I'll get right to the point: This one looks very sweet. Michel from Staretek (http://www.staretek.com.cn) sent us details on the Chinese STAReBOOK e-book reader, which boasts a 6-inch display using E Ink technology - apparently the same display manufactured by PVI and used in the Sony Reader and the Jinke HanLin eBook. The reader is supposed to become available this November in three different editions, two for the Chinese market and one for the English, at a price of around USD $440.

Specifications:

6-inch SVGA 800x600 4 grey scales E Ink display
250g (160g without case and li-ion battery)
188mm by 118mm by 85mm (last one looks like a typo and should probably say 8.5mm)
ARM-based 250MHz SAMSUNG processor (S3C2410A core)
64MB SDRAM system memory
SD slot (MMS compatible)
USB 2.0
headphone jack
rear-mounted mono speaker
Linux 2.4.1, MP3 player built-in, uses own e-book format internally (STK)


Related: Comparison of E Ink readers (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix)

Until there is A4/Letter sized Reader under $400, I'm not interested :)

Okay, now I'm confused, I thought letter sized was A5? No? Just trying to get it right for myself, you see.

Will it have a touch screen? What types of formats does it read natively?

Sweet!

Now if I only knew what an STK file was, and how to make one, I wouldn't now be living in terror that Sony won't get the Reader here in time and I'll have to buy this one for my wife instead...

Sounds like a removable battery? A useful feature for my wife. She's one of those people around whom batteries have shorter than expected lives for some not well understood reason.

I just call her "Battery Vampire". Less than six months and I've already had to replace both BT50's for her Motorola A1200... my single BT50 is still going strong in my A1200 after seven months.

Okay, now I'm confused, I thought letter sized was A5? No? Just trying to get it right for myself, you see.

All them A's are measured in them Fancy French Units so by definition noone of thems can be letter sized. :)

The rest of the world uses A4 paper for the same uses as an American uses letter sized paper.

A5 is almost the same as an "Executive Notebook" page.

Measurements in English units:
A5 5.83 8.26
A4 8.26 11.69

I'll get right to the point: This one looks very sweet. Michel from Staretek (http://www.staretek.com.cn) sent us details on the Chinese STAReBOOK e-book reader, which boasts a 6-inch display using E Ink technology

Link is broken?

All them A's are measured in them Fancy French Units so by definition noone of thems can be letter sized. :)

The rest of the world uses A4 paper for the same uses as an American uses letter sized paper.

A5 is almost the same as an "Executive Notebook" page.

Measurements in English units:
A5 5.83 8.26
A4 8.26 11.69

Thank you, scotty1024, I guess I've had it backwards for years. But I haven't been using the terms until recently ("letter sized" is just so long to type a lot), so I don't feel too bad about it. :beam:

...uses own e-book format internally (STK)

I like the appearance of this once.

Then I got to this last line. Come on, people. HTML!

All them A's are measured in them Fancy French Units so by definition noone of thems can be letter sized. :)

The rest of the world uses A4 paper for the same uses as an American uses letter sized paper.

A5 is almost the same as an "Executive Notebook" page.

Measurements in English units:
A5 5.83 8.26
A4 8.26 11.69

I hate to break the news to you ;-)
but it is YOUR paper that is being measured in strange medieval units (12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet makes 1yard and so on...) the rest of world has moved to sensible decadic units looooong time ago.
So proper dimensions are:
A4 is 210x297 mm
Letter is 216x279 mm

;-)

Why do all the hardware reader companies have to come out with their own format. Just standardize already!

Also, looking at it, what does this have over the Sony Reader? Seems less for more money. Also a single button on the bottom right? Ergonomics? (not that the sony is great in that regard.)

I hate to break the news to you ;-)
but it is YOUR paper that is being measured in strange medieval units (12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet makes 1yard and so on...) the rest of world has moved to sensible decadic units looooong time ago.
So proper dimensions are:
A4 is 210x297 mm
Letter is 216x279 mm

;-)Stinkin' metri-elitists. :laugh4:

You left out the truly superior Texas measurements such as: yonder, a piece, a ways, a hunk, etc. :grin:

Umm, forgive me for being picky, but I fail to see anything better, or for that matter, worse, between:

A5 is 5.83 x 8.26 inches
A4 is 8.26 x 11.69 inches

and

A4 is 210 x 297 mm
Letter is 216 x 279 mm

Now, if A4 was 200x300 mm, there might be something to crow about!

