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Offline Wikipedia Reader For iRex Iliad
An anonymous reader writes with a link to "an offline Wikipedia viewer for the iRex Iliad e-ink e-book reader (similar to Amazon's Kindle). Take it anywhere — and you don't need to be connected to the Internet in any way!" (You'll need a 4GB flash card and the ability to follow the directions.)
Very good. Now do the same with Megarotic!
I think I need to take out a small loan to buy an iRex. (or a Kindle!)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That instantly puts this technology beyond the capability of 95% of the population.
I don't even have an iRex whatchamacalit, and just today i was reading a book at a coffee shop without being connected to the internet at all!
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Do the instructions include printing out a sticker saying "Don't Panic" to attach to the cover?
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Whoever tagged this as toy should be given the whole Encyclopedia Britannica in print form and then be forced to lug it around for a day.
Yes. Kernel 2.4
oblig. wiki link
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Yes, it does.
I really, really want a decent e-ink ebook reader which can handle wikipedia and pdfs. £400 ($800) is just far too much though. I'm amazed that anyone is buying them at that price. They need to get down to ~£100.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
This is a neat hack; I'm mildly surprised that you can fit a decent version of Wikipedia in under 4 GB. The text, sure (especially bzip2 compressed), but a decent set of images? Anyone have a breakdown of exactly which version of Wikipedia this is?
The static Wikipedia pages appear to have not been updated since April 2007 (the February 2008 ones stop just before "en"). That version comes in larger than 4GB, but static HTML pages are less efficient, I would think, than what this guy did parsing the XML data.
These days, though, WiFi is available in so many places that even if I owned one of these devices I probably wouldn't use up the flash space with an offline version of Wikipedia.
Side note about the iRex. The ebook version of the reader (which, notably, lacks WiFi compared to the more expensive version) appears to be $599 MSRP. I personally thought the Kindle was expensive at $400, wireless service included. The WiFi iRex is $700, which is getting into the territory of a few low-end (or used, I'm sure) tablet notebooks. I understand that the battery life and screen readability of these things is supposed to be pretty good, though.
Anybody know if the iRex or any other ebook reader has the capability to annotate PDF files? I do a quite a bit of reading of PDF documents, and I find myself printing them all too often so that they're easier to read and I can make notes. These ebook screens are supposed to be easier on the eyes than a standard laptop screen, so all that's left is the ability to make annotations.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Apparently you can fit an offline copy of Wikipedia in 2GB on an iPhone or iPod-Touch.
http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
I wonder how many people would be around who could afford the Iliad AND also have the extra time and inclination needed to hack it.
I got all excited about a Kindle competitor... until I saw the price.
Lop a zero off the price guys, and I'll consider it. Give me a fscking break.
- Necron69
Kindle has free online access to wikipedia via cell phone networks so it is accessible virtually anywhere (don't need a hotspot).
It's not so hard to build a offline browser for mediawiki, since the foundation provides bz2-compressed xml-dumps.
I myself once wrote one for using with Apache+PHP (without a database or MediaWiki, e.g. for USB-sticks or laptops).
See
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Also having to download the entire Wikipedia DB to update the offline version each time will be time consuming for the user, and bandwidth killing for the Wikipedia site if this becomes popular.
Now if Wikipedia could organize themselves in a manner that allowed you to download the updates since your last update, you'd have a win-win on both sides.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What other ebook readers are out there that use an e-ink display? There has to be more than the Kindle and the Iliad. Something cheaper that can at least display PDFs and text files would be nice.
$700? Is this really the best they can do in the era of the $100 laptop?
This seems cool almost Hitchhikers guide cool. You could download a new version of the static every time you had a spare night with an internet connection.
Would also be good if you could right entries off line and sync them later (although this would make the hole project next to impossible to manage).
off course i could just get the static version and put it on my EEE (a mem card any way) then I could write entries in vi and upload later as the readers well out my price range.
Most Damage is done by people who are AWAKE
...and the ability to follow the directions
What do you mean by follow the directions? Everybody knows that you are only supposed to follow instructions when everything else fails...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
A similar project was covered recently on Hack-a-day. Same idea... different hardware.
