Comments on: TechCrunch’s $200 Web tablet: A way for e-books to take off?

By: Travis Alber

Travis Alber — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:29:51 +0000

I think this would be great for web-based readers like Manybooks, Gutenberg, and of course, BookGlutton. In fact, at BookGlutton we’re working on allowing epub uploads (we already use epub on the back end), so people will be able read their DRM-less libraries via Firefox without any additional plug-ins, add-ons or technical know-how.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:47:35 +0000

Pond, thanks very much for the sleuthing around. If the cost is several hundred and the res isn’t better, what’s the point? But maybe the current res is better and with the right biz arrangements, the costs can come down. I’m spread thin today, and I’ll welcome other poking around.

Thanks again,
David

By: pond

pond — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:50:26 +0000

I went to the tech-crunch site to check this out. There I read that they have spoken with some large-volume OEM’s and have been ensured that they can produce the specs they want for a few hundred dollars.

Now, ‘a few hundred’ is a bit north, shall we say, of $200.

And ‘we can manufacture it for x’ is another way of saying, ‘usual retail price will be 2x’

I do really want one of these…when Intel initially put out their flash-video promos of the ‘MID’ concept a year ago, they were all 800×480 pixel 7-inch touchscreen tablets. That resolution is not much to speak of for reading text, but the screen size is very nice. Unfortunately, the consensus among manufacturers has been that we customers want keyboards, which has led them all to ape the Asus EEE clamshell design, which isn’t optimal for comfy immersive reading.

By: Daniel Udsen

Daniel Udsen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:16 +0000

From a technical standpoint it’s not nesseryly as simple, epub is in it’s purest form simply a specific zip container with a few mandatory xml files present, theres a thing 2 or 3 recommended formats for inclusion in epub containers but im not sure how strict that list is.

In it’s base you just need to unzip the epubs to read them in your browser, so it must be relatively possible, and it used to be possible with the now out of development openberg extension.

Of cause add DRM and whatever nonstandard extentions being added by ebook redistributers and the epub brand becomes nothing but a marketing gimmick, it’s happened before with both sgml and xml, and not to mention html itself.