what about reading books in VR then ? 
Half-Life ALYX plug ā¦
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Letās think through the economics of this device. Iām going to make some wild guesstimates:
- Global annual market for an e-reader with a 13 inch e-paper display: 50,000 units
- Percent of buyers who are willing to pay extra for privacy and software freedom: 2%
- Percent of those buyers who see the product announcement and order from Purism: 10%
Total annual market: 50000 x 2% x 10% = 100 units
Purism was able to offer the Librem Server and Librem Mini because it was able to find an OEM that already made the unit, so it only had the focus on doing a Coreboot port and the PureOS configuration is very close to its existing Librem 13/15 configuration, so it wasnāt that much work. Even then, people on r/purism complained because the Librem Server and the Librem Mini cost a lot more than the same units sold by the OEM, because Purism has to cover its software development costs.
The software development costs per unit are going to be very high if you are only selling 100 units per year. If we guesstimate $70,000 in annual software development costs, that means a markup of $700 per unit over the price the OEM charges.
If the OEM can sell the same e-reader for $300 with proprietary software, are you willing to buy it for $1000 from Purism with free software?
Sure, these are wild guesstimates on my part, but Purism is dealing with a tiny market.
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I had to think about it for a moment, but, yes, I think I would pay that, if I had confidence that the product was going to last me, say, ten years.
However, that doesnāt necessarily undermine your point. I may be an outlier in my willingness to pay. Your figures could overestimate the size of the market and underestimate the costs, meaning that the product would actually cost $2000 or $3000.
Good e-Reader was able to crowdfund a 13.3" e-reader in 2016, which is still sold at a price of $679.99, running Android on an iMX 6 processor, which lends credence to your $1000 estimate for one running Free Software. However, I think there are more e-readers on the market in that size category now than there were in 2016, so the competition is greater.
$679.99 is about $594.99 more than Iām prepared to spend for the privilege of experimenting on an e-reader to find out whether it can be made to run GNU/Linux. (Those ones are meant to be supplied unlocked though.)
the question is - would you buy a 300$ e-reader from amazon if 1984 is going to be wiped during reading ??!
heck there are enough reasons to pay more but at what point would you stop and say ā¦ iām just a classic book worm so why bother at all ?
You can get a small projector about the size of a Librem Mini. You can zoom and adjust the lens to fit the requirements of your eyes on to almost any size of background. You can project on to poster board.
I used to print stuff too, but in the interest of greater efficiency, speed and resource conservation (i.e. to save a tree), Iāve since learned to use markup tools like with Ocular (go to Tools | click Review, then use the high lighter and commenting tools at the bottom of the page).
I am glad you found something that works for you.
The main reason I print is because I find it hard to read large amounts of text from the screen. I need to use better screen technology (e-paper) to fix my problem.
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not to worry we might reach the point when weāre asked if we would consent to data being showed directly into our brain from the āsourceā ā¦ thatās when eye fatigue caused by blue light or PWM would be the least of our worries ā¦ itās funny how we havenāt finished addressing the previous problems and a āsolutionā presents itself as the āsaviorā just in the nick of time ā¦ ^^ jackpot ā¦
Has anyone fiddled with https://fossbytes.com/the-open-book-an-open-source-ereader/? Not in production yet I think, however, looking forward to it.
Found the Github repo: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
Iām not on Twitter, however, the dev seems to be most active there if anyone wants to follow.
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Very low end. I think Adafruit is in recess at the moment.
this is like reading in minecraft pixelation style ā¦ but interesting none-the-less ā¦ the person who attempted this sure knows more about this subject than i do ā¦
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It does remind me of minecraft, yes!
So, you can put together a fairly low end Linux machine (or a dedicated e-reader, I suppose) using an e-ink display, out of a raspberry pi or similar board. You need a secondary board to actually drive the display, as they take about 20 volts to activate (you can use a boost converter to get the needed voltages). The difficulty is in doing anything with a decent refresh rate, or greyscale.
Physically, the screens are basically hollow, filled with oil, and then differently colored differently charged particles (usually black and white at least). The idea is you apply voltage to a cell and it attracts the charged particles to the surface, where they stay even once the voltage is applied. Of course, how much voltage you apply, and how long you apply it determines how many particles attach and how long they stay. The most basic patterns are obvious enough that theyāre known, but to do anything actually fancy with one of these displays, you need a fairly sophisticated pattern, the details of which are a closely guarded secret.
