Astak Mentor eBook readers with WiFi and Touchscreen (read-only)

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by slayda

All this sounds VERY interesting but just as a sanity check, Pythagorean's theorem does NOT confirm that a 9.7 inch diagonal screen will show an 8.5x11 PDF at full size even if you assume the original had 1 inch margins all around and the reader could trim off these margins. Admittedly it is closer than a 6 inch screen.

Personally I might opt for the 5 inch screen with wi-fi and touch screen, just because it would fit in my pocket better (and of course the price is "barato" - you can determine the meaning from the context.)

It depends. If the PDF was originally formatted with 1-1.25 inch margins all around, then PDF Cropper could whittle away at the blank space and fit each page into a 9.7" display screen.

Derek

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

It depends. If the PDF was originally formatted with 1-1.25 inch margins all around, then PDF Cropper could whittle away at the blank space and fit each page into a 9.7" display screen.

Derek

A letter sized page needs a 14" reader to read it successfully. So you would have to pull 4.3" off the diagonal to make it. Admittedly you could probably shrink it a bit without serious consequences but the math with 1" margins does not compute for 100% image.

Dale

[Nate the great]

I've been exchanging emails, and would like to share some of the contents.

The Astak Mentor is a joint project between PVI (screens), Netronix (assembly and design and Touch expertise), and Astak (end design and sales). We developed it in-house in Taiwan and are now refining it in San Jose, California.

The software issue is still being resolved. We have received a ton of help and cooperation from Fictionwise and will include their eReader. We are negotiating in Europe with Mobipocket now. Mobipocket (Amazon) wants exclusivity and we do not want that. Our reasoning is that exclusivity places everybody in Amazon's teeth. We argue that Amazon stands to lose a ton of book sales if they insist on the exclusivity angle. We would have to go without them in at least North America. We are hoping that Amazon will realize this and drop the exclusivity of their agreement. We have released an SDK to Fictionwise for porting.

There is more, but since I don't have explicit permission to post this I decided to only quote the parts that have already been discussed here.

[zelda_pinwheel]

thanks for the info ! any other news you can share ? like about features (dictionary lookup ?) or price for the 6 inch version including touchscreen and wifi, or vendors / price in europe ?

[Nate the great]

Much is still up in the air.

[davidw89]

Aww i just bought the Sony Psr505

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by davidw89

Aww i just bought the Sony Psr505

It is my belief that each household should have several e-ink readers, from a range of the producers. Bookeen, Sony, Amazon, Astak, Netronix, iLiad... And if one has any money left over from ereaders and ebooks, one can then pay the rent/mortgage, buy food, etc.

Derek

[moz]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I decided to only quote the parts that have already been discussed here.

Thanks Nate, great to be kept up to date.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Much is still up in the air.

well, you know where to find us, when gravity begins to take effect...

[msundman]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Medium is a "specific" font size which the reader labels as "medium". I am sure internally it equates to a specific point size.

Ah, OK, so this is just a communication error. By "arbitrary" I didn't mean it's unknowable or variable, but "whatever someone at sony happened to pick, more or less by random". (And, by the way, I apologize for expressing that in a way that had no good "outs" for you, but you responded gracefully (instead of in anger, like many others would have done) so kudos to you for that.)

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Yes, the total page count is adjusted based on the 3 font sizes available. I also don't see a problem with that.

Oh, I though it wasn't. Someone else said that the page count is fixed, but depending on your setup it sometimes advances 2 page numbers when you turn a page, or it might advance the page number only after turning 2 pages. However, if it indeed always advances one page number for each page you turn no matter what your setup is then I've been misinformed.
Well, either way is inconsistent. You're of course free to not mind having such an inconsistency. (And you're free to hammer your square pegs through any which hole you want.)

Originally Posted by pilotbob

I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I don't see why adjusting the total page count is a problem since the total page count DOES change as the font size changes.

If you pick up a HardCover copy of a book and a softcover property of the same book and a large print version of the same book, I bet you that ALL 3 will have different number of pages and page 150 will have different text in each one. Is this in any way confusing to you?

