Juice BoxBranko Collin‘s inquiring mind wanted to know. Could you use a Mattel Juice Box to read e-books? In the wake of a Slashdot item, he wrote me:

Some company called Target is selling these for 12 US$. With a 2.75 inch 240×160 color LCD spatial and colour resolution is better than that of my Palm Zire (160×160 with some greys), which I use for reading ebooks. [Links added.]

Well, according to Chris Smith, a poster to the eBook Community list, the answer to the “Can you?” question is a big Yes, just so you also buy an MP3/JPEG kit. “I downloaded JPEGbook, and used it to convert Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe to a JPEG sequence at 240×160. This would be directly loadable on an MP3/jpeg kit equipped Juice Box.” According to Smith, “at 12 MB for E.S.T., you might get about 40 novels on a 512 MB MMC card.”

Further thoughts from anyone? Does this actually work on a real-life Juice Box? Meanwhile you’d better find a Juice Box on sale since the usual price would be at least $40-$50–in fact, almost $70 at some places. Here’s the “Buy It Now” lowdown from eBay. Oh, and now some more links.

But what about the larger meaning of all this? If nothing else, the Juice Box shows how much the price of the technology, including LCDs, has come down–and how we really could see $25 e-book readers someday, maybe sooner than we think. What’s more, I’m intrigued by one of Chris Smith’s statements: “I checked, and people have been able to load their own ROM images on this device. It is not beyond possibility that someone could write an ebook reader for it.” Hmm. OpenReader someday on a future version of a Mattel Juice Box? Cool! Imagine the possibilities for libraries and individual consumers alike.

No, Juice Boxes wouldn’t be perfect e-book readers. But less-than-optimal reading of a much-desired book is better than no book at all.

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17 COMMENTS

  1. Chris Smith also mentiond that:

    – MP3 kit is basically an MMC/SD card adapter for the device
    – MP3 kit includes an MMC/SD card reader for a USB port

    In other words, if you already have these lying around, you won’t need to buy them extra.

    Of course, somebody could sell “Juicebox ready” MMC/SD cards filled to the rim with (illustrated) versions of Alice, Sherlock, the Yellow Kid, what have you? Not as hip as music videos, of course.

  2. All true, Branko, including, alas, the last few words. But maybe someone can do an e-book reader for the Juice Box to help make books a little more hip. Let people know! Maybe a project can be started, just like the one for Librie enthusiasts–perhaps even via a Yahoo Group. Hey, the Juice Box costs a fraction of the price of a Librie.

  3. My four-year-old keeps telling me that he wants an ebook just like me so he can read. He’ll take anything and pretend that it is a reader. I believe that this could be something I could use to make his dream come true. I know he likes these devices, but I thought that they cost too much. But now that the price is coming down, it’s worth a try.

    Ellen

  14. This bit about juiceboxes and book-readers, that’s nice!

    I got three of them for about $15-$16 each at Kay Bee’s, clearance etc.

    And more recently, I got six MP3/JPEG conversion kits at a K-Mart, the manager was kind enough to let it go for $2 per kit. I was pleasantly stunned, the kid includes a card readers for both usb and for a juicebox, software, and a 32mb sd card too.

    my wordperfect will convert text into pdf’s, and then you can select/copy images from pdf documents and paste them into Paint program. save the result as a jpeg, and, hey now.

    it makes a nice little mp3 player and a photo-display too, I like it.

    I gave one to my brother and I already want MORE of them, for clearance prices of course, naturally.

  16. Hey, Ben, thanks for the info on the Juice Box. We try to stay on topic around here, so I dunno about the Onion pointer–but I will say this: The e-book industry is bizarre enough to be written up in the Onion. Anyway, welcome to the TeleBlog, and keep us posted on your further fun with the Box and other e-book-related gizmos. David

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