An update on the Librie EBR-1000EP made by Sony in Japan, an e-book reader that weighs as much as a thick paperback, measures roughly 20 by 13 centimetres, and sells for ¥41,790. And oh yes it uses linux.
It is possible to create your own ebook from ASCII or Unicode UTF-16 content thanks to the linux makelrf utility. Basically you can now get a memory stick, mount it under linux and pass your project gutenburg books to the Librie.
Depending on how the Librie hardware is mapped to the device
model, it probably won't be a simple port to get XPDF to work on the Librie hardware -- the ebook reader probably does its own rendering to a framebuffer interface, as it does on the PC.
Issues that the users have seen:
* The E Ink display shows a faint "ghost image" of the previous page.
You can see it on the picture at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sony_Librie_EBR_1000.jpg
(near the text "Lisa Vogt") It doesn't really bother most people though
* It's slow to power up. Takes around 30 seconds until you are back
reading where you left off. Also, is shuts down after while
It's also a bit slow to turn pages - around 1 second - only slightly
annoying.
* The buttons aren't very good
* The DRM issue of course. There's still no way to get nice, rich
hypertext on the device (searchable and with links, images and
sounds).
So - no major hardware issues
Japanese related complaints
* The user interface is japanese only for now. This includes the windows
software, the manuals, sony support websites, everything.
* The lid is on the wrong side (Japanese style - you can take it off or fold it to the back though)
A nice guide has been put together for the device.
Posted by Anthony at November 26, 2004 11:56 AM | TrackBack