solved my own problem when going into the "easyreader" chinese web site.
While in the "english" portion of the web site and going into the "free downloads" I downloaded everything, hoping that one of my scout parent's whose native tounge is Chinese would be kind enough to translate for me,
as it turns out they did have an english version - just not identified as such.

So - for anyone who googles EB683 support. Go to the easyreader site and download the last listed conversion tool. This is the english version and much better than the Argosy version because it will do bulk conversions to the EBK format rather than single at a time. Going into the Argosy software, you can now upload the EBK format files.

If the %^&*&^% company provided support, and actually sold their EBK memory cards (same form factor as CF, but not CF) I'd actually think of keeping this.