TB storage for eBook readers...

[tompe]

A large portable hard disk would make it possible to always have all you data with you. It would need to synchronize automatically whem it is near other of your data storages. It eliminates the selection process you have to do to decide what to bring with you. This can be a solution until the network is fast enough.

[moz]

Originally Posted by recycledelectron

* 4TB size limit on the 2.5" SATA 9.5mm HDD (available with 250GB installed.)
* Transfer <= 120GB per charge.

I think I'll stick with my 2GB card and using internet cafes when I'm away from home. Much more robust and harder to lose, not to mention they provide updates for my email and RSS feeds.

You don't tell us what its file browse and search capabilities are. It's all very well have 4TB of data on the hard disk but if it takes 15000 key presses to get to my file it's not very usable. How does the search work? Can I say "copy all files matching ..." to the card, or do I have to search and copy one at a time? It's actually annoying enough on my home PC with only about 600MB of text + 3GB of pdf to search using Copernic desktop search, I can't imagine trying to do that on something battery powered with no keyboard.

There's also the speed question - I use 2TB disks at home, and backing one of those up using FireWire 400 takes at least a day. From the manufacturers website: Backup speed: 50 Mb/s (max), 25 Mb/s (sustained) I'm going to assume they actually mean MB (megabytes) not Mb (megabits) because 25Mb/s is rubbish for a USB2 device and would write their device off in the market. 500GB at 25MB/s is five and a half hours. 4TB at 25MB/s is 44 hours. That's just to copy the files onto the device, assuming everything goes perfectly and the device really can sustain 25MB/s indefinitely.

Also, how does it get 4TB into the box? The biggest 2.5" disk I've heard of is a "to be released" 500GB one, so you'd need at least 8 of them in the device to get 4TB. Or is 4Tb some kind of theoretical "if we keep using PATA disks and someone one day makes..." limit?

Finally, 4TB at 120GB per charge is going to require a lot of mains power. So "portable" is a bit in the eye of the beholder.

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by recycledelectron

You might be able to, but what about a soldier stuck in IRAQ?

Has network access and mucho computers.

What about a school kid in a country governed by sharia law?

Wouldnt' get his hand on such devices

What about someone interested in libertarian ideas who lives in China?

A 8GB card would hold the ideas just as well.

What about a couple of college kids on a cross-country bike trip?

A 8GB card would hold the books they want to read just as well.

What about a bright kid stuck in a 3rd world country, where running water is a rareity?

A cheap wasted textbook would be more sufficient, so he can start to learn the language first....

I'm not saying that we don't need the storage at all, but AT THIS MOMENT such a setup is overkill.

First, there aren't that many books digitized. Even if you count the digitizing comics and mangaprojects (which produces the largest files) you won't be able to fill the space up.

Second, it's quality that counts now. The ereadercompanies have to work on displayquality. Not storage limitations.

By the time the full color ebook-readers with massive runtime are available, memory-capacity will follow.
Seeing that they now can fit so many GB into a micro-sd, I'm pretty sure that in a few years the readers comes with a few GB of internal storage and with slots for cards that breaches TB-boundaries.

It's only when full colorbooks are available, that large storage capacities is needed.

[HarryT]

What are the search facilities of this device? Can one, for example, do a wildcard search and copy the files which match the search results to an SD card? The web site concentrates on its use for digital pictures - it's difficult to assess how useful it is for other purposes.

Could the original poster comment on this?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What are the search facilities of this device? Can one, for example, do a wildcard search and copy the files which match the search results to an SD card? The web site concentrates on its use for digital pictures - it's difficult to assess how useful it is for other purposes.

Could the original poster comment on this?

Judging by the user manual on the hyperdrive site, no. The Search function is by date, most recent first.

The drive posses no way to specify other parameters, even if it could search using them.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

OK. I've looked, and I get the idea, but I'm still confused.

This is a stand-alone, battery powered hard drive, intended for digital camera users. Plug in your expansion card from the camera, and the Hyperdrive automatically scans the card and copies over and backs up your digital photos.

The concept here is to use it for ebooks.

That's nice, but...

My device has two SD card slots, with a 2GB card in each. Card 1 has 3,255 volumes in Plucker format, occupying 1.52GB of space, and 51 miscellaneous text, RTF, and Word files occupying 14MB. Card 2 has 323 Mobipocket files, occupying 113MB, as well as 90 PDF files taking 50MB.

So, a total of 3,719 ebook files in various formats, occupying not quote 1.7GB of space. I already have my complete digital library on my device. If I run out of card space, I can switch to 4GB cards.