The e-ink displays you get, from Adafruit, or from one of integrated display companies, have an IC which takes care of the details for you, but they are all closed source. You can ask the display manufacturers for details, but only get them behind an NDA.
Still, you can get an e-ink panel screen replacement for a kindle or similar, rig up your own IC controller, and have black and white, with a bit of tweaking you can probably get broad-stroke grey. The fancy displays can hit 40 Hz, but I wouldnāt expect to get past about 6 Hz with a basic one.
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Ooof! 400x300 px display. Surely since January 2020 there have been higher res ones made?
A large format e-reader does have itās uses. Iād be interested in one. However, Iām more interested in something smaller. Iāll post my fantasies about that in another thread soon.
Iām using a Kobo Aura 2 - 10" i think?. From my point of view less is to small. More can easily become to big. When i bought that one, i waited for months as i wanted to get my hands on such a big one. I never regretted waiting for it. Would it have been powered by free software it would have even been better.
Big bonus over other displays: It can run for months on one recharge without much backlight, wifi turned off.
Do note that E-Ink screen resolution isnāt quite what youād expect from a digital display, so the lower resolution is slightly less important. (400x300 is still a bit on the small size, the Kindle Keyboard 3 was 800x600, which is great).
I have a Onyx Boox M92 clone, a 9.7" e-ink e-reader from late 2011. Itās a Linux device but with proprietary software. Someone managed to put Ubuntu on it, even added a bootloader. See the amazing video on this page: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=217438
(It didnāt work for me, as I was unable to change it to boot the right partition).
As for size, I think a 10" e-reader is the right one for me. It is large enough to read A4 PDFs (especially if you crop the margins) or websites. It is not that heavy to be that tiresome holding it, and it is portable enough to take it easily outdoors.
For a smaller e-reader, ultra-portable, you could just have a Librem 5 with an e-ink screen. That would be so awesome if someone makes it!
I was considering reMarkable. If only it was more openā¦
I might still fall for it, since it gives root access out of the box, so I could, in theory, disable bits I donāt like, and perhaps add bits that are missing.
Also it only has 8GB of internal storage - that would fill up quickly with all the books Iād like to put on it.
But Iād rather spend equivalent (or even three times that) money on something like this from Purism. Iām tired of getting around limitations and annoyances imposed by vendors. Not my game anymore.
So Iām on a lookout for e-reader/writer, that would allow me to comfortably read something, write or draw something, and would have enough flexibility to get those somethings out of it, or into it, without having to connect to the Internet.
My ideal e-ink reader would look like this:
- Running free software
- B5 format - ideal for textbooks, a bit tight for music scores, but still OK.
- Enough storage for hundreds of books (Project Gutenberg, Project Runeberg are great sources of classics), so that I can go offline and still read (Librem 5 have storage solved completely, with its support for sd cards as big as hard disks)
- Support for USB flash drives, keyboards, mice, and ethernet (act as computer)
- Export filesystem over usb (act as flash drive)
- Ultra low latency touch screen. (1ms latency ideal, 50ms latency makes lines lag about one inch behind stylus)
- E-ink screen working comfortably in direct sunlight, and with a support for partial screen redraws.
- Matte display - I hate mirrors that pretend to be screens.
- Low power CPU/GPU sacrificing performance to get longer runtime - this thing is supposed to replace a paper book or a sketch book, not to be a high end number crunching millions of petafloops beast.
- Two weeks on one battery charge. (Without data syncing, simple reading/writing 4 hours a day, otherwise idle)
- Weight: up to the same weight as Debian GNU/Linux bible (650 paper pages).
- Basic applications for starters: document viewer, e-mail client, web browser, some open cloud client.
- Killer app: ability to overlay hand written annotations over any document/book (in graphical form) or over an empty page/set of empty pages - Thatās what touch screen would be primarily for.
- Any else nice-to-haveās coming at later date from the app store - but this is covered by the point about free software already
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I have a small apartment and have books at my motherās, in my office, in a friendās basement and in my apartment. I invariably end up looking for books that I donāt have on site and so am frustrated. I have started to build my ebook collection so that I have access to them always.
I use a pixel tablet with a Calibre client on it and it works perfectly for reading books.
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Also, there is only so much books you can carry at any one time.
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