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.)

rickyaires

Very good. Now do the same with Megarotic!

pricey

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

Follow the directions?

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

Re:Follow the directions?

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

Re:

pfttt... directions are for wussies anyway!

weird

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

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

"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:

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

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

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

All I gotta say. :D

Re:weird

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

Re:

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

Don't Panic

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

Who tagged as Toy?

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.

I badly want one

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

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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [irexshop.com]. 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

It'll be text, no pictures. The Wikipedia image dump is several hundred gig.

Re:

On iliad you can annotate, but the method ain't perfect. See the end of this article [arstechnica.com] 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 [mobileread.com] that were already ported to Ili

Re:Kinda cool

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)

It costs $700

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

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

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..

...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...

Re:Sounds good, but...

Yes. Kernel 2.4

oblig. wiki link [wikipedia.org]