Wikipedia Goes All Douglas Adams With Portable E-Reader
  BY Kit Eaton 40 minutes ago


Think of Wikipedia, and your mental image probably has you 
sitting at a PC
tapping your queries in.  But that's about to change because 
Wikipedia's
Wikireader takes the encyclopedia mobile, in a sweetly 
Hitchhiker's Guide kind
of way.
  Meet the WikiReader, developed by Openmoko in official 
collaboration with
Wikipedia and available at retail starting today for $99.  As the 
press release
says, it's a "palm-sized electronic encyclopedia containing the 
more than three
million English language articles of Wikipedia" that works 
entirely off-line.  In
a time when people are raving about e-readers, the Wikireader is 
a neat little
piece of lateral-thinking, being part electronic-book, part 
e-reader...and
having the advantage of instant power-on, and cheap price due to 
its simple
components.
  Drawing comparisons with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 
is kind of
inevitable--remember Douglas Adam's description: "It's a sort of 
electronic
book, it tells you everything you need to know about anything.  
That's its job."
The Guide was also compiled by a suite of roving researchers, 
roughly equivalent
to Wiki's crowdsourcing and central editing of its content.
  The Wikireader doesn't bear the words "Don't Panic" on its back 
cover, sadly,
but Openmoko did give the device a clever interface, in a way 
that surpasses The
Guide's "hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four 
inches square."
Because though it does indeed have a tempered glass screen about 
that size, it
only has three buttons--Search, History, and Random--and the rest 
of its
controls are handled via a touchscreen interface.  The first two 
buttons are
obvious.  The last almost turns the Wikireader into a toy for 
studious kids
(complete with parental controls)--we've all enjoyed a random dip 
into Wiki's
>chive at some point, haven't we?
There's also a delightful irony in where the device is being 
sold: Through
Amazon's online store.  Considering Amazon's Kindle is touted as 
the most
successful portable electronic book, and one can access Wikipedia 
online via its
built-in browser, this is an amusing move.  And get this: while 
Amazon does, of
course, give users access to the live edition of the 
encyclopedia, the
Wikireader's content isn't static: You can update its built-in 
memory card by
free downloadable code, or by a $29 subscription service that'll 
send you a
fresh card biannually.  In truth, since the Wikireader's a 
single-use device,
Amazon's probably deemed it's competitor status as mostly 
harmless.
  [via Wikireader]
  Copyright Ággc) 2009 Mansueto Ventures LLC.  All rights 
reserved.  Fast
Company, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195


    VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
    http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
    Signoff: [log in to unmask]
    Subscribe: [log in to unmask]