E-Ink is selling $3000 "technology evaluation kits" for its "digital paper" --- 400MHz XScale Gumstix board pre-installed with Linux (with Bluetooth, USB, MMC), 800x600 6" E-Ink display, batteries, power supply. No case or human input device. US$3000; fax them an order form.
<http://www.eink.com/kits/> <http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9257262400.html> This is nice, because for a little over $100 ($120 or so) you can get 2GB MMC cards <http://www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx?i=226&a=396866>. At present, Project Gutenberg's FTP site lists 25004 text files totaling 17.45 GB (by my crude count) <insert reference here>. You could compress almost 5GB of text files onto this 2GB MMC card; in the case of Project Gutenberg, that would be around 7000 text files, probably 7000 books --- a substantial fraction of the English literary canon. >From the Internet Archive's Million Books scanning project, I downloaded a scan of a dictionary (Walter Farquhar Hook's Church Dictionary, 1842). It weighs in at 24.5 MB for high-res scans of 558 pages, compressed with DjVu. 2GB, then, is space for almost 49000 scanned pages. In December 2004, English Wikipedia's TomeRaider file was 537MB compressed <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database>, but now it appears to be close to 900MB <http://download.wikimedia.org/tomeraider/current_tr3/> including images and text but excluding page history and sounds. So for $3150 plus a case and some buttons, you could have all of Wikipedia at your fingertips, plus 2000 Project Gutenberg ebooks, plus 12000 pages scanned from paper books. In itself, this is interesting, but it gets better. The Librie EBR-1000EP cost US$390 and contained essentially the same hardware, minus the large flash. 126mmx190mmx13mm, 190g (300g with case and batteries). <http://66.150.196.37/forums/showthread.php?t=2403&goto=nextnewest>. It was greeted with enthusiasm in the press <http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1197495,00.html>. It wasn't marketed in the US, and the available books cost US$12 and disappeared after 60 days. I heard a rumor that they eventually opened it up to more formats: <http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000790024272/>. There are 1389 members of the Librie Yahoo mailing list <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/librie/> with about 6 messages per day; people are working on <http://www.sven.de/librie> reverse-engineering the file-format. So imagine $500, $250, or $100 for a similar device. (The Gumstix computer running this thing costs on the order of$99 and dissipates "under 250 mA", i.e. close to 1.25W at full speed.) Other possible applications for such machines (with their 1000-ms screen update times, during which time the screen flashes all black) include: - displaying maps - puzzle games (that is, games where you spend a lot of time thinking) - crossword puzzles - viewing concordances - hypertext navigation (The standard Slashdot comment here is, of course, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!" A 200W Gumstix Beowulf might include 200 Gumstix boards, cost $30 000, weigh as much as a light laptop, execute 80 billion instructions per second, and contain 12GB of RAM. That's roughly the same MIPS per dollar as an x86 desktop PC (times or divided by two?), but 10x better MIPS per watt. So there might be some potential here.)
