Sub Ubi

Slowly, the iLiad continues to improve.

I can now rotate an A4, zoom, and set my viewer to a continuous scroll. This means I can easily zoom in to half of the A4 (that is, A5), and then thumb through the document. This is almost good enough for viewing research content (articles from the ACM and so forth).

And, I now can annotate PDFs.

The PDF annotations are saved on the iLiad in the same place as the PDF; no doubt I could write the program that merges those annotations into the PDF myself, and I may look into it. However, for the moment, I’m content that it saves my annotations, and someday those annotations will be automatically merged into my PDF.

Carrie and I are off to London for the weekend; we’re seeing Patrick Stewart in The Tempest. Hence, I need a copy of the Tempest to read on the train on my way up to London. Whee!

Edit 20061027: The Sony Reader is based, in part, on the same freely available software as the iLiad. This means that some of what I say about the Sony Reader being a closed platform is completely false. My apologies. I have not updated the body of the article to reflect these inaccuracies, but you can read some of the linked pages in the comments to form your own perspectives.

You’re an avid reader. You’re digitally savvy—you have your digital camera, your iBook, and are comfortable with email, web forums, and the like. In short, you’re Connected.

And you love books.

Therefore, an electronic book reader makes sense. Electronic Ink technology has come a long way, and the promise of high-contrast, low-power screens for static text display is a reality. The prices are still high, and there are limitations to the devices on the market or coming to market. But what features should you really be looking for?

Extensibility

Your Mac is extensible. It has USB, Firewire, and you can download all kinds of software for it. You can’t actually imagine a computer where you’re not allowed to put more software on it of your own choosing. Likewise, your ebook reader should be extensible—you should be able to add new software to it without buying it from the manufacturer.

For example, there are many kinds of electronic content out there. Someone will certainly invent new ones over the next few years, and you want your ebook reader to be adaptable to these changing formats. Furthermore, you might want software on it that automatically retrieves newspaper, magazine, or weblog content for you… software that currently does not exist. When it does, though, you want to be able to download it (perhaps paying a small fee for the efforts of the individual who wrote it), and use it to make your reading experiences more enjoyable.

If your ebook reader is closed and proprietary, you cannot enjoy new software unless it is written by the ebook maker. Imagine if all of your software had to be purchased from Apple? This would mean you wouldn’t have Microsoft Word, Quickbooks Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Pagemaker, Quark Express… the list of software titles is practically endless.

The distinction here is that the Sony Reader is likely going to be a closed product; Sony has a horrible track record regarding their support for end-user modification. The iLiad, on the other hand, is based on the open-source operating system Linux. They are required by law to release much of the source code for the device, and they fully intend to. End-users will be able to write new software for the iLiad, and this is a Very Good Thing. The end result is that new and interesting software for the iLiad will be written for years to come, while the Sony Reader will only run software that Sony has written or deemed worthy to run on the device.

Connectivity

Imagine if your iBook only had one kind of connector, and it was designed by Apple and only used on Apple computers. Actually, this isn’t hard to imagine… only a few years ago, this was the way things were. Now, your iBook has USB and Firewire, which many companies use for mice, hard drives, and the like. In fact, there are no longer any “proprietary” connectors on your iBook—it is made up of commonly available, commodity components.

Your ebook reader should be the same way. The Sony Reader, for example, only has a Sony Memory Stick slot. The iRex iLiad has a Compact Flash slot, Secure Digital card slot, and a USB slot. This means you can have content on any of these types of card, slot them into the iLiad, and begin reading. Furthermore, the iLiad has an ethernet port (on the travel hub) and WiFi built in. This is the kind of connectivity you should expect from any device you buy today.

Open Formats

This is a biggie. We do not know, at this time, exactly what formats the Sony Reader will support. Certainly, it will support DRM-encumbered formats that guarantee the following:

1. You will not own the electronic content on the device; you will lease it.
2. You will not be allowed to resell electronic books you have purchased.
3. You will not be able to share or otherwise give away electronic books you have purchased.

The iLiad will likely support these kinds of “closed” formats as well. However, the iLiad already supports three formats that capture billions of pages of text already:

1. Plain text
2. HTML
3. PDF

Why is this significant? Everything in Project Gutenberg can be downloaded, right now, and viewed on the iLiad. Weblog content can be viewed on the iLiad, right now (see this post for some examples). In short, formats for which there is endless content already in existence can be viewed on the iRex iLiad today and forevermore.

