Slashdot Mirror
E-Books On a $20 Cell Phone
An anonymous reader writes "Moon+ Pro Reader, FBReader, Kindle, you name it--many popular Android e-book apps can run on a smartphone available for $20 and shipping. The trick is to respect the device's limits and keep down the number of apps you install. This fun isn't for eager multitaskers. On the bright side, the $20 phone can do Acapela TTS, includes a 4GB memory card and works with cards of up to 32GB--easily enough for scads of pre-loaded books. Plus, the WiFi is great. And the screen of 3.2 inches isn't that much smaller than the 3.5 inchers on the older iPads. What could cell phone e-reading mean in the many "book deserts" of the U.S.? And how about the U.K. where miserly pols are closing libraries even though the Guardian says "a third of UK children do not own a single book and three-quarters claim never to read outside school"? The smartphone post on the LibraryCity site tells how librarians and others could start "cell phone book clubs" to promote the discovery and absorption of books as well as smarter use of technology."
Reading e-books two or three lines at a time on a 3.2-inche screen would turn anyone off of reading. If you're trying to interest people in reading more, it's going to have to be a pleasant experience.
But it is much smaller than the iPads screens.
It is less than 1/9 the size of the 10" of an iPad.
Also can I expect the resolution to suck too?
Why cares? Why is this slashvertisment posted on /.?
It may not be much smaller than an old iPod Touch and maybe it doesn't have worse resolution either who knows but so what? It's still poor and shitty. Small, low-res and no e-ink.
"Shitty smartphone can do smartphone stuff although shitty" - You don't say?
I know the later may come out as trolling but .. it's just the truth.
What "older iPads" had 3.5" screens? Did you mean iPhone?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Did Carlos Slim buy up Dice? Makes a lot of sense if so.
>how about the U.K. where miserly pols are closing libraries even though the Guardian says "a third of UK children do not own a single book and three-quarters claim never to read outside school"?
So, the argument here is that at least 75% of the children never use libraries, so libraries should be kept open? Interesting but, I'm afraid you've lost me there.
I don't really see reading books on a phone. The text is too small. On a tablet, sure, that works, and I've been very happy to dump all my shelves and shelves of books for a simple single slab of electronics.
These phones are sim-locked and sponsered by the provider. So the 20$ mark means not much, the real price is 10-40 dollars higher.
Using a phone for reading zaps through your battery life (1-3 hours) to light the screen.
But the discusssion stays, since for $99 you can get a reasonable e-paper reader. How to get content for this.... i leave to your imagination.
The phones are only that cheap because they're subsidised. If too many people bought them just for books then they would stop being so cheap.
I would rather read a book printed on business cards than a cell phone. I'll stick to my kindle, eink (most important part, I think) and a decent sized screen.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Generic E-Readers are cheaper than that.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...|R40|R40&_sacat=0&LH_ItemCondition=3&_nkw=ereader&_udhi=30
You can even get used kindles for between $5 and $10
Those librarians need to kick the hobos browsing porn off the library computers so they can get on ebay.
What could cell phone e-reading mean in the many "book deserts" of the U.S.?
Citation needed. I've never heard of this phenomenon. Sounds like a made up term to add extra drama.
You mean iPod Touch...
Ken
What is this I don't even
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I mean for powers that be we are all prols. Why would any prols need any reading?
"This fun isn't for eager multitaskers."
Fun?!? Did you perhaps mean "phone"? I really wonder sometimes if you even read the submissions at all or do you just automatically approve every Nth one.
So much for the new corporate overlords classing up the joint any.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
A feature phone with a Java-based reader worked decently for me prior to getting an Android phone. Screen sizes wasn't huge, but as long as scrolling doesn't get in the way it's manageable.
Not sure how this is news?
Log in or piss off.
Phones are out of the question
Don't knock it until you've tried it; While a proper e-ink screen is nicer, new phones with large, high-res screens are really nice to read on, and even older phones aren't bad (I read loads of books on my 4" Nexus S). More importantly phones have the big advantage that you have it with you practically everywhere by default and they're almost always connected.
