This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,737 for Tuesday, the 29th of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Review of Cobo Librage 20 Reader.
It is hosted by Rowan, and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Rowan Talks about his new Cobo Librage 20 Reader.
Hi, this is Rowan, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I'm going to be talking about my Cobo Cobo Cobo.
This was a Christmas gift, and this episode started probably last January, and I just forgot
around to finish it, but since we were down low for shows, I thought, hey, this might
be easy enough to get recorded and out the door, so here we go.
I had been wanting an e-reader for a while, I just don't like reading books on my phone.
It's just too small, and the screen always goes dark on you to wait too quick, and it's
just annoying, unless I like keep my finger on it and keep calling things.
So I've been looking at either a tablet or an e-reader or something, but I really like
the e-reader just because I wanted a more or less single application kind of device, and
I also really wanted to try out an e-ink display, and so I was looking around, and the
Cobo, I liked one, I liked an e-ink, the size, seemed like a good company, particularly
because they are running Linux on it, and I thought, you know, maybe I'd also be able
to run my own distribution on it at some point.
I haven't really looked into that to see how easy or possible that is, but that was one
of the reasons for wanting this, so I mentioned what I wanted to my girlfriend, and being
the one of the curl for she is, it was under the Christmas tree last year, so the Cobo
Leaper H2O, it has a free-scale iMX6SL1GHz processor in it, comes with 512 megabytes, RAM, and
an A-K-Gabyte hard drive, which is very nice, I'm not even close to having to fill that
up, and it has a 7-inch HD300PP i-e-ink touchscreen that has a 680 by 1264 pixel
resolution, it's dimensions, it's 6.3 inches high by 5.7 inches by 0.3 inches deep, and
it weighs about 6.8 ounces, or for the rest of the world, that is 159 millimeters high
by 144 millimeters, wide by 7.6 millimeters deep, and 192 grams, not too heavy, it's nicely
in my hand, you know, don't get tired, holding and reading for a while, I do have a cover
on it, which now, which adds a little bit of weight, but it's nice, the this particular
model has two buttons on the one side, it's sort of a page forward, page back on button,
so when you're holding it in your hand, you can easily with your thumb, page forward
or page back with the buttons, as mentioned it has a touch screen, so you can just flip
your thumb, like you're flipping a page forward and back, then the touch screen also
then lets you touching at the top gives you access to, like, getting to your back out
of the book, to your list of books or to the settings, like the brightness or the font size
and things, and if you touch down at the bottom, it will give you access to the current
index or table contents for the book, all in all, it's pretty nice, they does rotate,
so if you, you know, you can rotate horizontally, vertically, flip it all the way around,
so if you're left handed or you just want to hold it, if you're not left handed, but
you still like holding the book that way, you can, you know, easily read the book and
use the buttons to, and you're left with your left hand, back and forth on the pages,
so that's very nice, sometimes you have to be a little careful, it will, like if you start
letting it, you're laying on your side or something, and it'll start flipping and wanting
to rotate on you, and while the screen refresh is okay, it can be a little slow at times,
you know, so once it starts turning and you're turning the thing this way and that trying
to get it to right back to the right way, here's just that, like, make sure you pause and
let it sort of catch up sometime, and you'll just see the screen sort of rotating around,
but other than that, it's pretty responsive, you have to say, it handles a number of different
formats, so like, e-pub, a couple different e-pub, PDF, it handles the CZR, some of the archives
they use for, like, comics and stuff like that online, I have to say, a PDF that is basically
like a scanned images of the pages, can be very painful, it just takes it a while to render
a page, and then if you have to, like, zoom in or, you know, because it's, like, double
column pages and the text is small, then you try to zoom in on the one column, it could
be a little painful to read, those kind of PDFs, trying to remember, I've really read that
many, like, PDFs that are more text-based, I don't remember off the top of my head,
I've mostly been reading through e-pub's, the one thing with this, it does, to get back
to its things, it does have a good battery life, it has a 1,200 milliamp hour battery,
I think, now I haven't used it quite as much as I was hoping to, but I think I've had it
almost a year now and I've maybe charged it four or five times, so it does have a really
good battery life, you know, if it's just sitting there, it will go into a deep sleep mode,
you can turn it off, there's a power button on the back of the device, it has, for connectivity,
you have Wi-Fi, which is 802, 11, B-G-N, and then it also has a micro USB for either data
and for powering, recharging the batteries, you can, if you plug it in, just, like, it will show up
as like an extra hard drive and you can just copy your books manually, which are directly
on to the e-reader and then when you re, you know, take it off the USB connection and it boots
back into the OS, it will automatically, like, find the book added to the library for you.
I found, well, I knew about, but I've started using Calibre or Calibre, the e-book management,
it's very nice, I like it, it's great for, like, particularly, like adding metadata and stuff like that
to the books, open source, it also has a number of different, it has plug-ins and there's a number
of different plug-ins for various things, but the one thing I did found find is Kobo apparently has
their own, they call a K-E-Pubb, which is their own, you know, special e-pub format that I guess helps
optimize for their devices, make them run a little faster and I think it also helps with pictures
for, like, re-scaling and that's one thing I found with some e-pubbs is the regular e-pubbs
is, like, an image might be too big and you won't scale it to the page, you just
run up the scroll around the page to see the whole image and with the K-Pubb stuff, I haven't
run into that, I mean, you can zoom in, but it generally will be resized to the right size of
your e-reader and so there's a plug-in third-party plug-in for Calibre that you can, when you push
a book from Calibre to your device, it will automatically convert it to a K-E-Pubb and that's been
working great, I really like that and they do blow faster and the pages turn faster, I'm not sure
what the different is, I know they add some extra sections and stuff, so maybe it's just makes
it easier if the e-reader to figure out, like, the layout and things, so let's see, so I have really
been enjoying it, like I said, I can't feel a little slow at times, but, you know, especially with the
PDF stuff, images, overall, it's pretty snappy, I don't use the Wi-Fi to, like, connect any book
stores, so I haven't actually used any of that, those features, I think Cobu has their own and I
think it connected some others, I've generally just been buying e-pubbs online and downloading them
and then moving them over, trying to think what else, I guess that pretty much covered it,
like I said, if you're looking for an e-reader, I really recommend this one, it was $169, so
not super cheap, but not super expensive either and it is really nice, it is also, you know,
it has the H2O, it makes it, it's waterproof to a certain degree and the e-ink, I really love it,
it's pretty amazing, I mean, you take it outside and bright light, I took it to the beach,
I was sitting on the beach at high, you know, middle of the afternoon, no problem reading,
it comes with a backlight that will automatically sort of adjust, depending on the light level in your room,
that works really nice, you can, you know, manually modify that, the brightness if you want,
so I found that the e-ink really, like it does meet all those things, it talks about it
is like electronic paper, it's pretty neat, I'm really glad I went with that, it is black and white,
I know there's some of the newer versions of there, some e-ink displays with color,
but I'm not sure there's having for any e-readers and they, you know, it's pricey still,
you're not going to find something probably under three or four hundred dollars that would have a
color e-ink display, have a bunch of links to the various websites for the Koboo and
information about it and about Klee Bryant stuff and E-pa, and those are in the show notes and with that,
I will say, please pick up a microphone or record something, you find interesting,
I know Hacker Public Radio will find it interesting also, and thank you for listening.
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