And, yes, I do know that the ISO paper sizes are metric with the aspect ratio based on the square root of 2 so that each sheet is exactly half the size of the previous one and that the actual area of the paper has a nice, round metric value.

I just love to argu...um...er...debate issues! :)

Link is broken?
Not broken; it's unfortunately the only related link we got right now.

And, yes, I do know that the ISO paper sizes are metric with the aspect ratio based on the square root of 2 so that each sheet is exactly half the size of the previous one and that the actual area of the paper has a nice, round metric value.See, now that's just being arcane for the sake of obscurity to me. I mean, who came up with that approach? And why weren't they doing something a bit more useful than figuring out paper sizes based on the square root of 2, for cryin' out loud?!? Probably some crazy european ('cause it's metric) philosopher-mathematician-printer type.

Is there any actual advantage to it aside from being able to fold an A4 in half to reliably simulate two A5's?

That's all just crazy talk. :rolleyes5

All them A's are measured in them Fancy French Units so by definition noone of thems can be letter sized. :)

Actually it was German, not French, now it's an ISO-Norm.
Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paper_size&oldid=80262785

#!chris

The company and the software on PC:
http://www.stareread.com/

I think STAReBOOK e-ink product is cooperated by Taiwan and China companies.

A Taiwan rental bookstore' brand is 'STAR'
(www.starfly.com.tw) uses the *.stk format to provide its ebooks.
The reader is also named 'eREAD'.

Probably some crazy european ('cause it's metric) philosopher-mathematician-printer type.

Exactly.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799). He was an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).
He obviously didn't know metric units, he just proposed sheets with proportions of 1 to sqrt(2)

Please note that nobody knows how american "letter" aehm.. "standard" came into being, or why it is 11 inches tall (and not 10 1/2 as it was in the history)


Is there any actual advantage to it aside from being able to fold an A4 in half to reliably simulate two A5's?

Yes. There are quite a few advantages.
See a VERY interesting article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paper_size&oldid=80262785

Not the last of those advantages is that it is THE STANDARD.
The only countries that did noit adopt the standard are:
USA, Canada. Yes. Even in The United kingdom they use ISO standard since 1959.
;-)

Umm, forgive me for being picky, but I fail to see anything better, or for that matter, worse, between:

A5 is 5.83 x 8.26 inches
A4 is 8.26 x 11.69 inches

and

A4 is 210 x 297 mm
Letter is 216 x 279 mm

Now, if A4 was 200x300 mm, there might be something to crow about!

That is one ... interesting comment :)

Take a look.

http://myprecious.info/img/mr/pagesizes.jpg

Surely there is a difference between A5 and A4 (like two times difference). There is small difference between A4 and Letter (that we can ignore for a moment). Hence there is a difference between pair with difference and pair without one :)

Anyway, whole brouhaha is about the Reader size and A4/Letter sized PDFs.

Even if one print A4 sized pdf on two A5 landscaped pages, it would be very hard to read. Sony Reader (and probably STAReBOOK STK-101) useful screen area is almost two times smaller then A5.

The conclusion? To read A4/Letter sized PDFs we need A4/Letter sized Reader, and whoever will be making it should keep price down :)

I think this thread has unraveled! :wink:

Exactly.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799). He was an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).
He obviously didn't know metric units, he just proposed sheets with proportions of 1 to sqrt(2)

Please note that nobody knows how american "letter" aehm.. "standard" came into being, or why it is 11 inches tall (and not 10 1/2 as it was in the history)


Yes. There are quite a few advantages.
See a VERY interesting article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paper_size&oldid=80262785

Not the last of those advantages is that it is THE STANDARD.
The only countries that did noit adopt the standard are:
USA, Canada. Yes. Even in The United kingdom they use ISO standard since 1959.
;-)
Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.
I was not talking about the use of measuring system, I was talking about standard for paper sizes. They still use "letter" format for paper as standard and not A4

;-)

The black bar near the bottom looks like a nice place for a solar cell!

Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.
Well, so is the United States - "officially." But that just goes to show you how stubborn we are. Even though back in the 70's the government said we had to change - nobody did.

