Episode: 3737
Title: HPR3737: Review of KOBO Libra H20 e-reader
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3737/hpr3737.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:48:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,737 for Tuesday, the 29th of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Review of Coball Leigh Brage 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 Coball Leigh Brage 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, cobo, each, Leigh Brage 20 Reader.
This was a Christmas gift, and this episode was actually started probably last January,
and I just never got around to finish it, but since we were down low for shows, I thought,
hey, this might be easy enough to get actually recorded and out the door, so here we go.
I had been wanting an e-reader for a while, I don't like reading books on my phone.
It's just too small, and the screen always goes dark on each way too quick, and it's just annoying,
unless I keep my finger on and it keeps calling things.
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.
I was looking around, and the cobo, I liked one, I liked the e-ink, the size, seemed like
a good company, particularly because they are running Linux on it, and I thought, 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 wonder of
girlfriend she is, it was under the Christmas tree last year, so the cobo Libra H2O, it has
a free scale iMX6 SLL 1GHz processor in it, comes with 512 megabytes, RAM and an 8K
byte hard drive, which is very nice, I'm not even close to having filled that up, it
has a 7-inch HD 300 PPI 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, it's not too heavy, fits nicely in my hand,
you know, don't get tired, holding it 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, this particular model has two buttons on
the one side, a sort of a page forward, page back 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 I mentioned,
it has a touchscreen, so you can just flip your thumb like you're flipping a page forward and back,
then the touchscreen 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 of 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, 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 right
back to the right way, here's just, I have to 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 EPUB,
a couple different EPUBs, 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, like 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 and you try to zoom in on the one column, it can be a little painful
to read those kinds of PDFs, trying to remember, I've really read that many of like PDFs that are
more text based, I don't remember off the top of my head, I mostly have been reading through EPUBs,
the one thing with this, it does to get back to its things, it does have a good battery life,
it has a 1200 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 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 11bg in, 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 external hard drive and you can just copy your books manually,
or directly onto the e-reader, and then when you take it off the USB connection and it boots
back into the OS, it will automatically like find the book and add it to the library for you.
I found, well I knew about, but I started using Calibre or Caliber or Calibre, the book management,
it's very nice, I like it, it's great for like particularly like adding metadata and stuff like
to the books, open source, it also has a number of different, it has plugins and there's a number
of different plugins for various things, but the one thing I did find is, Kobo apparently has
their own, they call it KePub, which is our own special ePub 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 rescaling, and that's one thing I found with some ePub's is, the regular ePub's
is like an image might be too big, and it won't scale it to the page, you just want to scroll
around the page to see the whole image, and with the K-Pub 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 the KePub, and that's been working
great, I really like that, and they do load faster, the pages turn faster, I'm not sure what the
difference 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 it can feel a little slow at times, but you know, especially with the PDFs
of images, but overall, it's pretty snappy, I don't use the Wi-Fi to connect to any bookstore,
so I haven't actually used any of that, those features, I think Kobu has their own, and I think
you can connect to some others, I've generally just been buying e-pubs online and downloading them,
and then moving them over, trying to think what else, I guess that pretty much covers 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,
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 in bright light, I took it to the beach and 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, 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 some of the newer versions of the E-ink displays with color, but I'm not sure there's
out in for any e-readers, and they, I 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, I have a
bunch of links to the various websites for the Koboo and information about it and about
Calibre and stuff, 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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