I was reading the article
Why the commercial ebook market is broken, when I came across this in the comments:
Quote:
|
My suggestion was to standardize at 800x600 monochrome bitmapped pages, because anything higher drove up the minimum cost of the end-user device. It could handle simple images and anyone's alphabet, yet avoided the scope-creep that seems to drive us to laptops displaying PDFs.
|
There's more about it, but that seems to be the core idea. That struck me as very interesting, as that would solve the cost issue in a rather neat way.
Let's assume that the hypothetical device had a extremely low-end CPU with 6" display (LCD for now, maybe eInk when prices fell down). All it would need to support is a very primitive OS and UI for browsing various books. The file format would be blindingly simple, a ZIP file with an "index" describing the TOC and various profiles available. Each profile would essentially be a set of page images in some format (PNG?) fitted to the ebook's screen. You could have a profile for small font, one for large font and another for landscape (it would all depend on the publisher). This would increase the size of the book from ~200-300kb to around 3-4MB, but storage is very cheap nowadays so wouldn't matter as much. The advantages would be many:
- support any language with all the "standard" book formatting we expect in a paper book
- low CPU/battery requirements, cheap to build
- OS can be very small and no further "upgrades" required
- Easy creation of books from any application ("virtual" printers)
- Books can be read directly on the PC side too
It would suffice for most people and make low-cost ebook readers widely available. It could peacefully coexist with more costlier devices which supported much more features (People would upgrade if they felt the need).
I know this is probably a pie-in-the-sky idea, but what do you think?