Episode: 1942
Title: HPR1942: Kobo Touch N-905 E-Reader
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1942/hpr1942.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:34:44

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This is HPR Episode 1942 entitled Cobota 1095 E-reader.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 43 minutes long, the summary is Klaatu Reviews the
Cobota chee reader.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting, that's Honest and Fair, at AnanasThost.com.
You're listening to Hacker Public Radio, my name is Klaatu and today I'm going to do something
that I don't normally do, I would say, and that is a product review.
I don't really love doing product reviews because it seems like I'm pushing the product
or something.
In this case, I'm not really pushing the product, but I do feel like informing you, my dear
listener, about the product might actually be helpful in case you're on the verge of
purchasing an item of this type.
I have found that items of this type have been really difficult to sort out and figure
out exactly what's good and what's bad about them, so this will hopefully be informative.
I certainly wouldn't hear, I wouldn't mind hearing from other listeners about their e-reader
devices because that is the topic that I am tackling.
This e-reader that I just got is a Kobo from the small print on the bottom of the unit.
It says that it's the N905, the unit, the box that it came in, simply read KoboTouch.
So the Kobo, that's KOBO, this KoboTouch device is an E-ink device and its sole purpose
is to display e-books, electronic books, and so I'm going to give you the positive and
negative points of what it does when it's attempting to meet that purpose and hopefully
that will help you in deciding whether it's a device that you would want to spend your
money on or not.
So first of all, a little bit of background, I should say that I have been reading e-books
for a lot longer than I really should have been.
I mean, whenever Gutenberg.org first started, I think, like back in 2005 or 2006 or
four or something, that's practically when I started reading e-books.
I just thought it was a brilliant idea to be able to have all these books at your back
and call without having to physically weigh you down with them and that was very important
to me at the time because I was living out of maybe four backpacks with one being a backpack
of books.
So it was quite nice for me to be able to have e-books so that I could have reference
books and fiction books on a computer and I transitioned pretty quickly to portable devices
as well because I would find myself on a bus or subway and want to read a book and so
I would use the N800 to display an e-book.
Now the problem with the solution was that any kind of handheld device that I could get
my hands on, typically where I would not say they were great for battery usage.
So you'd be on a bus for 45 minutes and you'd be reading and then by the time you reach
your destination, your handheld device has half the battery life available to it because
you had the audacity to read a book.
That doesn't really work all that well for me.
So I started thinking that I should get a dedicated device for this purpose quite some
time ago.
I was just very, very hesitant to dive into that market because I felt like, well first
of all, it did take a little bit of justification on my part because I mean, I have a computer,
I have a laptop, I have a desktop, I have a mobile device.
All of these things can display e-books.
So it seems like getting yet another device just to display e-books and nothing else.
That seemed a little bit superfluous or maybe extravagant, but what tipped the scales
for me was that I travel now to the States sometimes and that journey is literally at least
a day, like a full 24 hours, not all on the plane, necessarily it might be, so it's definitely
over 24 hours.
I think it's something it's insane.
After all the airport waiting in the actual flights, like the 17 hour flight from Australia
to America and then across America, usually depending on where I'm headed and all that other
stuff, it usually gets up to 30 or 40 hours of travel time.
So I figured it was just stupid not to have something that I could read reliably on
the plane and it also gets a little bit, you know, you've got your laptop out but then
they turn the seatbelt sign on or whatever they do when they're taking off and landing
and you have to put everything away, but with an e-reader you can just keep reading, they
don't make you put that away.
So I thought that would be a really good investment and so I started looking for what I should
get and I finally, and I did some research online looking for, you know, a plug-and-play
Linux compatible e-reader and that was one of my requirements that it was Linux-friendly
and that it was very, very friendly to free formats, open source formats like e-book formats.
So the Kobo was the one that I kind of ended up settling on and so far I will say up
front that I'm happy with it, I'm quite happy with it and that's one of the reasons that
I decided that a product review for it would be okay because it's not like I'm giving
free publicity to a device that I really hate, it is something that overall I'm happy
with.