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At that price i could probably get an entire bookshelf of books that i can read offline at any time i want. Not only that,i think this is only going to be good for books that you read from cover to cover. If you reference books extensively or are looking for say coding examples, a lot of the time you may have several pages open in several different books at the same time. On a laptop browser that is manageable. A real physical set of books is also manageable if inconventient. But on a reader with the screen the size of a large paperback which displays one screen at a time i suspect it would be very hard to manage indeed unless the navigation is absolutely top notch.
"and the ability to follow the directions"
That rules out most people.
'Course, being a miser and a logical git, it's all down to TPCs being considerably cheaper than most ebook gadgets, and having a lot more functionality.
Once there's an ebook reader that costs the same as a decent TPC and can do the same things as a TPC, then I'll be happy. So happy in fact that I'll politely refuse to buy it, because TPCs will also have become better by then.
ebook readers need to become really, really good really fast before cheap consumer TPCs become 'cool' for families and start appearing in the shelves next to the eee PCs.
No.
Got to fiddle with an Iliad at the last tradeshow I visited. Looked like an Ikea cardboard computer, seemed about as functional. Honestly thought it was a mock-up until it finally managed to display a new page. Would rather gnaw my arm off than attempt to browse a cached wikipedia on that thing.
Best of luck to the early adopters willing to shell out. The world needs guinea pigs too.
* Making waffles just so I have something to Twitter *
Really. I've had my eyes on this one for quite some time. I'm a PhD student, and I usually carry around at least two thick and heavy books with me depending on the subject I'm working on. A huge pile of books are scattered around my home, in the office where I work part time and in my car. It is quite usual that I have to go back to some books for reference and check for something. It is needless to mention the large amount of papers I have to read (but I've mentioned it anyways).
This is a scenario where Iliad can be a real saver, but it is simply very, very expensive for me. I also can not feel comfortable with a reading device that is too small, and Iliad has a decent screen size, but the damn price does not seem to be dropping at all!!!
Guys like me (with more money of course) should be buying this thing like crazy, but somehow it is now known very well. If IRex produces a color version of it, I'd probably consider selling a few personal belongings for it though.
I own an iRex and this is very cool. Problem with the compactflash cards is that is significantly drains the battery. The SD slot does not take anything over 1 Gig. Hopefully this wil be corrected in a next version.
I have an iPhone and don't necessary need e-ink to read something less than 30 minutes. this is sufficient for my purpose.
"You'll need a 4GB flash card ..."
check
"... and the ability to follow the directions."
damn it, always something stopping me from getting the cool stuff.
A Kindle competitor for only double the price! I'm no economics expert, but isn't this counter to the effect competition is supposed to have on prices? Add more competitors, and prices go up -- is this why I see so many gas stations?
I'm not a human, but I play one on T.V.
But couldn't they have come up with a more laborious name for the product? I mean, iRex Iliad e-ink e-book reader is great and all, but couldn't they have called it the iRex iLiad aMazing iNcredible iRreplacable e-ink e-page e-printed e-book reader?
Buy them used (or ebay). I just bought an iRex Iliad for $431. There is an ebay seller (rkgarinc) that has a large amount of new first generation iLiads to sell (around $535). You can also try the mobileread forums, which is where I found mine.
I love mine, even though I already have a Fujitsu T4215 tablet pc. The two devices serve different needs and usage profiles.
Why can I never go to the store and check something like this out and decide on if I want to buy it. From everything I've read about it, I most likely would.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Check out Wiki2Touch, an offline Wikipedia reader for a Jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch. It too requires a download and some processing of a 3GB+ file, however, the results are simply stunning. It leverages the iPhone's Safari browser, so you can bookmark articles, etc. It's truly amazing to be able to have instant access to encyclopedic articles. You have over 20,000,000 articles at your fingertips.
And to those who complain that it isn't online and up-to-date, really, who cares? Remember what this is: It's an Offline reader. If you need up-to-date info, then get an iPhone or some such and just browse live to Wikipedia. But for those of us who have the likes of the iPod Touch, this is a truly AMAZING application. OK, so it's not 100% up-to-date. But you have over 20,000,000 articles at your fingertips!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!