file sharing. As long as you didn't modify the scans, people could re-compress or whatever their files and still have a good chance of coming up as alternatives in DC++ and the like. And, at the time, PDF readers were basically Adobe Acrobat and not much else.
These days? Nobody really used DC++ anymore and the general etiquette is to keep an un-touched version in your torrent folder if you want to seed. And basically every web browser is a better PDF reader than anything before 2020. So there isn't much value in not just reformatting to a PDF and removing the need for a special cbz reader.
All that said: I haven't followed the changelog, but it might be worth checking if you have the latest Calibre version. Basically all the package managers are months, if not years, out of date and a LOT of work has been put in to making Kobos a first class citizen.