So I'm going to start out with the negatives because I don't want to leave you thinking
that I didn't like it if I close with the negatives, so I'm going to start with the negatives
and then I'm going to segue into the pluses, the good things and obviously none of these
will be equal in weight, the negatives and the positives and a lot of them are opinionated
so you'll have to filter out whether what I call a negative is actually a negative for
you.
Okay, let's get started.
So the first negative thing is that I did a lot of research, well it's related to me
doing a lot of research on the device itself, on this device on the Kobo line and I had
read that they were very friendly to Linux, like you plug them in and they work and it's
not really an issue, there's no, you know it's plug and play basically, I don't know where
I read this, I wish I'd kept the links or something but when I got the device, took it
out of the box, the opposite was true, it is not friendly to Linux, I mean it's not
hostile to Linux but it's not friendly because you open the thing and you plug it in and
it appears that it's going to work and you might even drag books over onto it because
it pops right up into the file manager as an external storage device, that's great,
that was very promising but you turn the thing on to use it as an e-reader and it tells
you that in order to actually use the super device, you have to register with the company,
that's not cool with me, there's no way that that's acceptable, I purchased this device
for 60 bucks, I bought it from you, I understand I'm buying a license and all that other stuff
but I buy the device because I expect to be able to read e-books on it and now Kobo tells
me that I need to register my existence and ownership with them as if though it's any
of their business, although if they're listening to this episode, they have already found out.
But anyway, I thought that was really stupid and so I go to their site thinking, well maybe
I can register and I'll just use a fake name and fake email address and just to get past
this stupid screen, so it turns out that not only do they want you to register yourself,
they want you to download an application to access your device, now that seemed really
stupid to me because it obviously doesn't need an application because it just came up
as external storage, so I was completely flabbergasted and disappointed, luckily it
didn't take long to find online on sourceforge.net, some brilliant, very kind user, Jedak, I think,
that's pronounced that way, I'll put the link in the show notes, absolutely.
So this user just posted this how-to on how to get around the registration thing.
The old way was to use wine and to download the application from Kobo and to launch it
within wine, and I was open to that, I was actually willing to do that, but it turns
out that that's been deprecated, Kobo screwed something up and now wine doesn't, it won't
work.
But it turns out that it's actually even easier now.
All you have to do is use SQL light and if you don't have the knowledge to do that,
you can use SQL browser, which is the way that he or this user demonstrates on the website,
with a web post that is up on sourceforge.
And all you do is you start up SQL browser, you point it to this little hidden SQL file
in the Kobo's little home folder or whatever.
You open that up and you add values for the user name, the user address, the user whatever,
the user whatever, and I just put in Foo, Foo, Foo, and Foo because that's what the site
told me to do.
Obviously, it doesn't actually have to be the string Foo, I mean, it could be anything,
but I just did it because I wasn't feeling very creative because I was angry.
So Foo, Foo, Foo, Foo save that back to the file, eject to the Kobo from your computer
or unmount it and start it back up and it just continues, it just proceeds as is.
It was brilliantly simple and basically not a problem, like it was that simple and
I would say that essentially that rendered the problem as not being a problem.
That is, of course, assuming that you, you know, if you're buying this for a, as a Christmas
gift for someone, for instance, then obviously you would have to intercept it.
I mean, if they're Linux user, you'd have to end it, but they're not very savvy, you
would need to sort of intercept it and kind of do this hack for them and, you know, it's
just stupid.
Really annoying and you'd probably want to put in their real information, I guess, because
in addition to the registration hack, there's this little online store that Kobo has and
in order for you to access that, I'm assuming, for DRM stuff, you're going to probably need
actual information in those registration fields.
So that's just, I don't know, I haven't played around with that because I don't intend
to ever buy anything from the Kobo store because now I'm angry at them and I won't give
them any more money.
But if it's just you and you're looking for an e-reader and you can do it a quick little
SQL light hack, then this is a no-brainer, it's not a problem.
It took me maybe two minutes and 30 seconds of that was installing SQL browser and you
don't even have to do that if you know enough about SQL light.
Okay, so that's one negative thing.
Next negative thing is that I would say the, like, in order of, I guess, annoyances, absolutely
the next thing on my list would be the fact that this e-reader is going to index all of
your e-books, which that's not the negative part.
