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

rickyaires

[rickyaires]

Very good. Now do the same with Megarotic!

pricey

[OrangeTide]

I think I need to take out a small loan to buy an iRex. (or a Kindle!)

Follow the directions?

[Anonymous Coward]

That instantly puts this technology beyond the capability of 95% of the population.

Re:Follow the directions?

[fastest fascist]

More like 70% - about 25% will pester and insult the 5% online until they get it to work.

Re:Follow the directions?

[Gat0r30y]

pfttt... directions are for wussies anyway!

weird

[Mateo_LeFou]

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!

Re:weird

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:weird

[Mateo_LeFou]

"Did you carry an entire encyclopaedia with you to the coffee shop?"

I did not need to. I was only going to be there for 11 and a half hours, so i just needed 2 books.

Re:weird

[Mateo_LeFou]

Obviously, I had the usual wires (cat5) connecting my eyeballs to the pages. I just meant that I wasn't connected to the WAN

Re:weird

[pembo13]

Hmm. For print encyclopedias, you rarely know ahead of time exactly which volumes you will need. One entry may reference, or suggest an entry in another volume

Re:weird

[Mateo_LeFou]

sigh. logic nazis ruining a perfectly good joke...

Re:weird

[maxume]

Were other people turned off by the cloud of smug coming out of your book?

Re:weird

[mewyn]

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.

Re:weird

[mewyn]

http://www.amazon.com/Zombie-Survival-Guide-Complete-Protection/dp/B000FBJAOG/ref=ed_oe_k

All I gotta say. :D

Re:weird

[Anonymous Coward]

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. These are the very reasons why ebook readers are such a great idea, but it is a shame that they need to be encumbered by DRM.

Personally, if amazon were to begin providing buyers, of tradition dead-tree books, with the option to download a DRM free file of a book with the purchase of the dead-tree version I would purchase a kindle tomorrow.

The lack of being able to sell a DRM encumbered kindle book makes the purchase very unappealing. I can't loan the kindle ebook to someone without giving them my kindle. I can't make copies of any of the pages, for use as reference material in writing a paper for example. I can't sell the book to anyone or a used bookstore. I can't even give it away or burn it to stay warm.

I just can't understand why so many people have jumped at the kindle. The list of features and the abilities that it affords when reading are amazing, but the trade off is enormous.

Re:weird

[TheRaven64]

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.

Don't Panic

[Laur]

Do the instructions include printing out a sticker saying "Don't Panic" to attach to the cover?

Re:Don't Panic

[ramsejc]

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.

Who tagged as Toy?

[Bryansix]

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.

Re:Sounds good, but...

[sayfawa]

Yes. Kernel 2.4

oblig. wiki link

I badly want one

[hairykrishna]

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.

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.

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

[owlnation]

...a decent version of Wikipedia...

If EVER there was a glaring need for the words "citation needed" then the above statement surely is it. "Decent" and "wikipedia" are not words that should be used together.

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

[proxima]

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.

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....

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/

It costs $700

[Necron69]

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

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.

Misses One Important Point

[Nom du Keyboard]

One of the charming, and important, features of Wikipedia is the timely updating on current events. Often by the time I've read something in the daily news the Wikipedia article has already been updated with even better information by the people who care about and watch over their articles. This feature is missed in any offline reader.

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.

follow the directions..

[brunokummel]

...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...

Another Option

[ninjapiratemonkey]

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

So lets weigh this up

[Anonimouse]

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.

Tablet PC

[Kamineko]

I prefer a decent tablet PC (yes! Running Linux!) for reading documents. A tablet PC in a Wifi hotspot is great for grabbing stuff off the Sub-Etha.

'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.

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.

My

[ubergoober]

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.

Compact flash card will drain the battery

[Yeti7226]

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.

Logic nutsies

[tepples]

sigh. logic nazis ruining a perfectly good joke... If logic nutsies can ruin a joke so easily, then perhaps it wasn't perfectly good to begin with.