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hpr1942 :: Kobo Touch N-905 E-Reader

Klaatu reviews the Kobo Touch e-reader

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Hosted by Klaatu on Tuesday 2016-01-12 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: book,ebook,kobo.

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. | Comments (2)

Klaatu reviews the Kobo Touch N-905 e-reader.

Too Long; Didn't Listen: it's a positive review and the device mostly works well with Linux. There are some exceptions, such as the need to hack around the registration process; luckily, that's easy:

https://gedakc.users.sourceforge.net/display-doc.php?name=kobo-desktop-ereader-setup

That being "the ugly", here are the Good and the Bad:

Good:

  • works with Linux, after one initial hack
  • uses file manager or calibre
  • great format support (EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR)
  • e-ink
  • great battery life (lasts a month on one charge, with every evening and weekend filled with reading)
  • a little more interactive and configurable than expected
  • one device, one app, one purpose
  • small, lightweight, convenient
  • cheap ($60 USD)
  • expansion up to 32gb

Negative

  • requires registration (or a rego hack)
  • rearranges your books by meta data; no override to respect your dirs
  • touch screen
  • slow (though not annoyingly slow)
  • long time to index books
  • hard to keep track of books you are currently reading
  • sleep/off screen should be more configurable

Show Transcript

Automatically generated using whisper

whisper --model tiny --language en hpr1942.wav

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Comment #1 posted on 2016-01-14T03:09:11Z by Jon Kulp

KOReader uses normal directories

Enjoying the episode! I've wanted to get a Kobo for a while but somehow ended up with a few Kindles instead.

Anyway you might check out the KOReader (Kindle / Kobo Open Reader). I've been using it on my jailbroken Kindle to read epubs. It doesn't pay attention to Metadata at all, it just has a file browser like it appears you prefer. It actually took me a while to get used to this because I'm more used to being able to sort and search by Metadata. Look for my show on the KOReader next week...

Comment #2 posted on 2016-01-20T17:49:11Z by Klaatu

KOReader

Thanks for letting me know about KOReader. I had not heard of it. My go-to reader on other devices has been either fbreader or epubreader in Firefox. Both have the concept of a "library" which I think is stupid (personally) but they're not bad.

I'll check KOReader out sometime, though. Sounds nice.

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