A reviewer tests Scribd on the Likebook Mars 7.8-inch e-ink tablet and finds the app well-designed for the device, with books, audiobooks, magazines, and sheet music. The A2 scrolling mode reduces ghosting, but page turns are slower than Kindle and offline downloads happen one at a time. Recent firmware updates improved app loading speed.
Chapters
Okay, today I'm going to do a quick review on the Likebook Mars using Scribd. Now I had not even heard of Scribd before, before a YouTube user asked me to do a review, and I am blown away. I love Scribd. I'm a subscriber, and I believe I always will be. I love reading and I love content, and wow. So let me turn on the little device here, and here we are. Now Scribd is just here, so let's go into Scribd and have a look. One of the things I was most impressed about Scribd is it feels like it's designed for this device, almost. It's a very clear reading experience. It's very engaging. There's just a couple of things that stand out that make it difficult. One is, of course, you have to be on Wi-Fi, and you don't have to, but the majority of the usage is Wi-Fi oriented, or needs to be online for the online experience. You can download things and, and then use them later, but this is a one-by-one kind of thing. It's not meant to be how the devices— how the app is used, but it does work that way, and you could travel on the train or whatever using things you downloaded and reading them. I have downloaded a few books and a couple magazines. Basically, a quick overview of Scribd, which will give you also a quick overview of how the app works, is that it has books, audiobooks, news, magazines, sheet music, and some documents. And I've looked into all of the categories and been very impressed with the books that are available and the audiobooks. I used to listen to audiobooks, but the Audible subscription was just too expensive, and so I stopped. Where here you have a library of audiobooks available, and you can just switch between them all month long and not limited to your one audiobook for the month. Let's have a look at the, at the books. You can see here you've got your Overview, you can see it flashing a little bit. That's typical for an ebook reader. You can change it to what they call the A2 mode, which basically redraws in a mode that's better for scrolling. And so then you can see the scrolling. What that does is it does leave a bit more ghosting, but not with this app. This app really does a good job with the ghosting. So let's go back up, let's just click into Just Books, and let's have a look. One thing that I've noticed is when you look at a book, there are some really cool options. I like the idea of being able to read the book in various feels rather than font choices. They actually have categories of like, would you rather look postmodern or rather it look vintage? And, and that's nice. One of the things that does bother me a little bit, you can see a little bit of the difficulty it's had with the redraw here. Left a bit of the ghosting behind it. You can clear that just by changing from A to back and forth. That redraws the screen for you. The boundaries on the edge here, you cannot change them. I like it to be about half that far from the edge so it's a bit more reading space so I can make the font a bit bigger. I wear glasses and I find it to be nice to have a bigger font. So at that size font, which I like, there's not enough words on the line. I'd like just one more word, which is a bit more space. It's just a preference thing, but it really It's one thing I like about Kindle, you can adjust it all the way as you want, and the reader built into the app is the same. So let's have a quick look at the fonts that I was showing you and how good they look. So I've got it on Vintage, which I, I like. Postmodern, let's try that one. Postmodern. So it just changes the font. You can see the font's a bit different. Now one other thing I did notice in comparison to Kindle and the built-in app, the built-in app turns pages instantly. Kindle is a flicker and it's changed. This one, watch how long it takes. That's kind of cute, but every single page flipping over like that, it's, it's a little tedious. It would be great if they just had an option where you could just turn off the flipping of the page and just have it transition from one page to the next. I could not find that. I also could not find the margin adjuster. Whether they exist, I'm not sure, but they would be welcome additions to make this even more ebook reader, Android ebook reader compatible. Okay, let's go back out to our choices. Well, of course it's great, but I'm not going to do that right now. I'll say "ask me later." Let's go back. Let's look at our audiobooks. So I've been listening to the second in this series here, March of Kings. No speaker built into the device, but I plugged headphones in last night. I listen on my phone when I'm driving, but I plugged it in here and headphones work great. It worked fine on the device. You can use Bluetooth. I don't have a Bluetooth speaker to show you, but you can add Bluetooth, you know, hook it up with Bluetooth and you can listen through that as well. So you can have an out loud experience or you can have headphone experience and it does work. You can see as I flip through things, this is one thing that's interesting is the news. Obviously it's meant to be on a phone. It's massive news titles. It would be great if they did kind of a Flipboard thing where they put 3 or 4 in a viewing so you don't have to go, "What's the next story, Bob? Let's scroll down." It takes a bit of time. Magazines. I am in love with this magazine feature. Of course, pictures on an eBook reader are not as good, but the articles come up so clean and crisp. They've done a great job with Scribd of getting rid of unnecessary content so that you can get straight into the reading experience. Again, it has that same page flip delay when you want to change pages, except there's a picture. That's not bad. In magazines, it's a scroll rather than a flip, but as it changes from article to article, it does the, the flip thing. That one's coming up a bit slow. Let's go back to the options. So yeah, magazines work great. Books work great. I'm very impressed with it. Like I said, I'm now a subscriber, so that should say everything. If you're looking at getting this device for the use of Scribd, you're well on the right track. It's, it's amazing. Sheet music is awesome. My wife had already heard of Scribd because of sheet music. She's a musician and it looks great. This device is a little small if you've got eyes like mine to read it while it's sitting up on the piano or on a music stand, but if you had the Note 10 or a bigger, you eBook device. It looks fantastic. So that's my review of Scribd, and I will say also that the eBook Mars just came out with an update, and there's a lot of things that were little wrinkles that have been ironed out. It runs smoother, it's faster to load apps, and you will love it. So yeah, grab yourself a Mars LiteBook and enjoy Scribd and many, many other Android apps.