Tell me why I need this solution?

One important fact I suspect is being missed is that digital photos are likely to be a lot larger than any normal ebooks, possibly by a factor of 10. (On my device, the average volume is probably in the 200KB range, for pure text books. Illustrated volumes with embedded images will differ.)

If I'm traveling, I have the laptop, and can backup ebooks to, or add ebook files from it.

Others may differ, but for me, a stand-alone hard drive would be a solution to a problem I don't have.
______
Dennis

[BooksForABuck]

Hum--
If the hard disk can display photos, why couldn't it display text? For $150, you get a zillion gig of memory and a color display. What's the battery life?

I'm always looking for new (cheap) devices I can use to read on.

Rob Preece
Publisher, www.BooksForABuck.com

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

OK. I've looked, and I get the idea, but I'm still confused.

This is a stand-alone, battery powered hard drive, intended for digital camera users. Plug in your expansion card from the camera, and the Hyperdrive automatically scans the card and copies over and backs up your digital photos.

Yes, that's the impression that I got too. I currently use my iPod for that purpose, which works very well.

The concept here is to use it for ebooks.

That's nice, but...

My device has two SD card slots, with a 2GB card in each. Card 1 has 3,255 volumes in Plucker format, occupying 1.52GB of space, and 51 miscellaneous text, RTF, and Word files occupying 14MB. Card 2 has 323 Mobipocket files, occupying 113MB, as well as 90 PDF files taking 50MB.

So, a total of 3,719 ebook files in various formats, occupying not quote 1.7GB of space. I already have my complete digital library on my device. If I run out of card space, I can switch to 4GB cards.

Tell me why I need this solution?

As you say, it does seem a little "over the top". I've been accumulating eBooks for something like 20 years and currently have about 15GB of them on my hard disk. It's difficult to imagine needing even a 250GB hard disk for them unless one is into books which are scans of graphical images, as I believe "manga" comic-books are, for example. I suppose it might be useful for MP3 files, but I have an iPod which I use for that purpose, which is a FAR better MP3 player than any eBook reader that I've owned.

At the end of the day, though, it seems to be the device's firmware which is the limitation here. With my 15,000-odd e-books, it's useless to have all the books available unless I have a decent search facility to actually FIND them.

[dhbailey]

I can think of a great reason why this system is wonderful, even for people in less harsh environments than Andy lists. People like us who have access to computers but who may be away on vacation for a while or traveling for business.

Reading from the memory stick or SD card, when there are lots of books on them, is slower than if the books are in the main memory of the Reader. So carrying around reference works as well as entertainment reading on memory cards isn't nearly as efficient as it will someday hopefully be.

So this system of using a carrying device so that you can transfer one or two books to the memory card for reading, thus not slowing down the Reader, seems to me to be wonderful.

On the 500 especially -- I found that even having 100 books or so on my memory stick slowed things down to where it would take a few seconds to place a bookmark and it would take almost 30 to 45 seconds when i turned the reader on before I could really start reading with almost normal-speed page turns. so now I keep a single mutli-MB reference on the memory stick and all the other reading books in the main memory of my 500.

I will certainly be investigating using such a library-carrying device for vacation or business travel. Unfortunately my Epson P2000 only works for picture files and mp3 files. Boo hoo!

[dhbailey]

Actually, I was wrong -- the Epson P2000 will indeed serve perfectly as an e-book transfer device! In the Setup menu was an option to Hide or Show unsupported file types. It was set to Hide them, and I changed it to Show and I can see any/all files which I can put on the hard-drive via USB mode from my computer, or copy to the P2000 from a memory card. The only downside is that it only takes SD cards or CF cards, so for the present I'll be limited to using SD cards for this sort of book transfer.

Thank you Andy for suggestion this method!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

Actually, I was wrong -- the Epson P2000 will indeed serve perfectly as an e-book transfer device! In the Setup menu was an option to Hide or Show unsupported file types. It was set to Hide them, and I changed it to Show and I can see any/all files which I can put on the hard-drive via USB mode from my computer, or copy to the P2000 from a memory card. The only downside is that it only takes SD cards or CF cards, so for the present I'll be limited to using SD cards for this sort of book transfer.

But will it write to memory cards, or just read from them? Forgive me if I'm being dense, but of what use for a bookreader is a device which will only read memory cards?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, that's the impression that I got too. I currently use my iPod for that purpose, which works very well.

If you're a serious digital photographer, this might be just the ticket -- you can keep in in your camera bag with the rest of your kit. But you better make it a reflex to back it up regularly. Hard drives have moving parts and can break, or you could lose the device. Oops! There goes your entire stock...