On a train? Read a book on your phone. Waiting in line for something? Read the same book on your phone. Waiting for a late friend? Read the same book on your phone. On the can? Read the same book on your phone. In bed? Read the same book on your phone. Finished your book? Buy/download/torrent a new one straight away.
Sure you could specifically carry round a book or e-reader everywhere you go, but that means yet one more thing to carry round and remember.
If you have to buy a device locked to a particular prepaid carrier, you could always carry it alongside your existing dumb phone, just as people who couldn't afford an iPhone used to carry a dumb phone and an iPod touch. Use the phone to make calls and the $20 PDA to read books.
It's free, it's fast, it's regularly updated and the reading experience is quick and convenient. I've tried Moon+ and it's good too.
...Steve
I'm not certain what the category is called(there must be a term for it; but I don't move in linguistics circles); but 'book desert' is an example of a specific class of made up term, the one that is novel; but is an explicit extension of an earlier and better recognized term(the best known example I can think of is, at least in the US, the ability to add "-gate" to almost anything to imply that it is a scandal. The result is always a made up word; but it creates a direct connection to 'Watergate').
In this case, the 'root' is 'Food Desert', a term describing the areas (mostly poor urban neighborhoods, and likely some rural ones as well) where grocery stores are effectively nonexistent and the population subsists on a mixture of convenience store fare and fast food, with a variety of types of food either atypically expensive or simply unavailable. By extension, a '[something] desert' is a region where local conditions make some good that you might expect to be available based on the overall development level of a country scarce or unavailable.
Anyone know what this type of coinage is called? It isn't merely a neologism; but I don't know what the subcategory is called.
My eyesight would never accept trying to read on a screen this small.
But I have used this same approach for creating a dedicated device to assist with tracking my diabetes.
A used $20 phablet + android diabetes tracking app = great diabetes tracking device
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
Of course the idea is that some areas don't have libraries (and likely don't have bookstores). My current city is fairly large, 225,000 people, and basically only has one library.
Reading on computers and phones and e-readers is indeed an alternative for people who live in such areas. I love my e-reader, but just because it's easier I read on my cell phone almost as much. It may seem ridiculous, but you quickly adapt and honestly I don't really mind it. It works for fiction, not so much for a cookbook or programming book or something where you'd want to flip back and look over pages.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
For those who can't find the link to the original article, here it is: http://librarycity.org/?p=1097...
More importantly phones have the big advantage that you have it with you practically everywhere by default and they're almost always connected.
And the disadvantage that upgrading from a dumb phone to a smart phone may inflate your cellular bill by $300 per year or more. One may have to upgrade from $7/mo low-minutes voice-only service to $35/mo voice and data service if the CDMA2000 carrier refuses to activate voice-only service on a smart phone or the GSM carrier exercises a provision in the boilerplate terms of service to automatically add a data plan the subscriber's voice-only SIM.
It's obvious American kids aren't reading enough, and the impact and consequences of not reading are pretty well known. But this is a cultural problem, not a technical problem, and proposing a hardware solution is not the right way forward and therefore won't work.
If kids wanted to read, they could do so basically for free already by getting a free library card and going from there. New hardware won't fix this.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I have a phone with a 3.5" screen. It's just about useless for e-reading. Also, the idea that if all the troubled youth were just given books they'd read them is bogus. They *can't* read and if they could they still wouldn't want to.
Err... Why? Even the peeps in the trailer park down the street have nice smart phones thanks to subsidies. The rest of us can afford anything we want. Lots of tablets on the market well under $100 outright.
"eager multitaskers" synonymous with "distracted liability".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I got this from an e-reader.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As a an early adopter of the the first i pod touch I shelled out 600 dollars Australian with the intention that within a matter of months a decent .pdf reader and asociated apps would spring up allowing me to reads books and all of the scientific literature i could get my hands on. .
-Keegan
I went the opposite route because no matter the .pdf software, scientific literature means text that can't be reflowed, tiny fonts (the subscripts and superscripts tend to be important), and needing to see the entire page at once to avoid spending more time flipping pages between the figure legend and the figure than trying to understand the content. A 10" color screen is pretty much the minimum.
http://www.mobileread.com/ --- forum for books where the members create nicely formatted books, and are willing to fix errors when reported
http://www.gutenberg.org/ --- mass-produced books by the masses --- getting errors fixed is a bit more difficult, but can be made to happen
http://onlinebooks.library.upe... --- The Online Books Page, John Mark Ockerbloom's attempt to list all freely available electronic versions of printed texts.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Sigh. May I suggest working on your reading skills? Determining meaning from context and imagery are important aspects of literacy. While they may not have a place in technical writing, where the precision of language is essential, they do allow for more engaging reading experiences.
