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Show HN: eInk optimized manga with Kindle Comic Converter (+Kobo/ReMarkable)

by seam_carver on 5/7/25, 3:26 PM with 49 comments

• by sabslikesobs on 5/7/25, 6:21 PM

  Super cool. Thanks for maintaining this.

  I read manga extensively on my Kobo Forma with koreader. I wrote a script with imagemagick to scale, trim, adjust contrast, map to 16 colors, dither, and repack, all without me having to interact with it... something I'm hoping to open-source sometime, although it's very specific to my use case.

• by shiandow on 5/7/25, 4:33 PM

  Are there any plans to integrate this with calibre? Or is it integrated already?

  The combination would be quite powerful IMHO.

• by goosedragons on 5/7/25, 9:51 PM

  Is it weird that I kind of want ePub to ePub support? I have many not Kobo compatible comics/manga from places like Humble Bundle that I need to fix. Ideally I'd like to keep metadata + reading direction and perhaps the table of contents. I suppose I could script something that unzips 'em and then processes them....

• by alec_irl on 5/8/25, 2:40 PM

  I would highly recommend that anyone interested in reading manga on an e-reader check out the boox page: https://shop.boox.com/products/page

  I have had this for a year and change and use it interchangeably for books and manga. The 7 inch display is sharp and I use CDisplayex to read manga in horizontal mode with both pages displayed to preserve spreads and other multi page layouts. It works like a dream and I've ready literally hundreds of volumes of manga this way. It also natively support FTP and runs Android, so you don't need to do anything special beyond dropping the files on your device.

• by joshdavham on 5/7/25, 5:37 PM

  Hey thanks for posting this! I'll defintitely check it out.

  Also, as a somewhat unrelated question: how would you recommend someone go about learning pyqt? I've looked into it briefly and am not really sure what the recommended resources are for this framework.

• by tecleandor on 5/7/25, 6:11 PM

  Looks nice! I'm gonna test it!

  Feature idea (that I think it doesn't have): a gamma/palette sampler. Takes one page of the source, and generates an output with multiple pages, all for the same source page, but each one using a different gamma and/or palette option. Useful when the source is "difficult" (weird shading, colors...) or it's an unknown device, to find the best configuration.

• by seam_carver on 5/8/25, 2:09 PM

  Also currently looking for a job, let me know if you have a role that fits me! I've done lots of work related to millions of dollars of AWS cost optimization and of course open source Python work.

  https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexu2/

• by Theofrastus on 5/8/25, 8:20 AM

  Slightly related: I'm currently reading manga on a normal Android tablet using Mihon. I'd love to read on an eInk display, but I'd rather manage my library on device instead of having to use a pc and transferring chapters manually.

  Does anyone have experience with Anrdoid capable eInk tablets? Are there any good, affordable ones?

• by ksynwa on 5/7/25, 5:52 PM

  Normally I just use Koreader on my Kobo. It crops out the margin automatically which is necessary for the small screen. Then I play with the contrast to make the blacks look like they would on paper. Hate asking people to sell their hard work to me but is there something else that this tool does to make the experience even better?

• by thenthenthen on 5/8/25, 7:20 AM

  Tangent, this person made a ‘magic wand’ manga to eink translator microscope contraption: https://friend.camp/@mewo2/114451110301432410

• by romaaeterna on 5/8/25, 1:31 AM

  I have found that the trick to getting optimized kindle display with imagemagick tools is to process pages as individual images, and then use a tool like img2pdf to quickly stitch them together into a pdf file as a simple archive.

• by looperhacks on 5/7/25, 4:11 PM

  This sounds great!

  I never got to reading manga on my Paperwhite 4(?) because the scaling made the text terrible to read (that was with KOReader a few years ago). Does this tool handle this better?

• by npteljes on 5/7/25, 5:36 PM

  Curious project! I'd love to check out the samples, but the links don't seem to be working in the README.

• by sepositus on 5/7/25, 5:49 PM

  Has anyone tried this on a Remarkable? It always seemed like the perfect size for reading comic books/magna.

• by roskelld on 5/7/25, 7:24 PM

  Bookmarking this for when I have some free time. It might get me back to finishing my read through of Berserk.

• by Mr_Eri_Atlov on 5/7/25, 5:56 PM

  This looks incredibly well done. Thank you for this tool!

• by w00ds on 5/7/25, 8:38 PM

  Exactly what I've been looking for, amazing work!

• by janetmissed on 5/7/25, 6:08 PM

  ty for maintaining kcc, I’ve used it heavily for close to a decade. I definitely noticed the performance boost on my macbook :)

• by i_v on 5/7/25, 7:32 PM

  What’s the best screen size for reading manga on an eInk display? I’ve always had issues with the entry level Kindles cutting things off or requiring scrolling to get the bottom section of a page. It’s been a long time since I tried this but I’ve always wanted to get my collection on a Kindle or other reader!

• by ronakjain90 on 5/7/25, 11:03 PM

  At TRMNL we have published a guide on how to jailbreak your Kindle[1], we also have a lot of community driven recipe[2] which are comics[3]

  Disclosure: I work at TRMNL

  [1]- https://usetrmnl.com/guides/turn-your-amazon-kindle-into-a-t...

  [2]- https://usetrmnl.com/recipes

  [3]- https://usetrmnl.com/recipes/27184