Granted, it's less of having eliminated a step and more like having shifted the workflow, now having to load into KOReader as the new "default" state if you ever have to reboot the device.

I can put on a custom wallpaper. That you cannot do this without jailbreaking is largely also an ideological/philosophical issue, IMO. And, it's a fun icebreaker if another Kindle user in public walks by and sees a whacky wallpaper. Then, I can share my enthusiasm with hacking or tinkering with computers in general and sometimes that will carry into another line of conversation if everyone's in a conversing mood (of course, without pontificating or breaking out into a lecture about the evils of bigcorp, DRM, etc... I know some people are really bad about that).

Not everyone wants to dump time into tinkering with their Kindle like that, I get it. And honestly, mine collects dust these days, as I find it more difficult to ramp up reading momentum with it, whereas I can more easily (and inadvertently) binge-read if I grab the smartphone thinking I'm just going to squeeze in a few paragraphs, even if the experience is worse.

If only there was a national (or global) digital library of ebooks.

There's a funny thing going on with maps in books.

Fantasy novels frequently include maps, and some people are pretty vocal about how much they appreciate those maps. But the maps are never relevant to the story at all; you'd lose absolutely nothing by leaving them out of the book.

History books also tend to include maps. The maps are much less detailed, and it's rare for people to make appreciative comments. But the maps are in there, even though the authors appear not to really care for them, because they're necessary to understanding most of what's going on. As far as relevance to the text is concerned, history books have a much more severe undersupply of maps than fantasy novels have an oversupply, and the fantasy oversupply is considerable.

And yet, somehow, all of the popular demand is for fantasy novels to have more maps and for history books to have fewer.

It seemed promising when it launched, but I switched to Goodreads (before the Amazon purchase) and haven't been able to find the time to look for an alternative since.

There is one based on ActivityPub called BookWyrm.

https://joinbookwyrm.com/

https://openlibrary.org/

Whenever someone on HN complains about Kindles, someone else recommends Kobo. But I never see anyone recommending the Nook.

I haven't used a Nook in close to a decade, but when I did, it was very hackable. I even used a $5 one from Goodwill as an e-ink photo frame. Are the modern Nooks as bad as Kindles now?

There are two main tag values for Kindle books: EBOK and PDOC.

EBOK is intended for store content. (ebooks) PDOC is intended for user content. (personal documents)

In the past, only EBOK got cover thumbnails. So Calibre tagged books as ebok to get cover thumbnails.

This changed in a relatively recent firmware update for 7th gen and later Kindles, so now PDOC tagged books get cover thumbnails too. (Sept 2022)

I assume that Amazon just looks at the EBOK tag, assumes its an expired loan or something, and deletes it. Since that thread says only EBOKs get deleted. Calibre still tags as EBOK by default. A possible solution is to tag as PDOC instead. That thread mentions the problem started in 7/2021

That phenomena isn't a coincidence, a large percentage of readers in this genre will have KU because almost the entire genre they love is on there. To sign up for KU requires authors to agree to an exclusive publishing agreement, meaning they can't publish their ebooks on other platforms. This means that the majority of that genre will never migrate to other platforms.