But in so doing, it parses all the metadata and it reorganizes all of your books by metadata.
This is a habit that obviously started with those portable media players and I'm suspecting
I don't know, but I'm suspecting it started with the big, famous one that came out a long
time ago and kind of changed the entire music industry for a couple of years until phones
came along and people stopped caring about portable music players.
But it's just really annoying.
I mean, like I told you at the beginning of this episode, I've been reading e-books for
years and I have got them all organized exactly as I want.
Like I have directory structures that matter to me.
And so when I drag it over onto an e-reader, which ostensibly is a portable screen, right?
I mean, that's all I want is something to access a file on its file system and then show
me that file on its screen.
That is the extent of what I need from this device.
And instead, it looks at all my files and all my directories throws the entire directory
structure away and or functionally throws it away and displays everything to me by metadata.
And you might think, well, that's not that big of a deal, but it is a big deal because
you see, if you buy books from three publishers and you play exactly by everyone's sort of
established setup, then it's not a big deal because then you've got all of your Heinle
books together.
You've got all your Philip K. Dick books together.
You've got all your Vonnegut books together.
You've got all your tech books together.
Well, no, you don't.
They're scattered everywhere.
But if you don't do that and you're purchasing indie books or you're downloading indie
books, if they weren't, if they're free, if there's your dollars and you're grabbing
tech books from various sites, I mean, like maybe you don't want those organized by
the metadata because maybe all that metadata isn't even correct.
Like not every indie author who manages to produce an EPUB also realizes that in order
to for an EBE reader to parse their book correctly, they need to put in a bunch of metadata.
I mean, I think a lot of people assume that if they name the file, migrate book by
clatu.epub, then that's what you're going to see on your EBE reader.
And maybe that is what you see after, you know, if there's no metadata, but that's kind
of my point.
Like, I don't want to have to look so hard for the book that I know that I put in the
folder called tech books, you know, that's where it should be.
So the fact that it reorganizes all of my stuff is, well, in general, I would say it was
a deal breaker, so that I already purchased it.
And it's just, it's annoying to me that there's no alternative, you know, like on media
players, you got rock box, which can, which will respect your directory structure by default.
But there's not really a choice in this matter yet, at least.
So hopefully, at some point, we'll have a rock box for EBE readers, and I'll be able
to correct this error.
Okay, so next up is, you know, and if the device is going to do that, they should at least
have the decency to give you access to kind of an editor so that you can make your own
metadata, you know, like that would be really, really nice.
Because the last thing you want to do is load up your EBE reader and get on a plane that
you're going to be on for 17 hours and then discover that your entire directory structure,
surprise, surprise, has been thrown out.
And now you get to sort through all of the books.
There is a search function, so there's that.
Anyway, next, next, next point that I had, I guess, is that it, well, okay, so personal,
this is a personal annoyance.
Again, not something that I really had a choice about, and to be fair, it's something
that they did warn me about on the title of the device.
It's a Kobo in 905 touch, and yes, of course, the entire interaction of this device, your
interaction with it is a touch screen.
Touch screens for me are the most, like, it's just one of the stupidest inventions that
I believe we've ever come up with as a technological society.
I understand that sometimes they are useful, but I really don't think that they're as
useful as people seem to want to believe right now.
I'm looking at this screen all the time.
It's going to get dirty anyway.
Is it really going to help that I'm touching it all the time and that I have to touch
it to turn pages and that I have to touch it to zoom and that I have to touch it to
click through menus?
I mean, it's just, it's so annoying.
I know you're probably not entirely with me on that, but you might be.
If you are, then I agree with you, as you agree with me, but there's just, in my mind,
there's no excuse to make, especially such a simple device touch screen.
They could have given me two buttons on the front, well, maybe three buttons, three buttons
on the front or the side or something, and it would be really nice if there was a button
on the side where your thumb or your finger would fall so that you can click through, scroll
through as you just hold it, rather than constantly touching the screen to scroll and everything
else like that.
It's just, to me, that's a really stupid interface.
I cannot wait for us as a society to get over this touchscreen craze.
It's a horrible idea.
It makes no sense.
