[donttrustben]

Hi,

Firstly, thanks to the calibre peeps for creating such functional and easy to use software and releasing it as free software.

So, a blue sky question: Is it possible to read wikipedia on an ebook reader? If not, what would need to be done to get there?

My thoughts on the second question to date:

1. (English) wikipedia is big (5.4GB bz2-compressed currently). ePub is natively compressed format and seems the obvious format to convert to, but I wonder how much bigger a zip compressed file will be than a bz2 one (also need to take into consideration the differing XML). Perhaps size also matters because if you store all the articles in one big file then that file is a lot smaller than thousands of smaller files.

What would be cool is if you could mount a bz2 compressed folder of ePub files directly using archivemount/FUSE on the ereader (or computer for that matter). For my case (I'm likely buying a nook), I wonder if anyone has got fuse working on android?

2. Are there any efforts to port the reading part of calibre to android? I think this would be awesome, because when the tech gets better companies will stop supporting their old products. I'm thinking of rockbox being better than standard ipod software as an example of this. Given the open nature of android, it might be possible to get commercial interests working towards that as well.

3. If you have internet access, then you could start a calibre content server and just access each article as an ebook over the net. Not an ideal solution I know.

4. Storage problems aside, if you store each ebook as a file, then it might become unwieldy to find the article you are looking for because there is so many articles, assuming 1 article = 1 ebook.

Fire away.. I apologize if I've said uninformed or stupid things - I'm supposed to be working, and these thoughts are embryonic.
ben