BOb

As for the EEE, it fills a need for me and does it at a price I can live with. Had it been available a year ago, I may have bought a desktop mac instead of a laptop one, but one does the best they can with the information they have at the time I would not have paid more than what I did, and I do think that by the time the macbook dies, the price of EEE-type devices will be less. But for now, for what I have and what I need, it’s a price I can live with considering that in the days before these types of sub-laptops were available, you’d be looking at 2k for anything under 5 pounds.

In all honesty, it was more than a little hypocritical of me to criticize the economics of position considering that I have a *mumble* thousand dollars in *mumble* gadgets I could do without.

I like your idea about very cheap ebook readers, but there would be about 4 or 5 times as many gadgets to consider if you raised the limit to $100. There are at least a half dozen different ones on Ebay right now $50 to $100 range.

Just so folks will know, there’s a difference between the tiny-screened HP you mentioned and Fictbot’s new pride-and-joy—no 17-incher but certainly better than the HP 320LX, which lacks even a color display.

Hey, keep commenting away if you’d like. Great to get diff perspectives and hear about a cheapie machine.

In fact, I’ll do a post in the main area on the blog asking people for the best e-reading solutions under $50 (used). Should be fun, and maybe we’ll help out some budget-challenged surfers.

By the way, two years ago Snappy wrote up another interesting possibility, the HP Jornada 720 HandheldPC.

Thanks,
David

Addendum: Actually let’s make that under $100.

I don’t see that as a valid comparison. It would be like saying this $40k I spent on a second car is cheap because I didn’t spend $500k on a Lamborghini.

If you want a really cheap ebook reader then go look at the HP 320LX. You can find it on Ebay. You can find it for less than $60 including shipping. I have one. It supports DRMed Mobipocket and Ereader, as well as PDF, HTML, RTF, TXT. Plus, it comes with pocket versions of Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint.

Best of all it runs on 2 AA batteries.

Bests,

–tr

Update: Ficbot says you’re right. Thanks. Changed.

Update: Some of my hacking crashed the whole thing last night. I reset it to the factory settings, then went to the eee user forum and followed every instruction, in order, on the ‘newbies do this first’ wiki page. I had been too late for it earlier, I had already started playing around and none of the stuff they suggest really worked. I don’t regret the day or two I spent learning the ropes a little and I had all my files still on the memory disk I used to load them on, so I didn’t lose much—and I wound up with a smoothly running system complete with a utility that lets me quite easily make things pretty after all So if you do get a Linux eee, I highly recommend that before you do anything else to it, you google eee user forum, go to their wiki and do everything it says in the newbie guide.

Update 2: EEE had its first session with my classes today. They loved it. Full participation on a brand new song on the first go, they remembered most of the words when I played it later without the slide show, and they just loved having something visual. Because the EEE is so small compared to a conventional laptop, I was able to turn the EEE out to face them, yet still be able to see over the top and have access to the trackpad to advance the slides. Huge success! I even had a few of the other teachers poke their heads in after they heard what was going on.

In general, plain text is the hardest content to display well. For FBReader (or the Kindle) I usually recommend DRM-free MOBI/PRC files over “raw” Project Gutenberg downloads, e.g. from feedbooks, or MobileRead or manybooks.net. However, FBReader can also read the Plucker files directly from Project Gutenberg. Also, if WiFi is connected, a local copy of the Kindle Download Guide from http://feedbooks.com/help/kindle can be read by FBReader to select and download content.