I'm really not enjoying that, but again, there really was just, as far as I can recall,
no alternative.
I mean, it was just, yeah, you just, that's what's on the market right now.
Okay.
So next up is, I guess, that, and now I'm, at this point, I'm just kind of, I'm faking
it.
I'm really reaching at this point.
This is, these are negative points that I'm just, I'll mention because more like they're
just kind of, well, this is something you should know.
So first of all, it's surprisingly slow.
Now that, don't, don't misunderstand me.
I'm not saying it's annoyingly slow.
I'm saying it's surprisingly slow.
Now, I use a 10 year old laptop as my main portable machine.
So me and slow, we're on pretty good terms.
I mean, I use a pie for a web server.
It's, yeah, slow is okay by me.
It's just, it's kind of funny to get like a device brand new off of the shelf or virtual
shelf, maybe, and turn it on and have to wait so long for it to start up.
And then when you touch a button on the stupid touch screen, like you touch it, and then
you think, oh, I guess that didn't take.
Oh, yes it did.
There's a menu.
Like there's, there is that amount of time between your, your action and the response.
So I'm saying it's surprisingly slow because it isn't fast, which I think is what one would
expect.
And I'm mentioning it, I mean, it's basically, it's basically just the rhythm of the device
now.
But when I first opened it, when I first got it, there were several times where I would
do something and I would think, oh, it crashed.
And then it would happen.
And I would think, oh, it didn't crash.
It was just really slow.
There were several times that that happened.
Now to be fair, I was also getting, I didn't realize what it was doing in the background
and at that point initially I was, I just loaded a bunch of books on it.
And so I thought, okay, I've dragged the books over to the device.
Now I'll turn it on and I should see the books on the device, right?
Well normally yes, but I had just dragged like, you know, 100 books and I didn't realize
in the background, it was indexing all those books.
So the books were there.
They were being recognized by the thing, but they weren't showing up because they hadn't
been indexed and sort of parsed and processed yet.
So that's something to be aware of and that's actually, I guess, a separate, it's a slightly
separate point is that it does take a long time to index books.
So if you're dumping your entire library onto this thing, and my entire library just
to give you an idea was about, let me see if I do a find on ePubs, 374 and then a find
on PDFs, 251 too many.
So that's about, that's like 500, 600 and some odd books.
So I dumped all those onto the device and then couldn't understand why it wasn't like
why they weren't showing up and I thought that there was something wrong with the little
micro SD card on the side.
So yeah, don't be too confused by the length of time that it takes to index things if you're
throwing a bunch of stuff at it.
That is to be expected.
It indexes everything, it's got a pretty good little search function on here.
So it's a pro and a con, all sort of wrapped in one, just be aware of it.
But in terms of the speed, I mean the thing is slow, but it's an ink screen.
So like response time, the refresh rate isn't exactly the greatest.
Is that a problem?
No, but it is something to be aware of just so that you don't panic when it's being
slow.
That's actually normal and it's okay.
Next, slightly negative point and once again, I'm really reaching here is that there is
a list of rotating books on the home screen.
So when you boot the thing up, you go to your little home screen and it shows you the
five most, well ostensibly the five most recent books.
But what that ends up being is it's kind of like the five most active books or the five
most recent active books and active is not defined by whether or not you'd sat down
and read the book or whether you would just drag it over.
So like for the longest time, and I still fall into this because it's so prominently
displayed, like this cluster of books up at the top on your screen, I was using that as
kind of like my most, you know, those were the books that I was using and then I would
add new books to the device and suddenly all the books that I'd been in the middle of
reading were gone and all the books that I had just put on the device were in my five
most recent books.
And that was really annoying because that's not what I wanted.
I wanted a shortcut, you know, to what I have been reading, which doesn't seem really
all that much to ask, honestly.
So I guess what you're really supposed to do in this case is use maybe your short list,
which is a, well, a short list of books that, like they're your favorites, I guess, essentially.
And I honestly haven't really quite gotten what they want me to do yet in order to kind
of sort those from, you know, to sort those for myself.
Like I don't know, I still don't understand how the short list is arranged because if
I go to my short list and I look at it, it lists a certain list, like, you know, the
first page lists the five books alphabetically.
