hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2337.txt

Episode: 2337
Title: HPR2337: The Kobo Aura eReader
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2337/hpr2337.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:27:48

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This is HPR episode 2337 entitled The Kobo Allery Reader.
It is hosted by John Kulp and in about 19 minutes long and Karimaklin flag.
The summary is a review of my new used Kobo Allery book reader.
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Hey everybody this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana recording another episode of Hacker
Public Radio.
I wish I had been able to record more episodes recently but even during summertime I'm finding
it hard to get time to do this.
However, my summer class is just finished up and today is actually a holiday at the
University.
Tomorrow is July 4th which is a holiday here in the United States and the University
has given everyone the day off today as well and so I'm here pretty early in the morning
at my office and it's very quiet in the building perfect for recording a podcast though.
If I pause for more than a second or two you might hear the strains of someone practicing
a piano up in one of the practice rooms above my office, I hear somebody up there playing
some kind of cheesy, like easy listening kind of piano music endlessly and I suspect
it's not a music major but rather some student who just wants to take advantage of the fact
that there are no students around to come in and play the pianos.
Anyhow, it's totally fine.
What I wanted to talk about was a new device that I got recently or new to me anyway.
I've got a whole series of these.
My new used this or that I did one on my pickup truck and on what else have I done?
A new used laptop and I'm a large kindle and stuff for it anyway, I can't remember them.
I've done a lot of episodes.
Anyway, today I've got a new ebook reader that I just purchased not too long ago.
I'm proud to say that I was the recipient of one of the university's outstanding graduate awards,
not outstanding, outstanding advisor awards.
I'm not a graduate of this university.
I'm on the faculty.
Man, sometimes I wonder what's happening in my head.
I got an outstanding advisor award this year for the very first time ever.
And advising is when you tell students what classes they need to take to graduate on time
and that kind of thing.
To get the award, you have to advise a certain number of students every year and you have to attend trainings and stuff like that.
And this year I qualified and got it.
So not only is there a great distinction in that, but there's a little cash prize as well.
And I decided on account of that to treat myself to an ebook reader that I've wanted for quite a long time,
but that it was very hard to justify since I already had a couple of kindles at home.
I started out my very first ebook reader was the Kindle Paper White that I got.
I want to say probably about May of 2014 I think is when I got my first Kindle.
Not too off a long after that.
I picked up an earlier version of the Kindle from a pawn shop for about 40 bucks and my son uses that now.
My wife has a Kindle that she inherited when her mother passed away and hers is basically just like mine.
And she has been reading that ever since then.
And I've just recently gotten a Kobo Ora.
Now Kobo is a company that always intrigued me just because I'm always interested in the alternative companies.
Kindle and Amazon, those are the big monopoly kind of outfits.
And then there are these other companies that kind of just get by
and have really cool looking devices, but the ecosystems might not be as large
and maybe the ebooks cost more and that kind of thing.
And so that it can inhibit people from getting into the new device and the new ecosystem.
And the device that I'm holding is a Kobo Ora.
Now I'll have a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article about the Kobo Ora and its side.
It's worth reading if you're interested in these kinds of things.
This device was released in 2014 and mine is a refurbished one.
It looks brand new.
I got it on eBay and it was coming from Canada and Kobo is a Canadian company.
So I don't know if this is coming straight from the Kobo refurbishing place or what,
but it looks great.
It looks brand new and it came with a little slip cover with a zipper on top.
It's not quite like my Kindle cover where it's kind of a case with a flap that puts it to sleep
and then you open it up and wrap it around and just read the book and then you can close the cover back
and it will put it back to sleep.
When you take this out of the slip case, you're actually just holding the bear device in your hand.
But it feels pretty good.
The refurbished one that I got here came out to about $60 American, which is a good price for any book reader of this quality.
When it first came out, according to the Wikipedia article, it was $149.99, which is pretty high.
That's a good bit higher than the Kindle Paper White that I think I paid $100 for the Kindle Paper White when I got it.
It was a subsidized one where if you had paid another $20, you could remove the advertisements.
But the advertisements I decided were not too intrusive and so I just live with them.
The Kobo Aura, this 2013 device, has a number of things in common with the Kindle Paper White.
It's an E-ink device.
It looks great even in bright sunlight. It actually is easier to read when you're outside in full light,
unlike your phone or your tablet or things like that.
So it looks terrific.
It feels nice. It's a little bit smaller in total size, although I think the screen size is exactly the same as the Kindle Paper White.
It has a physical button to turn the backlight on and off.
The backlight is an important feature for me, just because I like to read in dark places,
sometimes sitting in bed, waiting to go to sleep, sometimes I like to read for a little while.
And if the wife has already turned out her light, then I don't want to keep one on and disturb her sleep that way.
So the backlight is an important feature and this one has it.
And you can turn it on and off with the little button on top and you can adjust the brightness using a little...
You can actually use a two-finger pinch or...
I don't actually use it because I find that I don't trust the two-finger pinch.
The pinch and widen actually controls the font size.
But it seems like sometimes the device, when you try to do that, it gets a little bit confused.
These things are not powerhouses in terms of processor speed and memory.
So you don't want to do anything too drastic.
I'll see you confuse and make them reboot.
But it's fully adjustable, the backlight, and that's a good thing.
One of the major advantages, there are a few obvious advantages of this device over the Kindle Paper White right off the bat.
And one of them is the availability of an expansion slot for more storage.
The device itself comes with about three gigabytes of free storage space.
It's a four-gig drive, but I guess close to a gig of it is taken up by the operating system and various configuration files and whatever has to go in there.
It runs on a Linux kernel. I found this out on the Wikipedia page.
The Kindle Paper White might run on a Linux kernel too, I don't really know.
