Martin a few years agoI apologise deeply for my absence from these pages for more than a month now. I have spent the intervening weeks in completely redesigning and rebuilding my website which isn't quite finished yet but is up and running and contains 120 or so fairly entertaining ( I hope) pages.
What the Lightbook is not
One thing is now clear to me, in any case. The solar powered e-book reading device which we have re-christened the Lightbook is not a computer, any more than a pocket calculator or a portable phone or indeed an electric toothbrush or a gas cooker is a computer.
I make the point light-heartedly and even nonsensically, here. But to persist in even looking at the Lightbook as though it were a 'computer' is not merely to miss the point but, damagingly, to adopt a mind-set in which yes, of course, it's an inferior, a 'pared-down' version of something which it isn't and was never intended to be.
No, you can't read the Web with it. You can't play shoot-up games on it, nor take photographs, record MP3 tracks on it, any more than you can with a paperback book. In fact, I dare say, the Lightbook shouldn't really be appearing on this site at all --- except that it does what Nicholas Negroponte originally intended; namely, it brings education, knowledge, learning, to those billions of human beings in this world who lack electricity, let alone a connection to the Internet, who have never read a book, but whose lives would be improved immeasurably by the ability to do so at negligible cost.
May I summarise the Lightbook again?
It will consume about a fifth of a watt in power while reading the pages of a book out of a (physically tiny) memory bank and placing the corresponding data as pixels in colour on a screen. If that screen is backlit -- which for much of the time it need not be -- then overall power consumption might rise temporarily to around one watt.
The Lightbook reads books of all kinds, of any genre from novels or textbooks through children's story books to full-scale, wholly pictorial comic books, in colour, in any language and using its own typefaces and layouts. Its own proprietary page format --- to be issued, and taught, free of charge to any user who wants it --- is called "Illumination" and has been in (error-free) existence for twenty years now.
It is this format, together with the Lightbook's own operating system and interface, and its hardware configuration, which accounts for a power need so low as to be supplied from its own inbuilt solar panel --- just as a pocket calculator is powered.
Its manufactured cost will be that of:
- its simple, slow, low-powered CPU and associated circuitry, including local memory and screen output 'card'
- its case with four buttons and a reading 'slot' for the small external SROM units which will each hold around a thousand standard-length electronic books (in "Illumination" format),
- a screen, roughly 6" x 4-5" and probably 800 x 600 pixels, roughly similar to to the screen designed by Mary Lou Jepson and her team at MIT and as used in the XO
- a solar panel of the same size, together with the controlling circuitry which will keep two standard AAA cells trickle-charged and thus provide several hours of use in the absence of daylight.I have already costed this, in consultation with several first-class practical electronic design and production engineers, and our consensus is that the entire unit, produced in runs of a hundred thousand or so, will cost less than US$20 and will probably eventually get down as low as US$10 per unit.
This is virtually a throwaway or drop-in-the-mud price.
And it needs no costly infrastructure to support it. It will never need to be upgraded or updated --- the twenty or so Illumination books created between 1990 and 1994 are still perfectly readable today. It will rely on nobody except ourselves, its makers, who will also have set up the truly massive, world-wide, multicultural, international publishing house which will supply it with reading material.
(Oh. And its lifetime carbon footprint must be rather less than that of a very small field-mouse.)
As I say, it's possible that a device which is not a computer in any sense of the word may be out of place on a site devoted to One Laptop Computer Per Child.
I hope, though, that it can remain here for your interest, consideration and criticism and, just possibly, so that as a project it may attract that financial support without which the Lightbook won't get launched.
Which will be a very great pity indeed, for a few billion people.
Lightbook: Website | Forum
Tags: Carbon Footprint | Illumination | Lightbook | OLPC | SROM Units | XO Screen | eBook Reader | eReader |