But then if I go back to my home screen, it's a different set of books on the bottom row.
So I honestly don't know how they expect you to kind of like have quick access to the
books that you, that you are currently reading.
I guess you just have to make your short list short, like you get five books to mark as
your sort of quick access books and that's all you get.
So that's a little, I feel like that's clunky.
So you should be aware of that.
The short list is not really like a book of stuff that, oh, I should, I should read that
next necessarily or where I don't want to lose track of that book.
It's kind of like, well, you would better make it the list of books that you are currently
right now reading so that you can have quick access back to them.
That would be, I guess, my advice.
So it's a little bit annoying that there's no way to just ask it to respect your directory
structure because yeah, finding the books that you are using on a regular basis really
is a little bit tricky.
Okay.
Next one is the on and the off screen or rather the off in the sleep screen.
So when you put this thing to sleep the screen or off, the screen actually gets painted
with something.
So it's not like a computer monitor where you turn it off and it goes black, it's different.
So because it's eating, so it stays where they paint it.
So if you turn it off, it actually, it does one of two things.
It either paints the screen with the front cover of the book that you are currently reading,
which seems fairly logical because if you've got a book and you've put it down frequently
what you see is the cover.
Unfortunately, sometimes the books that I'm reading are not, they don't have a cover because
they're like independent or whatever and no one bothered assigning it a cover.
So or there are EPUB versions of a website that I want to read offline, you know, something
like that.
So sometimes it's just a white screen which seems kind of weird.
And the sleep mode has I think the same option or and in both cases you can just default
to Kobo like logos and their little little books with happy faces but the sleep mode he's
got as little eyes closed and the off mode like his eyes are something else, maybe closed
harder or something.
I don't know, it says power off and to black screen.
So it is really, it's fun because it looks like it's never off, you know, like even when
it's off it looks like it's on because there's something on the screen and to most people
that reads, oh that device is on but that's not correct, which is cool.
But it seems like if that's a capability, it would almost seem like it would be more
useful to just give us an option to paint the screen with a current page.
That way if I'm like, if I've got a list of classes and functions or stuff or whatever
I'm reading and I want to refer to it, then why not just put the device to sleep or
turn it off and then I can just keep referring to the device because it's, you know, because
the screen, the page that I was looking at is still on screen.
So I think that would be a really useful feature.
They don't have that.
It seems clunky not to have it, so that's a negative point.
And the final negative point is not even a negative point about the Kobo, really it is
about PDF, PDF is a horrible format, it's great for post-script, don't get me wrong.
I mean for pre-flight, for your printer, it's fantastic, use PDF, it's really, really
great for that.
For everything else, it's horrible, do not use PDFs, don't use them as forms, do not
use them as e-books, do not use them to distribute information at all.
Use them to send pages to printers, that's all you should ever use a PDF for.
I have unfortunately amassed 251 PDFs of e-books because they were offering no other choice.
And I've tried every trick in the book, X PDF, I think it is, ships with something called
the PDF2, T-E-X-T or PDF2-H-TML, and it grabs any kind of embedded text in the PDF
and spits it out into some universal format.
But it very frequently that just doesn't, you can't even read it, it makes no sense
because the order of the text in the PDF just makes no logical sense.
They do fancy layouts and it just falls apart when you try to just dump that into
a screen.
So it's been very, very frustrating to deal with PDFs and the Kobo, bless its little heart,
has tried to manage PDFs and it does open them and it reads them, but just the inherent
nature of PDF being fixed to a resolution size is or designed for a specific page size,
I guess is what it really is.
It makes reading it on an e-reader very, very difficult.
So avoid that.
And I will, I mean just any e-reader, but the Kobo included, you know, you have to zoom
in to see the text because they're assuming by default that your presentation is eight
and a half by eleven, so you have to zoom in to see the text and so you see like this
little quadrant of the page and you read and then you scroll and scrolling on the
Kobo is not super smooth because they don't really expect you to have to do that.
They want you to be reading like an e-book or something sensible where you just flip the
page and it refreshes the entire screen all at once, very simple.
