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!

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.

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

[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

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.

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

[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: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...

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.