As you say, it does seem a little "over the top".

A little?

I've been accumulating eBooks for something like 20 years and currently have about 15GB of them on my hard disk. It's difficult to imagine needing even a 250GB hard disk for them unless one is into books which are scans of graphical images, as I believe "manga" comic-books are, for example. I suppose it might be useful for MP3 files, but I have an iPod which I use for that purpose, which is a FAR better MP3 player than any eBook reader that I've owned.

I have a 200GB drive devoted to images, which is nearing full, and had a 200GB drive devoted to MP3s. But those, on average, are much larger files than ebooks.

For Plucker, for example, I routinely use the "High Compression" option, which gives Zip compatible file sizes. (If I didn't, I would already be using a 4GB card for my Plucker files...)

At the end of the day, though, it seems to be the device's firmware which is the limitation here. With my 15,000-odd e-books, it's useless to have all the books available unless I have a decent search facility to actually FIND them.

Even if the device firmware can do it, the device interface provides no way to specify it. That sort of search requires being able to enter an author name or title, but there's no way to do that.

If you could access it with something like a BT keyboard, that might change, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
______
Dennis

[recycledelectron]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But will it write to memory cards, or just read from them? Forgive me if I'm being dense, but of what use for a bookreader is a device which will only read memory cards?

The ColorSpace is the FIRST device in this category that will write to cards, copying data from the hard disk. Before this, they all copied from the memory card to the hard disk (only.)

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The one thing that really bugs me is people who think that because we've had Internet for a decade and a half, that we'll always have it. They are willing to bet everything on having uninterrupted Internet access.

My grandparents grew up in a world where international trade had ruled the seas for over 100 years. No serious impediments had been raised to merchants in several generations. Then, in 1942, they stood on the beach at Galvston, TX and watched the oil tankers sink within sight of shore after being torpedoed by German U-Boats.

Which is more secure: our current virus-infested PCs, or the massive international shipping industry of 1940?

Our Internet connections can go away. Our power grid can collapse. We can loose utilities. The casualties of Katrina didn't seem to realize that sometimes the systems you are used to fail, and you have to rough it.

My goal is to have a library that covers all the knowledge known to man, emphasizing the useful stuff. Food production, self defense, transportation, auto repair, and medical care and very useful. Architecture & bridge design are useful. Great books are somewhat useful. Art is not useful.

I have different goals than someone who believes a few 4GB cards will be sufficient. My target audience is someone who is not "supposed" to have access to this data.
* My library should be entirely self contained. It should never need to be connected to a network. Wireless connections should not be possible, so a repressive government can not sniff out baned devices.
* My library must be self-powered (solar?) because power jacks may not be available.

How can my library survive? The only answer I can find is: redundancy. If you hand out enough pocket calculators, someone will always have one around. Yes, they can be damaged. Yes, the disks can develop errors. Yes, they can get too old to work. Still, a million dollar-store libraries will outlast a few expensive systems.

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Have you ever read L. Neil Smith's North American Confederacy series? ("The Probability Broach," "The American Zone," etc.?) He imagines libertarians/anarchists taking over the world by dropping in easily concealable weapons by the billion to repressed people. It's a cause I've supported for years. If you arm the victims of genocide, you make the genocide a lot harder. Adding my library into that equation, it's hard to keep people ignorant when they have pocket libraries that expose them to every idea in existence.

I'm sure people will find my ideas abhorrent. They believe that only certain groups in society need power. Some claim that only a religious cast (taliban?) should have power. Others claim that only the police (stasi? guestapo?) should have power. It's all the same. These people love banning "saturday night specials" because they want to disarm the most likely victims of crime (poor people.) They believe that you must grow up in the right family, or you have the right license, or the right job, than you have no right knowing what the precursors to C4 are. They claim that only the "right people" should have "that" knowledge.

My view is that information is always good. I want everyone to know everything.

Other people believe that bad things never happen, and that nobody needs to defend themselves. They also believe that anyone who kills an animal is evil, while they sit there eating their hamburger. They think that roads just happen naturally, and putting away anything for a rainy day is silly. They would have been in denial if they had seen every ship leaving Galveston sinking within sight of shore. They don't realize how many modern countries have been destroyed by civil war (Serbia,) or have been conquered by radical nuts (Thailand.) They really believe that that all happens somewhere else, and that anyone who sits in an air conditioned room and watches it on TV is safe from what happens in the third world. Denial is very common today.

My view is that bad things happen, especially to me, especially when I'm not prepared.

