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.)

Comments

Re:Sounds good, but...

[sayfawa]

Yes. Kernel 2.4

oblig. wiki link

Kinda cool

[proxima]

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.

Re:Kinda cool

[David Gerard]

It'll be text, no pictures. The Wikipedia image dump is several hundred gig.

Re:Kinda cool

[georgeav]

On iliad you can annotate, but the method ain't perfect. See the end of this article for a review.

Regarding the price.. Iliad has a bigger screen and Wacom style touchscreen. And if you are a Linux user you can install apps that were already ported to Iliad.

Re:Kinda cool

[proxima]

On iliad you can annotate, but the method ain't perfect. See the end of this article [arstechnica.com] for a review.

Ah, it stores everything separately, and doesn't seem to have anything but a "pen" mode. Since my handwriting is somewhat poor (and my tablet-writing is even worse), the ability to add typed notes would be nice (via a little on-screen keyboard, perhaps? I'm not asking for OCR to read my scribbles). The biggest thing for me is underlining/highlighting - this can be done neatly and efficiently in any PDF which isn't simple scanned. Okular for KDE4 seems to do a decent job at it (the annotations are also stored separately), but it's still a bit in the early stages of functionality.

The big screen is nice - if/when I ever get an ebook I'd be tempted to want one that's about a 8.5x11" screen to view pages 1:1. Still, the eink and battery life would have to be awfully nice to choose it over a low-end tablet (e.g. HPs start at $900).

Re:Kinda cool

[peragrin]

with wifi on and modifications done to use the irex as a web browser, battery life is about a day, usually less. without wifi on all the time your talking a couple of months depending on how much you read.

e-ink's to main features are no back lighting and they only update the page when you change the page. with refresh in the high milisecond range(ie you can watch it change)

Re:Kinda cool

[Nicolas Roard]

I posted a blog entry with some pictures: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/05/iliad-irex-pictures.html and a previous post about the iliad and other stuff: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/04/iliad-irex-note-taking-and-hand-writing.html The Mobile Read forums are also pretty informative. On the capacity to annotate pdf, I think that's one of the great use case of the iliad -- you can easily read & annotate on the iliad, then transfert back the PDF+annotations, and merge them in a new PDF -- or even only create a PDF with annotated pages.

Re:Kinda cool

[moosesocks]

That's for full-size color images, and other non-visual uploads as well (eg. audio clips).

If we're preparing a wikipeia dump specificly for the iLiad, we can convert all of the images to 16-level grayscale, and resmple them down to a resolution appropriate for the device. Recompress, and the resulting image should be much, much smaller.

Wikipedia should probably start implementing some sort of tagging system for images to help strip out non-essential media for a "condensed" version on platforms where bandwidth/storage is limited. Images that are only peripheral to the article should get some sort of tag so that they are omitted; images that are vital to the comprehension of the article should get another so that they are sure to be included; there should be some sort of identifier to separate photographs from diagrams/maps that haven't yet been converted to SVG for devices that cannot display photos, and so on....

Re:Kinda cool

[Anonymous Coward]

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. I have a 1st edition Iliad reader. Got it off e-bay for about US$550.

The wifi is pretty limited with the Iliad. It can synch wirelessly with a samba drive and also synch downloads with the iDS service. Currently that does little more than schedule firmware updates.

However, you can get "shell access" to the iliad and load in a ported web browser. It's slow though -- not an idea solution.

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. All editions of the iliad have a wacom stylus for making annotations. I do the PDF annotations myself, i haven't tried other formats. It saves the annotations in separate files, although you see them together on the screen. very, very slick.

The battery life, however, is measured in hours rather than page turns. Mine lasts about 12 hrs or maybe a bit more in PDF reading mode. There's a nice hack that slows the processor to 100mhz while reading.

Really, though, the screen on these things is amazing. Much better than the sony or kindle. Also, PDF support is 1st class, I can read a 2 column ACM paper on it without losing my eyesight. Also, you can hack the iliad in C++ or Java (MIDP/CDC).

Andrew

Or an iPhone

[rfunk]

Apparently you can fit an offline copy of Wikipedia in 2GB on an iPhone or iPod-Touch.
http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/

Re:It costs $700

[sayfawa]

The iRex has a Wacom tablet screen. The cheap, screenless Wacoms that you connect to your computer cost about $200 by themselves. $700 may be too much, but the device is in a higher class than the Kindle.

Another Option

[ninjapiratemonkey]

A similar project was covered recently on Hack-a-day. Same idea... different hardware.

Re:Tablet PC

[proxima]

'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.

I agree that at this point tablets look like a better bang for the buck, at least for me. These ebooks though blow away tablets in terms of battery life (from maybe a dozen hours with WiFi use to weeks of just reading, according to people here). Also, though I haven't seen one in person, I've heard that the eink screens are really nice on the eyes.

Even though the Iliad is $700, I can't point to a new tablet PC that's cheaper than that. The cheapest I know about is the consumer HP line starting at $900. For my next laptop I'm looking at the Thinkpad line, and the X series tablet starts about $1500 (while the X61 series non-tablet starts about $1100). I think to beat $700 on a (full-featured) tablet you'd have to go used, but I'm definitely interested if you know of something else.

I had a completely opposite reaction to the price when I read about the Nokia N800. Full web browser, WiFi, 4" screen (bigger than ipod touch, significantly smaller than most ebooks) was being sold on Amazon for about $210 last week (they don't appear to sell them directly anymore). The new version adds a keyboard and GPS and goes for about $400. Still, $200 w/ WiFi seems like a much better price point. The full web browser is more useful than the Kindle, and the price is far and away better than the Iliad, provided the screen is big enough. Considering I've used a few Handspring/Palm-based devices as ebook readers before, I'm sure this Nokia thing could work for some people.

Re:I badly want one

[Shagg]

There are several cheaper eink devices. The one in this story is by far the most expensive. It has the largest screen and most hardware features though, which is what you're paying extra for.