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[hokusai]

bowerbird:

"i'll even help you, freely, any way that i can."

As I will help you.  Not that you need any assistance, I know, since

" . . . the software is easy."

Well, it needs just a teeny bit of work without Windows, but okay

" . . . i know it can be done."

Me, too.  'Cos I already done it.  Twenty years ago, matter of fact.

Cheers,

Martin

[delphi]

Martin,

Hello delphi and all.

Do you, or do you not, think that when manufactured in lots of a million or so, the Lightbook will be able to purchase, as a component, a screen at a cost of $7 or less?

As I said before, the current cost (not price!) supposed to be $28 (and I've seen some reporting $35). And that figure would be higher still if not for the fact that OLPC, the owner of the patent, struck a special deal with the manufacturer. From the manufacturer side of things, they already assumed million(S) of units and the setup costs are small since the same production lines, with minor modifications, can be used as for traditional LCDs.

So the answer to your question for now is 'no' and only time will tell by how much the cost will go down in the future...

[hokusai]

Hello delphi

"As I said before, the current cost (not price!) supposed to be $28 (and I've seen some reporting $35). And that figure would be higher still if not for the fact that OLPC, the owner of the patent, struck a special deal with the manufacturer."

If what you suggest turns out to be true, then it's pretty well certain that we will not be specifying the OLPC screen, but some other model.   That's all.

[ In fact, I'm already brooding a bit about the MIT screen, which is fantastic in concept but which is said to have a 200dpi resolution.   This is over-specified for any Illumination book; all of the existing ones display nicely at a standard 96 d.p.i --- so my guess is that we'd be asking Mary Lou Jepsen to redesign a screen for us --- and to bring it in, please, at less than $7/unit in six-figure lots . . .]

Cheers,

Martin

[Peter Ruhe]

Solar-powered portable media player displays txt ebooks too.

    http://www.mediastreet.com/s.nl/it.A/id.4486/.f

Looks like the marketplace is going to provide proof of concept soon enough.

[DGoncalves]

What now?

[Peter Ruhe]

I received my XO two weeks ago, and am still busy learning all about it and experimenting.

A preliminary conclusion is that the XO hardware is capable of being a usable ebook reader, but the software is not there yet (ereader software and content).

I am always indoors and using the display backlight, so the solar power Lightbook concept using XO display technology is a no-go in my view.

PDF files are generally horrible on the XO because they are intended for printing on letter-sized paper.  E-books would have to be specifically formatted for the XO display to make them appealing.  Or else text must be reflowable and resizable like plain HTML.

Sometimes I dislike scrolling, and other times I dislike paging. But if I have to choose one or the other, I will opt for paging, and hope the author/editor formats pages to my liking.  I especially dislike horizontal scrolling AND vertical scrolling of the same document or web page.

It seems safe to say that for any given ebook reader, there will exist ebooks that no one will want to read on that particular ebook reader.  That is, any particular design of ebook reader will only be useful for reading a subset of all available ebooks. Stay away from the notion that we can design a universal ebook reader for a low price. For the not-yet-literate children of the world, we will need to settle on a low-cost ebook reader spec, then gather or prepare suitable libraries of content that can be used within that spec.

About myself:  I am overloaded with other commitments, and have too few resources to make any significant contributions to the Lightbook project in the foreseeable future.  I don't know if anyone else is actively pursuing the project.

I would still like to have a generic 'page viewer' (see other forum thread), especially a non-volatile page viewer.

[delphi]

A preliminary conclusion is that the XO hardware is capable of being a usable ebook reader, but the software is not there yet (ereader software and content).

Try TeleRead - The OLPC laptop as a promising school and library machine, by David Rothman
(http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/01/13/the-olpc-laptop-as-a-promising-school-and-library-machine-plus-detailed-e-reading-tips-for-people-lucky-enough-to-own-xos-already/)

"...
FBReader: Salvation for XO owners who hate PDF

On the negative, the XO-bundled reading software is primitive right now and is too PDF-centered. But you can install FBReader, free, and enjoy books in HTML, TXT, RTF, Plucker and other formats, including nonencrypted Mobipocket, as well as the IPDF’s .epub format, on which leading publishers will be standardizing as a distribution format and ideally a consumer one, too. Later in this post I’ll provide detailed FBReader tips for people who are already using XOs or setting them up for others.
..."

[Peter Ruhe]

Interesting that the XO-2 announced yesterday emphasizes ebook capability because OLPC has learned from a couple years experience that book learning is important. So Dr. Martin Woodhouse was apparently barking up the correct tree by declaring that the poor children of the world need cheap ebooks and ebook readers more than anything else. I wonder where he disappeared to?

[teapot]

Interesting that the XO-2 announced yesterday emphasizes ebook capability because OLPC has learned from a couple years experience that book learning is important. So Dr. Martin Woodhouse was apparently barking up the correct tree by declaring that the poor children of the world need cheap ebooks and ebook readers more than anything else. I wonder where he disappeared to?

It has yet to be seen if the intended audience -- teacher and education officials in third-world countries will be as enthusiastic as Americans. In US books are expensive, combining publishers' monopoly on granting printing rights and slow, designed for huge batches, printing industry, so e-books are cost-efficient -- publishers often sell them at a discount expecting them to be a loss leader, and there are no costs associated with changing the size of a production run.

In the rest of the world school textbooks are cheap -- they are developed by country's public education system that usually has the authority to print as much as it pleases, and local printing is not that expensive. E-books provide convenience (one small device instead of a bag full of books), however it's pointless at school where "throughput" of readers is limited by what can be read in 4-6 hours of a typical school day, so they merely allow kids to carry lighter (but more fragile) bags. Does it worth the cost of e-book reader that is likely to be many times the cost of all school-related books it will ever contain? It can be used to contain audio and video, however added education value of those formats is low and production costs are enormous compared to books -- either paper or electronic.

E-books reduce dependence on logistics -- if one copy of the book is there, but there aren't enough copies, you just copy the file -- even if the book is not licensed for free copying by general public, school likely has the right to copy it because it is a part of public education system that owns the book. A hardbound paper book is beyond the capabilities of a typical copying machine, and cost of such copying is ridiculously high, so paper books shortages, if they happen, are a problem that can't be fixed locally. Yet I repeat, they are not related to supposedly high cost -- non-US school systems' main problem is being disorganized and understaffed, not the book prices.

Taking this into account, can someone show that amount of book shortages covers the cost of maintaining e-books readers? What is easier to cover -- shortage of books or shortage of e-book readers? Just how poorly organized the system has to be to have shortage of books that are supposed to be printed by millions of copies by the government, and how would such a disorganized system reflect on distributing complex electronic devices?

In the end, I would not be surprised if next time OLPC will appear in Egypt, Negroponte would be asked if XO-2 plays blu-ray.