If your ebook reader cannot read the most common digital formats in use today, and cannot easily be grown by you and the community to support them… then you need to justify why you are buying that reader in the first place. Does it have some killer feature? Or, does it have better marketing? Because really, in the end, you want the electronic book reader that is the most flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions, not the one with the tightest restrictions on it.

Conclusions

The iRex iLiad is the most open ebook reader on the market today. It can be purchased right now. However, it is not yet done. The iLiad team is in the process of bringing the iLiad’s software up to what we would call “Version 1.0″. Really critical things are missing at the time this was written; most importantly, the ability to scale and rotate PDFs. This means that (currently) a US Letter sized PDF is shrunk down to A5 paper size, and it immediately becomes unreadable. That said, WWW content and plain text work just great. So, given a little more time, and the iLiad will be a “no brainer”. If you have to choose between the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader, there’s no good reason to buy the closed product.

Yes, they’re both expensive. But you have to decide whether the cost is worth the utility of the device in the long run.

iLiadFan pegged my wishlist for the iLiad. I need to be able to read ACM PDFs unmodified, battery life must improve drastically, and … well, that’s it. I’m not on the file management bandwagon yet.

But we were warned: the software wasn’t done. And the iLiad folks are working hard, no doubt. I have faith.

I really like the idea of being able to easily get news and weblog content onto my iLiad. In a nutshell, this means RSS feeds. I’d appreciate some pushback (either by email or in the comments below) from any other iLiad users who might be interested in the same.

I intend to write a tool that consumes an OPML file, and generates a river of news for you to view on your iLiad. This way, if you read your news with Vienna, NetNewsWire, Bloglines, or something else (that I assume can generate OPML), you can export your typical reading list for use with the iLiad.

Given the Education feed from the New York Times, my spike solution looks like:

Now, the NYT post slugs aren’t all that great, because they don’t actually include the full article. However, if I export my Vienna subscriptions to an OPML file:

You can see that, in the more general case, I get the full article.

What I’m not clear on is how the user indicates:

1. Which OPML file they want rendered?
2. Where they want the resulting HTML placed?

Should those be file chooser interactions? Through a wizard (step-by-step process)? Drag-and-drop? Who knows…

I think I’ll just put something together later today that will suck, and let people play with it. Then, based on feedback, I’ll iterate. That, I think, seems like a reasonable approach. Or, an agile approach, which in this case seems reasonable.

Mac OSX drops little fumets all over every drive it touches. These annoying little files are fine in some contexts, but they clutter up the iLiad something fierce.

Scrub-a-dub is a little PLT Scheme application that I built to take care of these .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._ files. Point scrub-a-dub at a drive, tell it to “Scrub!”, and it will delete all of those irritating files. Of course, it might delete a bunch of other files, too… I’m not making any promises. It should work on Intel Macs under Rosetta; if you try it, and it works, please let me know. If it nukes everything on your machine, please note that I lied about all of my contact information on this site.

Additionally, I don’t know how to auto-detect the media type I’m dealing with—at the moment, I cannot tell the difference between a compact flash card and a hard drive. Therefore, it is conceivably possible to remove these special OSX files from an external hard drive, which might be a Bad Thing. However, like all software, it’s user beware. Who knows… there might be other unimagined evil that scrub-a-dub is capable of, but it works for me.

And it works for Oliver over at iLiadfan, so that makes two people whose computers haven’t been destroyed by scrub-a-dub.

(As a side note: if you want to prevent the creation of these files on networked volumes, check out this hint. It doesn’t help you with USB sticks and compact flash cards, however.)

The iRex iLiad is an eBook reader using electronic ink, or eInk, technology. It is completely unlike a PDA or laptop, if that’s all you’re familiar with.

Short version

The device is ready for adventurous users who cannot wait. I think the iLiad is amazing, but the missing functionality would make it a non-starter for the casual user. To be fair: iRex is releasing updates at a rate of 2-3 per month; by the end of September, I expect this to be a very compelling device.

Longer version

Phillips/iRex released the iLiad before the software was done. This is fine—they have a stable base, and are improving/extending it with a large pool of beta testers. iRex is active on their forums, and taking bug reports and reader feedback very seriously. As a result, they’re getting excellent real-world usage reports. Each software release (I’ve seen two since I’ve had the device) improves the performance of the device, either in terms of power management, responsiveness, or functionality.