Scrolling around with a PDF with all of its fancy fonts and its horrible raster images
in the background and it just does not, it really doesn't do all that well.
It's highly recommended against using a PDF on this thing.
I do not recommend it, but then again, I just don't recommend PDFs at all, so avoid
them if you can.
Okay, so now the plus is the good thing is this is the thing, these are the things that
I love and that you will probably love about this device.
So first of all, yes, it is Linux friendly, it works on Linux, it totally works on Linux
after one hack, the initial hack, you're in the clear, you don't ever have to go to
cobo.com, you don't ever have to register, you don't have to phone home, nothing.
It's completely, it's just, it's a, you know, you plug it into your computer, you drop
your books onto it, you wait a while for it to parse those books and then you're up
and running.
So that's a huge thing, very, very nice.
The format support is fantastic.
I looked into other devices, I didn't do a whole lot of research, but from what I could
tell, the format, the formats on other devices are typically very proprietary.
They want you to read a dot moby or a dot, you know, a m w or zad or something or a dot
iBook or a dot lit or a dot whatever.
This is dot ePub and that's an open format so you can, if some format will let you convert
it, then you can convert to ePub.
You can roll your own ePubs, it's just, it's a beautiful, beautiful format, it's great
for eBook readers, it does word wrap and everything, it's resolution independent, it's basically
html in a zip container renamed as ePub, that's what an ePub is.
So this is, this is great for that, but it also just reads plain text, it reads rtf, it
reads, I think dot doc, it reads html, it'll do all that stuff, it's, it's, it's sublimely
simple, very, very nice, no complaints about that whatsoever.
It also does like comic book archives, CBZs, CDRs, it does, I think there's one more
that I'm forgetting, but yeah, the support is fantastic, zero complaints.
Okay, so next up is that it opens in your file manager, it's, it doesn't actually require
any kind of external application or additional application, you can use it with caliber,
but you, you don't have to, I do not, I do not bother, I just use it from a file manager
in, in KDE or flux.
The cool thing about the Kobo as well, of course, is that it's an eInc reader, as I've mentioned,
it's the, I have, I'd seen e, eInc devices before, I'd never really like held one and
used one, and I just, I love eInc, it is amazing, I want a computer with a screen of eInc,
I want it to be slow and power PC based, I would absolutely love this device, it's
just incredible, or not power PC, it could be ARM, but anyway, it should be something
power efficient, I would love that because I think, I think such a computer would be fantastic
for writing and it would last forever, battery power wise, yeah, eInc is amazing, I mean,
you look at it, when I first took the device out of the box, it had a picture on the screen,
and I thought, that's probably one of those little plastic overlays that I'm supposed
to remove, but it wasn't, it was, it was just the eInc painted on screen, saying something
like, you know, Kobo or something like that, or read, or whatever it said, it was, it was
so confusing, and to this day, I'll have a page on it, and I'll look over at it, and
I'll just, it looks like a sheet of paper, it just, this looks more like a notepad upon
which you scribble, rather than a digital device, and that's really cool, eInc is amazing,
I cannot sing its praises, loudly enough, related to that is the battery life, the battery
life is amazing, I got this device on October 20th or 21st, during the all things open
conference, and I, up until three days ago, I had not charged it, I mean I charged, I charged
it when I first got it, and then I took it on, I used it over that conference weekend,
I took it onto a plane, five hours from South, or one of the Carolinas, Raleigh to Houston,
and then 17 hours, well, and then a layover there, and then 17 hours back to Australia,
layover there, and then five hours back over to New Zealand, and I've used it for a month,
and it just, it was, it was going strong, the entire time, battery life, amazing, absolutely
amazing, I cannot tell you how amazing the battery life is, it is amazing, okay, next up, next
positive point is that it is actually more interactive and configurable than I'd kind of
expected, and I'm not saying it's really configurable, I'm just saying it's more configurable
than I had expected, I guess I'd kind of thought it'll be a device, I put my books on there,
it shows me the books, and that's it, but actually, I mean there's a button on the, on the
main screen, and you can go to a store which I've never been to, you can go to your library
which lists all your books by metadata, you can go to settings, and in settings you
