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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.)
Did you carry an entire encyclopaedia with you to the coffee shop? I have an iLiad, and I carry a small selection of textbooks on it as well as a new novels. I've only got a 1GB card in it, but it's a long way away from being full. It accepts compact flash cards, so I'll probably pick up a 16GB one soon. That's enough for all of Wikipedia and most of Project Gutenberg in something light enough to carry with me.
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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
My thoughts exactly. This is the second 'prototype' of a HHG that I've read about in the past two weeks: http://www.hackaday.com/2008/05/13/pocket-hitchikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-wikipedia-style/
At the rate that we are evolving, we will see/discover the first babel fish in the next 100 years, and the first improbability driven space ship by the year 2400.
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."
I very recently bought a Kindle, and I love having access to wikipedia on the device, as well as a built-in dictionary. If I don't know the meaning of a word, now instead of guessing the meaning I will look it up really quick, if it doesn't break my rhythm.
I was reading a book the other day on it, a weapon was mentioned in the book, and I quickly looked it up in Wikipedia to see the image, and then got back to my book with a much better mental image of the scene in question.
Neat stuff. Still, I'd probably only be willing to pay about $300-400 for the Iliad's functionality, not $700 (I'd want WiFi). The cost of the eink screens needs to come down quite a bit so we get low-end readers in the $100-200 range and $300+ occupied by the really hackable ones like the Iliad.
Regarding Wikipedia, the Kindle has a distinct advantage over this: free access to Wikipedia through the cell phone networks rather than WiFi. That almost completely negates the need for an offline (especially if crippled) version. I still think the Kindle is too expensive for what it gives you at this point, but the tie to the cell phone network for no monthly fee was a really good idea. It's hard to imagine any of the smaller ebook players working out a similar agreement.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
'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.
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.
Getting a book takes a few seconds, and I tend to only download things I am likely to want. That said, Wikipedia is 3.7GB for the latest dump. If I got it at work, the bottleneck would be the speed of writing it to flash, which would be around 3MB/s for a cheap CF card. Google tells me that would take about 21 minutes. Getting it at home, my Internet connection would be the bottleneck and it would take closer to two hours. I'd imagine that Project Gutenberg would take a similar amount of time. It ought to be possible to fetch it once and then merge in the day's updates every night.
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