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Originally Posted by athlonkmf

I'm not saying that we don't need the storage at all, but AT THIS MOMENT such a setup is overkill.

First, there aren't that many books digitized. Even if you count the digitizing comics and mangaprojects (which produces the largest files) you won't be able to fill the space up.

I've got TBs of books, audio books, etc. The useful material is out there. You have to know where to dig for it.

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

Second, it's quality that counts now. The ereadercompanies have to work on displayquality. Not storage limitations.

By the time the full color ebook-readers with massive runtime are available, memory-capacity will follow.
Seeing that they now can fit so many GB into a micro-sd, I'm pretty sure that in a few years the readers comes with a few GB of internal storage and with slots for cards that breaches TB-boundaries.

It's only when full colorbooks are available, that large storage capacities is needed.

We'll need lots of stuff beyond a color reader with a big screen and some color eBook downloads from Amazon.com to create my library. When full color ebooks appear on the market, and the rest of the hardware catches up, I plan to be ready. So, I'm working on my library's software now.

When the full color books are available, we'll need a database or search feature to find what we are looking for. For example, I'd like to know who was a fictional character in Shakespeare's MacBeth, and who was a historical figure. Was the king a real person?

When the full color books are available, we'll need an AI to note that you lack the prerequisite knowledge to grasp what you're looking at, and to suggest other (simpler) books. I've (accidentally) found that the books cited in a book I'm reading, or the books that cite the book I'm reading make a good starting point to filter to find prerequisite knowledge.

When the full color books are available, I'll still be in the middle of a book when I need to put down the reader. I'll want to tap a button, and switch to an audio book. I can drive to where I'm headed, then switch back to the text version (at the point I stopped the audio book) without loosing a word, and without flipping pages. (I'm working on that software.) What happens when your audio book is abridged, and the text is unabridged? (That's a question I hope to answer.)

I've (accidentally) found that original papers on a subject engender interest far beyond what a text book can. A science lesson comes to life when students get a copy of Ben Franklin's original letter to the (then) Royal Society of London about his kite experiment. Local high school students have been recreating Bohr's gold foil experiment that showed atoms are mostly empty space, based on Bohr's original paper that came from my library prototype.

I've noticed that you can not set out your library to charge - it's too noticeable. It's far better to charge off a car's 12V DC than off solar power, if you have a car. Using standard rechargeable batteries allows a generic charger to charge the batteries and for your library to stay hidden.

Andy

[JSWolf]

When I go on vacation, I just figure out how much I'll possibly be reading and put on enough books on the 505 to keep me going. I've not been on vacation in a while where I didn't have some sort of computer access anyway where I can plug in my 505 and get content.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by recycledelectron

The one thing that really bugs me is people who think that because we've had Internet for a decade and a half, that we'll always have it. They are willing to bet everything on having uninterrupted Internet access.

To a large extent, we are betting on our technological infrastructure continuing to exist and function.

My goal is to have a library that covers all the knowledge known to man, emphasizing the useful stuff. Food production, self defense, transportation, auto repair, and medical care and very useful. Architecture & bridge design are useful. Great books are somewhat useful. Art is not useful.

Hmmm. A survivalist?

I think "art is not useful" betrays a misunderstanding of the nature and function of art.

How can my library survive? The only answer I can find is: redundancy. If you hand out enough pocket calculators, someone will always have one around. Yes, they can be damaged. Yes, the disks can develop errors. Yes, they can get too old to work. Still, a million dollar-store libraries will outlast a few expensive systems.

And paper books will outlast all of them.

The question is, how likely do you think your efforts are to be needed, and why?

Have you ever read L. Neil Smith's North American Confederacy series? ("The Probability Broach," "The American Zone," etc.?) He imagines libertarians/anarchists taking over the world by dropping in easily concealable weapons by the billion to repressed people. It's a cause I've supported for years. If you arm the victims of genocide, you make the genocide a lot harder.

But you make attempts at it easier. If someone is the victim of attempted genocide, do you think most won't try to return the favor if they have the means and plausible suspects at hand?

Adding my library into that equation, it's hard to keep people ignorant when they have pocket libraries that expose them to every idea in existence.

You need more than exposure tio the ideas. You need a context in which the ideas are meaningful.

I'm sure people will find my ideas abhorrent. They believe that only certain groups in society need power.

In any society there will be power, and those who have it. Societies may differ in how power is obtained and held, but it will exist.

My view is that information is always good. I want everyone to know everything.

Whether they want to or not?

As it happens, I agree, but you'll get a fair bit of resistance from many you would like to empower with this knowledge.

Andy

______
Dennis