can set things like date and time, the language, sleep and power behavior, set up your account,
I guess, I don't know, I hacked it, wireless connection, so I've never used that, but it's
there, device information, and extras, extras is kind of cool, it has a Kobo sketch book,
I've never used it, but I should, it's got a Sudoku game on there, I've never used that,
and it's got a web browser which is kind of cool, that's just seems really neat, now I've
not used any of those extra items, but they are there, and that's kind of cool, I mean you
have to admit, that's kind of neat, so it's a little bit more, a little bit more of a tablet
than I'd expected it to be, and that's, to me that's, that's nice, it's almost exactly the
right mix, because really all I want for once in my life is one device, one application, you know,
the e-reading application, and for it to serve one purpose, which is to open e-books and show
them to me, that's, usually I want my devices to do a lot more than that, like that's, that's
often one of my problems with modern technology, is that they constrain them to only do some
stupid set of things arbitrarily, but this, I mean this is an e-reader, that is what it is advertised
as, it's not advertised as a tablet, it is not, it does not claim to have an, you know, like an
app market, or anything like that, it's, all it is, is an e-reader, and that's all I wanted was
an e-reader, so this is, in that sense, very much what I wanted, I very much did not want to
tablet with an app infrastructure, and you know a store, an app store, and stuff like that, I just,
I don't want that kind of distraction, I want the thing to last forever in terms of battery life,
so I didn't want to, a screen, I didn't want to lit screen or anything like that, I just wanted
e-ink e-reader device, and that's what I got, and so it's, it's exactly what I wanted in that
sense, it is small, it is lightweight, I would say that the screen size, I'm going to guess maybe
seven inches diagonal, might be a little bit more, might be a little less, it fits into my hand,
certainly, I don't think I have huge hands, but they're not, they're not super small either,
so, but I would say, like if I grab, if I grab just a paperback book here, it's, it's basically
the size of a paperback book, it's actually smaller than this one here, but yeah, you know,
it's, it's basically any given, you know, sci-fi novel that you pull off of a shelf, you know,
it's, it's that size, I mean thinner than that, but, but that's sort of the dimensions
width and heights of it, so it's, it fits into the hand pretty, pretty nicely,
and that means that it's, it's basically, it can usually fit into my pocket, not,
not that I would stick it in my pocket and then walk around like the city with it in my pocket,
it's not quite that small, but in terms of like if you're in line waiting for something,
and then you get up to the desk and you have to use both of your hands for something,
then you can, you could just stick it in your pocket for a minute and do whatever you're doing,
show your passport, you know, do whatever you have to do at that desk, and then, and then go
about your way and take it back out of your pocket, so it's, I would say it's conveniently sized,
it was cheap, it was about 60 bucks on Amazon, so I have no complaints about the price,
it was about the right price, I mean, I wouldn't have minded if it was cheaper, but it, I mean,
it was under $100, and it feels like it, I mean, it in terms of like the performance, like I said,
it was a bit slow, it's, it's really no frills, but it's very, very functional, so I feel like 60 bucks
was, it seemed pretty logical to me, and then finally, it's got an expansion port on the side,
so this has an internal storage capacity of 1GB, and then you can expand that up to 32GB with a mini,
or a micro SD card, and I did that because I figured, well, I might as well just max it out right
now so that I don't ever have to think about this device again, and so that's kind of what I did,
I put a 32 micro SD card in there, and amazingly, with only 374 ePubs and 251 PDFs,
I'm really only up to about maybe three gigs tops, and most of those are the PDFs, to be honest,
it's just not, it is nowhere near as bulky, like it's, yeah, 32 gigs is a lot for books,
really, especially if you just stick with the ePubs, I mean, I guess it depends on what you put
inside the ePub, I mean, you could put just a bunch of big PNG images on each page, but I mean,
in general, you know, if you're reading text, it's not, you don't actually need a whole lot of space,
so that is the Kobo in 905 Touch, hopefully this has been informative, again, overall, I would
recommend it, I would simply warn you that you will have to do a little tiny hack to register,
but from there, it's pretty much invisible in terms of your use with Linux, you just use it,
it lasts forever, it's exactly what I certainly ever wanted, so that's the Kobo, thanks for listening.
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