Heh, like we'd take the gubmint's word for what's O-fish-all. :beam:

imho: starebook looks nice.

[OT] nice discussion here - to sum up we need a paper formats thread!

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

Or the iLiad, at 8" diagonal, which is nearer still. ;)

Looks like they are going to OEM the STAReBOOK (for which more can be found on this Chinese website (http://detail.china.alibaba.com/buyer/offerdetail/53722146.html?keywords=%B5%E7%D7%D3%CA%E9)).

Attached photo shows the IBOOK eReader V12 which is supposed to come out sometime around May 2007. And supposedly it can be equipped with WiFi or/and BT.

Isn't it slick? :D

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

I'd really love for someone to come out with an A4/Letter sized reader. 99% of the content I use for work is letter size.

There's a market niche not being served by the current products. As you note, they are laser focused on replacing the paper-back book. That's interesting, but to me it's a lot less interesting than replacing the stack of printouts I carry home every night and keep stacked up on my desk all day: research reports, SEC filings, westlaw printouts, journal articles, court motions, company presentations.

What matters to me: a4/letter, thin, light, e-ink screen, good battery life, processor fast enough to render PDF, keyboard to search.

What doesn't matter: touch screen (nice for notes, but as the iliad has demonstrated very hard to do right), backlight (printouts don't come with backlight), mp3 player (seriously, it's enough of a hassle to keep my ipod updated, i don't need to worry about syncing another device), color (99% of what i read is black and white), content (this is a different product than the sony reader - i can honestly see owning both that and this).

How big is this market niche? Well, the only person I can speak to for sure is myself, but others in finance might use it too. I'd imagine that sales and technical service representatives would dig it. I bet attorneys would find it useful.

The closest thing on the market now is the fujitsu stylistic. I'd buy that in a heartbeat, but $2k is north of what i'm willing to pay.

I agree with you for the most part, bhaggerty, but I think the stylus/notation capability is more important than you see it as being. :) I think the ability mark up documents and send them back or on to someone else is necessary to truly take over most of the paper usage in our work worlds. :shrug:

Lawyers, doctors, professors, news people, office workers from clercks all the way to CEO's, and at least a thousand other possibilities.

As to the latest news of eREAD STAReBOOK , Please refer to HttP://www.stareread.com

It is expected that A Market Campaign is about to start in the early period of Nov.

Pictures listed before is just a inperfect sample picture. As to final ones please refer to address:
http://www.stareread.com/images/default/zh/reader_pic1.gif
http://www.stareread.com/images/default/zh/reader_pic4.gif

The photos and news of STAReBOOK in the official website:
http://www.stareread.com.my/STAREBOOK.htm

The supported formats are TXT, HTM, and "STK" (eREADER's format)

Starebook is a device where 200 million contents will be free!! I think that is the most acttractive part of this device.

Uh-huh. So will these 200 million contents also be legal? How will that work?

The content is provided by http://www.isoshu.com/... not sure whether it's all legal or what.

I added the STK-101 to our Matrix (http://www.mobileread.com/eink/). If you have more information, feel free to expand it.

Do these look oddly similar to anyone else?

Do these look oddly similar to anyone else?
MUAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D

MUAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :DYeah, makes me a bit (more) skeptical about this "free" content. :(

I mean, sheesh, you can still see the Reader's buttons under the dropped in starebook image in the lower, right-hand image (along the edge). C'mon guys.

Y
I mean, sheesh, you can still see the Reader's buttons under the dropped in starebook image in the lower, right-hand image (along the edge). C'mon guys.

So, Nathan, would you call this "Hardware Piracy" or "Image Piracy"? :rolleyes5

Um, how about "Hardware Image Piracy?" :laugh4:

That is so hilarious ... they did not even bother to take a new pic?? ... or perhaps they are the OEM for Sony Reader? :o

That is so hilarious ... they did not even bother to take a new pic?? ... or perhaps they are the OEM for Sony Reader? :oI'm beginning to think it's more like disrespect.

