274
Solar-Powered E-Reader With No Buttons
(hackaday.com)
Okay this is so fucking cool.
I want a scheme for one with all the buttons. Gimme tactile!
It’s called paper?
That's a good one
Super cool project. FYI it does require converting your ebooks to a special format.
I suspected as much since it's using an Arduino Mega - very battery efficient I'm sure, but very underpowered.
Epub, the most popular format, is a fucking website, not very efficient. And it even allows the author to set font size and stuff, i mean, use a pdf then.
Except that a PDF isn’t dynamic. You’d be locked to whatever the page/text ratio was on every unique screen size. Not to mention all of the accessibility you lose because you can’t use a dyslexia-friendly font or increase the font size for bad eyesight.
That’s all before we get into the performance hits. EPUB certainly has its place in the market.
Yeah, i mean, why does the author need to be able to influence styling that much in a fucking ebook? That's why, use a pdf then, if you want to force styling that much.
Btw, there's FictionBook. But some find it too limited?
This is amazing! Using LICs is pretty ingenious considering the pure use case of an ereader.
I still kick myself for not getting one of the first Kindle models that had free 3(4?)G built in.
I don’t think it was free, you still had to pay for data
No, it was free. Not really usable for web browsing given abysmal performance of Kindle Keyboard, but 100% free.
Huh how does that even work? Amazon doesn’t have a mobile network so were they just paying some third party and eating the costs?
Yeah they were using AT&T. Remember that at the time Kindle books were limited with respect to images so you're talking a couple megabytes tops. The Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety, images and all, is 12MB. The primary use case was whisper sync which is just sending page numbers.
Plus this was on 3G while AT&T had moved mostly over to LTE, so you weren't competing for bandwidth with most subscribers. I imagine Amazon got a pretty good deal, but more importantly it helped cement them as the default option for e-readers.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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