OLPC tech guru on ‘$100 laptop’ as p-book replacement with high-res screen
From Mary Lou Jepsen’s comments in an OLPC Talks transcript just quoted in OLPC News:
The screen is 7.5 3×4 so it is more 30% more area than the last screen. It’s 200 DPI which [is] about 5 times the resolution of your screen which is 72 probably. Why is 72 5x? Because it’s X and Y.
The reason we went high resolution is part of the justification of the expenditure of government for book replacement. The number one reason we prefer to read on paper rather than on a screen, so it’s stunningly higher resolution, color translucent mode is about 800×600 up to XGA and that is 1024×768, it’s a smaller screen so the pixels are more dense [sic].
The center area of the touchpad is touch-sensitive. Across the whole thing you can write so you can learn to write with a stylus, and that’s the whole length of the screen – 6 inches.
The TeleRead take: With OLPC laptops very possibly destined for oodles of U.S. schools, more kids than ever will grow up accustomed to reading e-books and other texts off screens. Same for other countries. That could be bad news for people in the book business who ignore consumers’ intense dislike of DRM. More and more readers will demand e-books—and without the usual DRM hassles.
Related: Terrific IEEE article on Jepsen, including the above photo.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
now instead of 1 laptop per child, it has become 1 laptop per 1.75 child. i simply don’t get the idea of providing laptops to children of the third world when they still lack the basic needs - medicine, food, lodging… the money would be better used for something else, anyway, what use is a computer without internet? who is going to pay for their internet access?
April 30th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
A posting on the ZDNet “Education IT” blog by Marc Wagner is also emphasizing the value of the OLPC for electronically distributing educational e-books. In fact, Wagner thinks that the entire OLPC project goal would be worth the expense if the computers are used as e-book readers and children are given access to large e-book libraries. Here is an excerpt of his blog posting:
Wagner also is concerned about the possibility of censorship. A topic David Rothman also commented on recently. Here is an excerpt:
May 1st, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Isn’t there an opportunity here for someone who wants to create
a nationwide tax-dollar-supported digital library system? Seems like it
might make sense to start a non-profit dedicated to adapting
the OLPC technology for free e-book readers for the nation’s
public library system. Partner with the OLPC and LOC and wireless
hotspot providers to provide access to content from the local
public libraries via the mesh network. The library would run what the
One Laptop folks call the “school server”; the patrons would use
stripped down versions of the laptop (maybe not so stripped; the
keyboard would still be useful for note-taking).
May 1st, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Mr. Wagner apparently hasn’t been reading carefully. There’s next to no storage on these machines. What the project is planning to do is establish a server in each community that has a disk, and contains the large volumes of materials. The laptops will access the material over the network.
May 1st, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Bill: Yep. I like your idea. E-books have been a support nightmare because of all the different formats, in addition to the usual hardware challenges. You’re talking about standardization in effect. That’s ok as long as different vendors can participate.
Mix the software and related hardware standards with a comprehensive solution and tax money (perhaps a mix of local, state nd federal), and voila, you’ve got a variant of TeleRead.
I’m using the word “comprehensive” with some major caveats, by the way. I don’t want any national digital library system to control all of publishing; no Big Bro, please. I’m sure you’d agree.
But most books are not controversial, and within certain categories, such as textbooks, there could be a wide choice. Furthermore, with standards around, the consumer machines and the infrastructure associated with the system could work with all kinds of books.
As for a cause dear to you—e-books accessible on the Web rather than on users’ local drives—I continue to worry about the downside. For example, do we want Big Bro to yank away books already on the server?
But for people who want this as an option in the interest of simplicity and variety, I think it would be fine. What’s more, the ubiquity of the system would actually make this approach more practical than otherwise.
Thanks. Further details welcome!
David
May 1st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Below is an excerpt from a recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte that mentions e-books on the OLPC and is dated May 2007 (bold added for emphasis):
The excerpt leaves the impression that some e-books will be pre-loaded on the OLPC. Yet, the memory of each OLPC is limited and so access to a really big library of e-books requires something like a local server, a non-local server, or a distributed storage system using other OLPCs.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:38 pm
[...] OLPC tech guru on ‘$100 laptop’ as p-book replacement with high-res screen (tags: ebooks olpc) [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
There’s an initiative called LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) which seems relevant. If your community library served the copies, so that there would be thousands of copies of each document, it might be hard to remove them all from every server.
Note the current antics going on on DIGG…
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Actually, they’ve recently increased the storage on the machine from 500 MB to 1 GB (which must accommodate the system software as well as data like books). I believe it has 256 MB of RAM. You could probably get a lot of books in, say, Plucker or some other compressed format, in that amount of space.
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:04 am
Bill: Many thanks for mentioning LOCKSS. Looks very interesting. The prob is that at first glance–am I missing something–I don’t see participation by large book publishers. I’m not sure how fond they’d be of letting local libraries keep copies.
Simply put, while LOKSS is a dandy system for consenting journal publishers, it has its limits.
So the big prob remains. Consumers will have to trust large central sources rather than being able to download and have permanent access to copies of a wide variety of content.
Hey, keep plugging away with your thoughts on possible solutions. I do see merit in books-living-on-the-Net as an option. What’s more, in the case of truly networked books of the variety that the good folks at Sophie envision, there won’t be any other choice.
Thanks,
David