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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.)
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.
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