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Chumby in need of a good e-book reader app?
April 17, 2008 | 1:35 am
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By David Rothman
Hackers love the easily tweakable Chumby, the little computer with embedded linux and the ability to display widgets for the Web, Facebook, clocks, Internet radio, you name it. No, the 3.5-inch screen isn’t the best, but it should suffice. So why hasn’t someone done at least a primitive e-reader app? Or have I simply failed to spot one? If nothing else, meanwhile, people could use the $180 Chumby’s Web browser to read public domain books online from Manybooks.net and elsewhere. 
Might an FBReader port do the trick? Or might someone arrange for the Chumby to display text as images? Do any TeleBlog community members own one of these things and have e-book-related apps going or anticipated?
Related: Other TeleBlog posts on the Chumby and the corporate site, as well as the Wikipedia page, a must-read for Chumby developers—plus the company’s own wiki.
Technorati Tags: Chumby
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Comments:
The main Chumby user interface is based on Adobe’s Flash Lite technology, so any e-book reader on it would need to be programmed in Flash. There’s not a web browser on the device, just lots of Flash applets that can pull content from the web. I think something is quite possible, but doing something like epub parsing in Flash Actionscript is a bit daunting; you’d really need to do the heavy lifting on a server and send a simplified and paged format down to the device.
Well if we could have an EPUB Parser in AS3 it would be wonderful: this would enable widgets displaying EPUB files on a webpage for example (there’s a lot of widgets like this for PDF, but you’re right, most of the pre-processing might be realised on the server side, rendering the pages as images).