Samsung cameraSamsung’s VLUU i70 digital camera—7.2 megapixel—can display e-books in the .txt format on its three-inch LCD.

Besides shooting videos and photos, natch, it offers text-messaging and plenty else, including MP3s. See specs (thanks Dan).

Who knows what this portends? Will the day come when you can shoot videos and instantly insert them into a Sophie-style book—right there in the field—with the same gizmo?

Even with the present technology, the camera would be a natural home for such e-texts as tourist guides and maintenance manuals and some pleasure reading.

Meanwhile the present item serves as a handy excuse for a mini sermon on the need for comprehensive e-book standards. The more devices out there, the more useful such a standard will be, especially if the big publishers keep insisting on DRM. Consumers should be able to buy or rent one file for a book and have it work on all devices.

I continue to hope that the IDPF will adopt the OpenReader standard. OSoft is talking about trotting out dotReader 1.0 at the IDPF’s conference on mobile reading, and it would be helpful if the company used that as an occasion to resume a tangible commitment to OpenReader.

(Via TMCnet, MobileMagazine and electronica.com.)

4 COMMENTS

  1. Hi David,

    Definitely a call for the common reader format. I know you don’t think that format is HTML but consider this–readers like this could use HTML as the input format and then apply any add-ons they needed (like bookmarks). I don’t think people are going to be doing a lot of shared annotation on their camera anyway.

    For me, a key advantage of eBooks is that you already have your book with you–because it’s in your PDA, your phone, your camera, your MP3 player, your game machine. Although I love my purpose-built eBook Reader (eBookWise), I do a lot of my reading on my Palm because–I have it with me. Adding the camera means another ‘have it with me’ device. A bit of Wi-Fi so we can send the partially completed eBook to all of those devices and voila, we’re reading everywhere.

    Rob Preece
    Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

  2. Thanks, Rob. HTML’s fine by me, but it won’t offer all the formatting capabilities that some scientific, tech and academic books require. Also, remember that major publishers will insist on DRM (different from a core format, of course), which needs to be part of the standard. Of course, I hope that like EMI, the big publishers will have second thoughts on DRMing everything. Until DRM ceases to be so important on the e-book scene, alas, we need to think about it when considering standards. Thanks. David

  3. From the i70’s specifications page:

    File: Text file (TXT extension name, up to 99999 pages)
    File Format: Windows – ANSI (Windows 98~), Unicode/Unicode(Big-Endian)/UTF-8 (Windows 2000/XP), Mac – ANSI, Unicode(UTF-16)
    Function: Auto Scroll (0.8sec ~ 2.0sec), Skipping by 1 page/10pages, Auto reload function (Remember last page), Support MP3 BGM during displaying text file
    Language: English, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Dansk, Swedish, Finnish, Bahasa, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Turkish
    .

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