But this one definitely does.
But the expansion slot will accept cards up to 32 gigabytes in size.
And so I immediately ordered a 32-gig microSD card.
And so I could store, I mean, I've put something like 800 books on here and I still have 29 gigs free.
So you can really, really store a lot of books.
And it seems pretty quick when you go searching through all the books.
It doesn't lag for a long time when you put in a search key or something like that.
You can create collections of books right there on a device.
You can group them into various categories to easier finding them.
I've got a collection of books right now related to my job under the category of leadership.
Now that I'm a director, I have to read a number of books about managing people and stuff like that.
And I find them very helpful.
So I've got a collection of those and then I've got a collection I called Must Read,
where I can kind of keep track of the books that I want to read next,
which could easily get buried when there are 800 or 1000 books on the device.
I've got a bunch of music books that I keep in one category.
You get the idea, you can make collections.
What else?
Another killer feature of this and something that for me makes it really stand out above the Kindle Paper White is one of the adjustments that you can make to the appearance of the book on the screen itself.
You can choose your alignment.
You can either have it fully justified, which in most books is the default.
Or you can choose left alignment if you find it extremely annoying when there are large gaps between words.
So this is a problem that especially creeps up if you make the font bigger.
This is something my wife has some finds it much easier to read books when the font is very large.
And so she ends up having, I don't know, 30 or 40 words a page instead of a couple hundred.
And not only are there not many words, but there are really big gaps between the words because on her Kindle Paper White it's forcing her full justification instead of allowing the words to naturally follow one another without forcing them all the way over to the right hand margin to make a full justification.
So on this device you can turn off the full justification by one of your reading settings, which is just awesome.
That's something I used to go in and edit my Kindle books.
I would go in and edit the style sheet to make it left aligned to avoid the full justification and on this device you don't have to.
So that's pretty great.
Another great thing about this is that they don't try to keep you out of the device so much the way Amazon does with the Kindle.
For example, you can easily hack the device to put alternative fonts on there by just creating a fonts directory in the units top directory.
You create a directory called fonts and then just put whatever fonts in there, reboot it and then next time you want to you can change to one of those fonts.
I just tried this right before recording this episode and I put this awesome font called JSL Ancient.
It's a font that a guy designed based on 17th century printers.
And so if you load up a book using that font it has this amazing vintage look of a 17th century printing press.
And it could not have been easier to add the font in there and reboot and then just select that font on the book.
With the Kindle Paper White you can't just add fonts to the device.
You have to embed them in the ebook which is possible.
And I've learned how to do it using Caliber but it's kind of a pain.
And it's not the easiest thing. It's not foolproof the way this is.
I like the fact that they seem to trust you and are not trying to lock you into a specific way of viewing your books.
I also like the fact that this one comes with installed by default.
It comes with the Open Dislexic font which is a, I did an episode about that font on an earlier HPR show and that comes already installed on this device.
Now one of the difficulties that anybody would face when trying to transfer over from the Kindle Paper White or some other Kindle device to the Kobo would of course be what about all my books.
If I've bought all these books on Amazon I won't be able to read them on the Kobo because it's a totally different ecosystem.
They come in a different file format that the Kobo prefers EPUB whereas the Kindle prefers either Moby or AZW3.
And most of the books that you buy are locked down by DRM as well.
I was pretty confident when I bought this that I would not have any problem with this because I've got a plug-in installed on Caliber so that when I import any of the books that I purchased either through the Kobo Store.
And I had actually purchased some books through the Kobo Store before getting the Kobo device and then just converted them to Kindle Format.
I've got a plug-in on Caliber that will take care of that problem so that once I import the book I can convert it to whatever format I want and then just side load it onto the Kobo.
And so all of the books that I bought on Amazon I've already put on the Kobo and it's not a problem at all.
Just plug it in with the USB port and you can either use Caliber to manage the collection and right-click on a book title and then choose Send to Device or now that I have an expansion card in the memory.
It's either Send to Device main memory or you can send to the device's memory card A and easily manage the things that way.
There's some kind of error message I get whenever I do this saying that it doesn't...
It's not compatible with the Kobo database format or something.
I don't really know but the books all show up.
And so I don't really worry about it.
You can also just in the file manager itself just drag books onto the Kobo and it'll find them and put them in your book lineup menu next time you open up the reader.
What else to say about this?
I don't guess there's so much to say.
I mean it charges from a regular micro USB thing so the same cable that I used to charge up my phone I used to charge up this and my Kindle Paper White and everything.
It's a nice device I'm really glad I got it and my daughter is glad I got it because I gave her my Kindle Paper White and now I'm using this.
Anyway it's great I certainly encourage it if you're an e-book nerd like me.
It's really nice to try a totally different e-book reader than the Kindle.
One other thing that this does that the Kindle at least the version of the Kindle that I have does not do is word breaking.
And that was another reason why it had such a problem with ugly full justification was that it never broke words at logical plays it just didn't do that.
And so to make it justified you would end up with these great big gaps between words that could have been avoided if you just break the words up in a logical way.
Well the Kobo has word breaking and it's not perfect but it's pretty good.
And so that makes even the books that are always displayed using full justification look better on the Kobo than they did on the Kindle Paper White.
I bought a book on Kindle Store a couple of days ago that advertises a new feature apparently that they've implemented called smart type setting or something.
And so I guess a bunch of their books feature this now but they're I think slowly they've realized that they've got a big problem with the full justification and the giant gaps between words.
And so they're trying to put books up there that will do smart hyphenation.
Anyway I've probably talked a whole lot longer than I meant to here but anyway that's my review of the Kobo Aura and I hope you've enjoyed that.
Now I think I'm going to turn off here and go read a book. Talk to you guys later. Bye bye.
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