Here's a press release (http://www.stareread.com/en/shownews.php?nid=92) from them where they claim to have "beaten" Sony, whom they apparently consider the industry leader:A world lightest and thinnest ebook reader was firstly launched in the Cheng Du today. It is learned that this kind of the ebook reader has successfully beaten the leader of this industry – SONY, and be the most advanced technology in the world now.As near as I can tell, they mean that they're the "most advanced" because their reader is the "thinnest and lightest" -- the article suffers from indifferent xlation, and it doesn't really say much. Certainly they haven't beaten the Sony Reader on price or sales (they're a hundred bucks more, and they just launched). :shrug:

A friend who played with their software (which apparently gave his anti-virus software conniptions, BTW) sent me some screen caps which I've attached. I haven't played with the software myself, nor am I likely to after his experience, but all I'd want to see is these screen caps show anyway, so....

From the caps, the book he looked at looks like a scan & OCR job. :shrug: They did include the copyright info, which is a bit ironic, given my increasing suspicion that their content may be 'free' because they didn't pay for it in the first place.

As you can see, there's also an ad-space at the front, so they're clearly expecting some revenue from that.

Beyond that, apparently a lot of the english covers they show sport the Amazon "look inside" logos on them, so it would seem that ... borrowing the Sony marketing pix isn't an isolated thing. :shrug:

It seems to me that if this is a good product, then it'll stand on its own well enough. While I am a bit put off by what seems to be their attitude toward other folks' property rights, the hardware (what little we actually know about it) looks reasonably nice. The light, thin (apparently plastic) case makes me want to hold it in my hand before I decide whether how durable it might be. I'm also concerned about the apparent disinterest in any formats other than their proprietary one. That seems like a bit of a step backwards to me. :shrug:

They have a bunch of other releases (four just yesterday) here (http://www.stareread.com/en/news.php), but they seem to be more of the same: vaunting, low on actual info, and indifferently xlated. :sad:

I'm not sure about you guys...but this whole starthing is starting to seriously annoy me. I'm always for a new ereader on the market...but this advertising campaign is a bit (or rather a lot) of hot air.

I'll repeat what I said in the other thread...provide us with a sample...we'll give it a go, compare it to the other ereaders around (the Iliad and the Sony Reader and of course the Hanlin V8) and then we'll see how the device compares.

And please...stop spamming the forum with pointless press-releases and ads.

Thanks.

I removed the previous message. Any further posts on the STAReBOOK which include only meaningless content such as "I love it!" will be deleted without further notice.

I just tried to get their .stk maker software...but all I could get was the eRead3 software...did anyone actually manage to get that STK book creator software from their website or is it all contained in the eread3.0 package???

I sent an email to the STAReBOOK guys asking for a review device...now waiting for a reply...let's see what it will be...

My guess would be "no reply at all" but I've been wrong before... :scholar:

I like the appearance of this once.

Then I got to this last line. Come on, people. HTML!

I'd prefer PDF myself, or at least plaint text compatibility.

Seems like Sony & others would have wised up about proprietary formats by now.

Wow, you'd think with all of the e-Ink clones coming out, the price would start to drop (esp. for more cheaply made devices coming out of China). I seriously do not think that they'll see a phenominal launch trying to ask for more than a well-known company such as $ony was for essentially the same device. Those image comparisons were too much, I can't belive they did that! Who needs all of that other jazz on an eReader, i mean come on, my paperback/hardback doesn't need to calculate, play MP3's, warm my pants for me (j/k) so why should it's replacement when the initial draw is to simply replace the paper and bulk of the item?

Here's another question, does the e-Ink technology cost so much that all vendors need to charge so much and offer essentially the same sized screens? How much more would it cost to create a screen that is 30% larger? I don't see too much on the IC side, except maybe a few more to "help flip the pixels," but nothing to really inflate the price too much. Perhaps some company will eventually (think near-term future here, or hope) concede to our requests and eventually offer a full PDF-sized device that is in a reasonable/approachable sub-$300 price range. If they do, and the size/battery life/ruggedness/capabilities fit, I think this would blow all the others out of the water (or at least force them to adapt). Think of the paper saved on all of those soon-to-be-dated tech manuals, computer books, and out-dated medical refernce journals! <-- JMHO

Aside from iRex, which has its own e-ink factory (which seems to be serving only iRex's requirements), everybody is buying e-ink from a single source: PVI. As far as I know, they're the only ones currently licensed by E-Ink Inc. to make the stuff.

Part of the high prices on e-ink devices is likely the still limited manufacturing capacity. But I suspect that part of it also stems from the fact that (unless you're iRex) you can only get the stuff from one place. :shrug: