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lumpen · 05-20-2010, 12:45 PM

I am not affiliated with any company. I was looking all over for a cheap ereader, and the Kobo stood out immediately as it was cheap and I live in Canada, I kept looking and and noticed the foxit ereader which looked strikingly similar with the same 6" e-ink screen and that square menu button on the bottom right. I looked up e-ink readers on sites listing manufacturers and found many listings of similar items with 6" e-ink screens and that same layout.

By "hacker" ereader, I meant one that gave us access to the OS and ability to customize everything (fonts, zooms, image viewing?), but I do not know if this is actually an option with ereaders straight from the manufacturer, and I do not know how to program. I don't like the idea of being limited to amazon or any other online store for ebooks, I like to use my local library website or other free services like gutenberg. However, I mainly need to read scientific research articles which no reader seems to be good for.

The more I look into it the more this is a bad idea, Iphinome hit most of the points: "$145 is about what my refurbished Kindle cost it doesn't sound like much of a deal especially for a bulk and for having to deal with shipping costs, probably import duties and the effort of writing new firmware or writing patches for the current that will no doubt void the warranty." I think the software immediately available for these will have poor English setups (Many seem to support Chinese, English and Russian). There would be no warranty or technical support. The price can be beaten by other companies and the technology is advancing quite quickly. An order of 100 would be impossible, and if not sold right away they would become outdated and worthless in a few months, if not weeks. Also, not having the backing of any legitimate online stores would raise costs and limit the availability of reading material. I don't know how patents on file formats work, but I assume if they manufacturer supplies an OS which can support "TEXT: TXT, Fb2, FB2.zip, TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML, PRC, CHM, DJVU, DOC, EPUB, TCR Image: JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF" then these formats are already cleared in some way.

The supplier I talked to said I could get a single sample reader for $185USD (180 for 10-15), but it looks exactly like a Kobo from the poor quality pictures available and paying an extra $30 dollars to support "any file format" may not be worth it for me.

05-20-2010, 12:45 PM	#12
lumpen Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2010 Device: Kobo or PRS300	I am not affiliated with any company. I was looking all over for a cheap ereader, and the Kobo stood out immediately as it was cheap and I live in Canada, I kept looking and and noticed the foxit ereader which looked strikingly similar with the same 6" e-ink screen and that square menu button on the bottom right. I looked up e-ink readers on sites listing manufacturers and found many listings of similar items with 6" e-ink screens and that same layout. By "hacker" ereader, I meant one that gave us access to the OS and ability to customize everything (fonts, zooms, image viewing?), but I do not know if this is actually an option with ereaders straight from the manufacturer, and I do not know how to program. I don't like the idea of being limited to amazon or any other online store for ebooks, I like to use my local library website or other free services like gutenberg. However, I mainly need to read scientific research articles which no reader seems to be good for. The more I look into it the more this is a bad idea, Iphinome hit most of the points: "$145 is about what my refurbished Kindle cost it doesn't sound like much of a deal especially for a bulk and for having to deal with shipping costs, probably import duties and the effort of writing new firmware or writing patches for the current that will no doubt void the warranty." I think the software immediately available for these will have poor English setups (Many seem to support Chinese, English and Russian). There would be no warranty or technical support. The price can be beaten by other companies and the technology is advancing quite quickly. An order of 100 would be impossible, and if not sold right away they would become outdated and worthless in a few months, if not weeks. Also, not having the backing of any legitimate online stores would raise costs and limit the availability of reading material. I don't know how patents on file formats work, but I assume if they manufacturer supplies an OS which can support "TEXT: TXT, Fb2, FB2.zip, TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML, PRC, CHM, DJVU, DOC, EPUB, TCR Image: JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF" then these formats are already cleared in some way. The supplier I talked to said I could get a single sample reader for $185USD (180 for 10-15), but it looks exactly like a Kobo from the poor quality pictures available and paying an extra $30 dollars to support "any file format" may not be worth it for me.