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XO laptop e-book video reminds us that the Kindle isn’t the be-all and end-all for every reader
November 26, 2007 | 5:53 pm
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By David Rothman
Believe it or not, the TeleBlog is much more of a text blog than video blog. On the way is a commentary on yet another literacy report out of D.C.—correctly bemoaning the decline of reading.
But often video is the best medium for making a point about physical objects such as, paradoxically, e-book readers.
The XO as an e-book reader: A Kahle-Cisler chat
A great example is a video of Steve Cisler, a veteran librarian, interviewing the Internet Archive‘s Brewster Kahle about the e-book potential of the OLPC XO laptop (thanks, OLPC News). What doesn’t come through in the video is the quality of the screen images for e-booking, which I’ve seen first-hand.
My hands-on happened at night and I couldn’t see the XO in the reflective mode designed for viewing in the sunlight. Will the text-background contrast be sufficient in the reflective mode during the day, as I perceive things? I don’t know for sure, even after watching someone shine a flashlight into the screen. But I can say that the backlit mode is adequate at the very least for e-reading, and I can get very excited about the XO’s price of around $200, half that of the Kindle’s—and eventually expected to be less than $100. Meanwhile a few stray thoughts:
- Brewster is right, right, right about the desirability of being able to see books in their original formats, but ideally he’ll make .epub files and other nonimage formats available as well. They’re easier to read than images of books in most cases, and precise OCRing will offer improved search capabilities.
- He needs to reach out to commercial publishers. Public domain books and other free ones aren’t enough. Readers should also have a choice of commercial books. We need all kinds of models, not just the public domain and Creative Commons models.
- I’d love to see U.S. libraries buying up OLPC-type machines and lending them to patrons, who could then buy their own from retailers on and off line. That’s in line with the original TeleRead vision, going back to the early 1990s. I proposed a general-purpose tablet for use with well-stocked national digital library system–as well as close integration with schools and libraries.
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Comments:
I can see that OLPC would be pretty uncomfortable for reading with. Two issues:
1) Watch Brewster’s hand as he pages through the book. It’s bent into a pretty unnatural position. So this would likely be uncomfortable during any reding session of more than a couple minutes.
2) Still have doubts about the screen. I know that video is harsh, but I saw glare and washout in that video. Hard to know if these would be avoided in the many places one reads a book.
OLPC shows that it may be possible to lower the hardware price to more acceptable levels. But let’s keep in mind that the OLPC guys seek zero profit. We’ll soon see how sustainable that is. And, as an ebook device, it needs a redesign – buttons in more hand-friendly places at a minimum.
XO seems to be a pretty neat ebook reader. I’ve been looking at a fairly nice sized 181 page ebook I downloaded from a site called, “Adopting an Abandoned Farm”. I’ve found the XO loads the large ebooks rather slowly. At least on my XO but I’m still learning. The pages are not all loaded in memory or it doesn’t seem like they are. They are queued up, so a larger PDF file isn’t something you can quickly scroll through, as you could on an ibook G4 or some other modern powerhouse.
The resolution is really GREAT on the XO. It’s great, some of the smaller EBOOK scans could be magnified a bit more for some books like the one mentioned above. For elderly readers who want larger fonts or diplays the 400% resolution limit might be a little on the low side. I’ve seen some Ebooks that looked fine and huge at much lower scaling on the XO more in the 200% range, so it’s dependent about the book.
The sunlight screen is really sharp and DEAD on accurate and matches the color screen nicely. Video doesn’t do it justice. The sunlight screen mode is easily as good as the Sony Ebook reader you’d see at a local bookstore like Borders. I’d say this is a winner from a gadget geek point of view. There are some caveots however. Sometimes the machine seems to act slow or hang up unexpectedly. I expect this to improve with better version updates over time. Sometimes it’s a bit of a pain to wait and wonder how long it will take for the thing to work and get going. I suppose if your a kid in the third world and not loading a huge PDF file, it’s not going to be as much of a problem for younger kids. They might seem impatient waiting, but if it’s their only experience, they’ll just learn some patience and learn to wait a bit.
That’s my first impression, but my XO is only a couple of days out of the box. We’ll see what happens later. I actually have two of them so I can play with mesh. I’m working on learning about what is going on with that.
WOuld like to see a comprehensive all in one spot manual for basic XO stuff in PDF format, that I could print off for quick reference and learning. It’d be nice to have that stuff in a printed manual for those of us in the first world, with access to other computers and printers.
[...] at least one library is experimenting with Kindles. (Thanks, David Rothman at Teleread). I think XO’s would be a much better durable choice. Kindles are a bit too fragile, IMHO, for library [...]