Thread: $13 eReader?
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Old 10-12-2012, 10:07 AM   #73
latepaul
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Quote:
Originally Posted by frostschutz View Post
But according to some reports you can start reading while it's still transferring stuff, so it probably won't matter much in practice unless you want to start in the middle of a book.

Also, I guess that most books will be considerably smaller. Especially if you read at a normal font size, which will use considerably fewer pages and therefore images and storage space, than a large font...

Also, even if the reader stores the images uncompressed, the transfer itself may be compressed somehow. So it may transfer files much faster, and the above estimate is just the worst case scenario...
Thanks for the figures.

Fair point about the file sizes being smaller I guess but then why not have the restriction be based on space available rather than a flat 5 books?

Also, if the transfer is compressed then the device has to uncompress it and then we're into questions of how fast the CPU is. As I said before if the CPU was fast enough to decompress basically in the screen refresh time them you could store the books in compressed format. So let's assume it's slower than that. The next question is how many pages can it decompress in the time it takes to read one? If it's >=1 then you can have a reader that's reasonable for page-by-page reading but slow for random access or skipping back and forth. Which for a cheap reader might be a trade-off some people would accept.

But clearly it doesn't work that way. The only way to make sense of that 4Gb-5Book combo is the way you describe. It's just a shame to waste so much space.

I wonder if the conversion process indexes the pages. It would allow for some level of searching.
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