Linux For Poets

It was in the news recently that Firefox has done away with the read later service Pocket. I actually liked Pocket, I thought it was half of a really nice idea. But they didn't have the missing half, for my purposes, which was RSS. I have a goal of a smooth, offline RSS eink reader. Pocket was lovely because it would sync with the Kobo reader. If it had RSS and the ability to save articles, and could export them to Kobo, I would have been obsessed. Maybe someone will implement that one day.

An easy Way to save longer online articles to Epub, the way Pocket does, would be a nice feature. Currently, the best I know is a browser extension like Dot Epub, which exports a web page to an epub file which can then be added to calibre and an ereader.

Offline RSS on Supernote Tablet

Meanwhile, I am able to use the Supernote e-ink tablet with the Feeder app for RSS. It isn't as pleasant a reading experience as the Kindle or Kobo, but it generally works, and is mostly okay offline. That seems to work best for blogs, including Substack blogs.

The News on an E-Reader

I also use the method everyone mentions for downloading RSS to an ebook reader - Calibre. The down side to calibre is that it does not work well with all RSS feeds. For reasons I do not understand, there are many RSS feeds that work nicely in RSS Guard on desktop, or Feeder on Android, that show no content in Calibre.

The best way to read news is definitely RSS on an ebook. I don't like the news on the Feeder app, it's too visually hectic with a million articles you have to clear out if you don't read them. But Calibre makes it into a nice little book, so I can peruse the Economist, or the BBC, etc in a pleasant manner. I find that much calmer and less anxiety provoking than looking at a news web site. The web site is all big headlines and garish pictures. The ebook just gives you the articles, and you can draw your own conclusions. News is crafted to create anxiety, and this format diffuses that tension a bit. I love that. I want to stay relatively informed about world events, but want to maintain my cool while doing so.