offline wikipedia ? PLEASE

[fsvum]

hi
i don't have a ereader device yet (probably will get pb912 or/and pb360)
but is there a way to get wikipedia offline on any ereader device? i read that there is one for iPhone and other mobile device , but what about ereaders?

[user_none]

The majority of the Wikipedia apps for the iPhone don't actually have an offline copy they just provide a nicer interface. Wikipedia itself is very large. Last I checked (a few years ago) or was over 4 GB of just text.

Any reader is going to have trouble with a book that large. Not to mention most readers don't have a very robust search feature.

[gweminence]

Not to mention that it's constantly changing.

[fsvum]

this device
and this app which work on most mobile phones(Android,BlackBerry,Symbian and Windows Mobile) ,totally offline.
so why not on an ereader? 6GB is nothing.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by fsvum

this device and this app which work on most mobile phones(Android,BlackBerry,Symbian and Windows Mobile) ,totally offline. so why not on an ereader? 6GB is nothing.

Since this is available for android it is time to buy a android based reader and figure out how to get the app installed. Definitely not a calibre forum topic. Try the ePub or Mobi forums if you wish to pursue this further.

[Serpentine]

Originally Posted by fsvum

so why not on an ereader? 6GB is nothing.

It's not really a problem of 'why not' so much of the expectation of performance/problems.
For example you can quite easily process the whole of wikipedia into an epub, however the horrific size of the ToC would make it near impossible to navigate, text search would be soul crushing and you'd run into problems with most reader software running out of memory just trying to hold most of it.

Since epub uses zip, you'd need to make sure that any reader supports ZIP64, allowing for archives > 4gb, since the compressed xml is around 7gb (no images) in its raw form. I expect 50% of readers would choke on just requiring compatibility with large zips.

Apps, since you have software control, allow you to avoid this since you can control memory usage, use custom structures to cope with indexing/searching which fit your usage, compression or markup which is optimal for the format.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by fsvum

so why not on an ereader? 6GB is nothing.

The Nook only has approximately 1GB of, the Sony PRS-T1 has 1.3 GB and the Kindle Touch has 3 GB available for user content. The Nook and PRS both allow for user expandable memory but the Kindle does not. I realize the Kindle is not an EPUB device but these three are the most popular on the market and as you can see e-ink devices are storage space constrained.

You're as Serpentine said an EPUB this large would need to be using Zip64 which I highly doubt most devices support.

In addition to being space constrained many devices are memory constrained too. This is why people talk about that magical 260k maximum XHTML section size. While each article can be broken down the OPF has to list each and every part and it cannot be larger than 260k. Listing potentially millions of pieces is going to make the OPF very larger and possibly too large for the reader to be able to load.