What?!?! That phone has better specs than the highest of the high-end $600+ smartphones just 4 years ago. It's got specs as good as my $200 mid-tier smartphone from 2 years ago.
They could handle multiple apps back then, they can now, too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Trying to read on that little cellphone screen might eventually drive you nuts though... You'd be better off buying a Chinese-made 7" Android tablet like I did. (I four of them for ~$40 each, half off though.) Make damn fine readers, and good for a lot of other tasks, too.
Though I also picked up an Android phone with a bad speaker for $13 on eBay that I use as a wifi mouse/keyboard and Mediaplayer remote for my PCs. All in all, a pretty good supplement to my 'digital life'.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Sigh. Another /. response that opens with a veiled insult in the form of an ad hominem argument. I hope your self esteem got a little boost, person who is clearly better than I.
The problem wasn't determining the intended meaning of the phrase. That was pretty clear: it implied that "many" areas in the US are literary wastelands devoid of life and nourishment (for the mind) with haggard readers thirsting for relief crawling slowly along in the dirt, bathed in the harsh life-sapping light of modern media, hoping to come upon an oasis. I get it.
The problem is, this isn't a poem or creative piece of prose where such imagery can provide a more engaging reading experience. It's a summary set in the real world about a cheap smartphone with ereader software installed and a statement about the potential impact of said phone (in the real world). So dramatic language isn't warranted unless there are actually many places in the US suffering so horribly from lack of real books that this phone and ereader meets a pressing social need. I see little evidence in the real world (via much traveling, talking to people, watching the news, reading the news, listening to the news, reading books and magazines, visiting used bookstores swimming in donations, looking around me at parks/on the bus/at the beach/etc.) that this is actually true.
So it comes across as overly wrought handwringing with no real basis in fact. It should read in the voice of the sad persona of the Mayor of Halloween Town to help people really feel the intended emotion.
If there is some truth to it, another solution might be for some enterprising socially minded entrepeneur to come up with a viable way to move books from where they are in oversupply to places where there's a dearth (and more importantly, demand). Or people could just, you know, order cheap used books from Amazon and have them delivered right to their doorstep.
Provide a link to the damn phone. FAIL.
here it is.
Android [...] $10/mo for my service.
Which carrier in which country?
>> Those librarians need to kick the hobos browsing porn off the library computers so they can get on ebay
A political friend of mine was on the local library board and he was wondering how to handle the problem of porn browsing on the library computers. I suggested a large sign right over the computers that were "open" with no filters. The sign would be right over the unobstructed faces of the users. It would say "PORN ENEABLED COMPUTERS" and be well lit in bright colours.
He told me he was afraid I'd be sitting up there smiling and waving at library patrons.
Oh well.
If your only tool is a hammer, you'll approach every problem as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I have a different experience because I am visually impaired. I find that using a 19" screen with a zoomable PDF reader is actually better than reading the hard-copy book. It is a bigger font size and I have the option of reversing the background and forground colors. I don't have the usual eye condition that requires reversal of screen collors for accessability but with a cataract it turns out to be helpful. So it is actually easier for me to read and edit on a computer screen than to use a paper book.
One area where it may not occur to many people where having zoomable fonts would matter is reading any mathematics. When I was in school I tended to gloss over typeset mathematics, it actually interferred with my learning of math in college because reading exponents and subscriipts was hard, A magnifying glass was a help but if you have ever had to use them, they become tedious. Now, reading scientific and technical texts as the PDF is better than owning the hardcopy book, even given some of the downside of reading a book on-line. As for editing, I now tend to run my favorite editors on black or dark backgrounds with white or light colored fonts, emacs and Sublime Text, I actually perferred for a time running editors inside an xterm for that reason. Now emacs under genome fills the screen with a big font on a black background.