Yes, it is indeed confusing to me if I switch between the 3 versions, and I thought I already described (or at least hinted at) why. And it's obviously inconsistent.

P-books have this limitation, but e-books don't. In fact, I hate that none of the e-book readers I've tried support overlaps when I "turn the page". My current reader's 150-200 ms page flips makes this less of an issue than would, say, a 2000 ms page flip of a sony reader. But still, why can't they have a user-specifiable number of rows of the next page visible at the bottom, and similarly at the top? Probably precisely because the makers of the software are so used to the limitation of page breaks that the feature just hasn't occurred to them. OTOH, they have seen webpages, which are completely pagesizeless, so they figured you can also have e-books be completely pagesizeless and have the text just scroll across the screen, one pixel/text line at a time (and at this time the observant ones start realizing how illogical it is to be talking about pages when everything's just one, long, scrolling page). That's the other extreme, and kinda inherits the limitations of that too, and I don't quite like that either.

I understand that many people want new stuff to have the same limitations that old stuff had (like how powerpoint moronically copies the worst limitations of physical slides *shudder*); it's familiar, it feels comfortable, and you don't have to adjust your way of thinking in any way. However, it's not sane as such, even though some of its implications might be sane.

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Although I still think the definition of insane isn't: "msundman doesn't agree with it."

Of course it isn't, which is why I wrote the actual reason why it's insane (and even that isn't the definition if the word). I even added the thing about the square peg through the round hole in a try to make it more clear. (Yes, yes, I know they sometimes make round pegs by doing just that, but that'd be out-of-context.)

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

thanks for the info ! any other news you can share ? like about features (dictionary lookup ?) or price for the 6 inch version including touchscreen and wifi, or vendors / price in europe ?

eReader has dictionary lookup. For features look at the product that is already released.

Dale

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by msundman

I hate that none of the e-book readers I've tried support overlaps when I "turn the page". My current reader's 150-200 ms page flips makes this less of an issue than would, say, a 2000 ms page flip of a sony reader. But still, why can't they have a user-specifiable number of rows of the next page visible at the bottom, and similarly at the top? Probably precisely because the makers of the software are so used to the limitation of page breaks that the feature just hasn't occurred to them. OTOH, they have seen webpages, which are completely pagesizeless, so they figured you can also have e-books be completely pagesizeless and have the text just scroll across the screen, one pixel/text line at a time (and at this time the observant ones start realizing how illogical it is to be talking about pages when everything's just one, long, scrolling page). That's the other extreme, and kinda inherits the limitations of that too, and I don't quite like that either.

I agree that there are two intrinsically different models of how an e-reader should work, one is page based and the other is text stream based. Converting a document to PDF with a fixed page size (optimized for the target device) is the purest version of the page approach, and an unmodified web browser is at the other extreme. Actual readers are somewhere between these two poles, but most want to present the page model to the user even if it is not used internally. It has been mentioned in other threads that a good test is to try to goto the middle of a page somehow (e.g. search). If this ends up at the top of a page after all, then the reader isn't enforcing a fixed page layout for the document as a whole.

FBReader is a good example of a reader that does not enforce pagination, and it allows overlap between pages if you want (or not if you don't want). I also agree that overlap between pages could be implemented by a genuine paginating reader (e.g. this is in principle possible when converting to PDF), but I am not aware of one that does so.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

eReader has dictionary lookup.

i did not know dictionary lookup support was a feature of the format software, not the product firmware / os.

For features look at the product that is already released.

Dale

Astak has already released a product ? which one ?

[slayda]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

It is my belief that each household should have several e-ink readers, from a range of the producers. Bookeen, Sony, Amazon, Astak, Netronix, iLiad... And if one has any money left over from ereaders and ebooks, one can then pay the rent/mortgage, buy food, etc.

Derek

Food?? We don't need no stinking food! Words are food for the soul.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i did not know dictionary lookup support was a feature of the format software, not the product firmware / os.



Astak has already released a product ? which one ?

they have already announced that they will use eReader. Look at it.

dale