I purchased the device with one primary use in mind: being able to read PDFs from the ACM digital library. Secondary use includes content I create myself (for example, my calendar and GTD list), and content I suck down from the web—fluff content to read for fun.

Viewing PDFs

Fig 1: An ACM PDF (Thumbnail - click)

I purchased the device with one primary use in mind: being able to read PDFs from the ACM digital library. Secondary use includes content I create myself (for example, my calendar and GTD list), and content I suck down from the web—fluff content to read for fun.

Figure 1 is a picture of the Iliad rendering a PDF from the ACM digital library. The PDF renderer on the iLiad is based on the open-source XPDF, but currently, zooming and rotation are not implemented. I’d be happy to be able to rotate a PDF 90 degrees, and view a half-page of a PDF at a time. For the moment, ACM PDFs are viewable, if you’re willing to read 7pt text.

Viewing plain text

Figure 2 is what plain text looks like on the iLiad. Before I start nitpicking, I should say that plain text is a critical, and awesome, inclusion on the part of iRex. The inclusion of plain text means (for example) that many eBooks in Project Gutenberg, or plain text exports of email, can easily be read on the device.

By default, the text is too small. It is possible to make the text larger; unfortunately, there is no global default for preferred plain-text font size. Additionally, text files do not seem to “remember” the size they were last rendered at; this means I have to constantly resize every plain text document I view, which is tedious.

Viewing HTML

Using Firefox’s “Save As Webpage Complete”, I saved the main page of this weblog. This created a file and a folder full of images and other content. Copying this file and folder to the iLiad, I didn’t expect much… I was confident that a weblog rendered by Wordpress 2.0, with significant amounts of CSS styling, is going to choke the iLiad. I was wrong.

sububi.org	transterpreter.org	scripting.com
Fig 3: Three webpages on the iLiad

My tests so far seem to indicate that the iLiad has an excellent HTML renderer on board. The rendered version on the device looked exactly like the blog on Firefox. I tried this with several other sites, including the Transterpreter Wiki and Scripting News.

Viewing Pictures

I think the iLiad has support for JPGs, PNGs, and possibly some other image formats as well. I haven’t explored this; instead, I converted a JPG to PDF, and dropped that on the device. This is a picture of Carrie with her cousin’s son; while it isn’t the best way to share photos, it certainly isn’t the worst. Given that the iLiad renders HTML, you could easily copy a complete web-based photo gallery (as produced by JAlbum, iPhoto, or similar) onto the iLiad, and have an instant, portable gallery of pictures. In grayscale, yes… but the point is, it works.

Summary

I am pleased with the device. Power management is not yet to the point that I can simply “leave it on”. The iLiad should measure power by the page turn, and have a battery life that is measured in weeks, not hours. With the good peeps at iRex keep beating on it, I’m confident the iLiad will be there soon enough.

It is always the case that, if you wait six months, something faster/better/cheaper will come along. In this case, that is almost certainly true: eInk technology will improve, screen size will increase, and so on. However, the iLiad is an excellent device that is on the market now. It is small, light, and has a lot of excellent features, now or down the road:

• [Connectivity] Both WiFi and ethernet can be used for updating the device; ultimately, I imagine that you’ll be able to interactively browse web content using these channels.
• [Storage] The iLiad allows you to expand its storage capacity via Compact Flash, Secure Digital, and USB simultaneously. I’ve ordered a 2GB CF card, but I could still plug in another 1GB SD card and (if I wanted to) my iPod Shuffle.
• [Audio] It has audio built in, as well as what looks like a small beeper/speaker, and should (someday) be usable for listening to MP3s while reading.

Given the features, I assume that iRex is imagining that the iLiad won’t just be your digital document reader, but a complete PDA replacement. If it can beep at you, it can remind you of appointments. Given its connectivity, it could easily have an IMAP client added that will pull down all of your unread email. Again, that connectivity also means that it could run a simple calendaring application that synchronizes with a server. Once iRex completes their source release, it will be possible for third-parties to develop these tools, even if iRex does not.

We’ll see. For now, I’m looking forward to the fixes that let me read (and annotate) PDFs from the ACM digital library.