More E Ink from China: STAReBOOK STK-101 e-reader

[k2r]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

All them A's are measured in them Fancy French Units so by definition noone of thems can be letter sized.

Actually it was German, not French, now it's an ISO-Norm.
Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...oldid=80262785

#!chris

[segatang]

The company and the software on PC:
http://www.stareread.com/

I think STAReBOOK e-ink product is cooperated by Taiwan and China companies.

A Taiwan rental bookstore' brand is 'STAR'
(www.starfly.com.tw) uses the *.stk format to provide its ebooks.
The reader is also named 'eREAD'.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Probably some crazy european ('cause it's metric) philosopher-mathematician-printer type.

Exactly.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799). He was an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).
He obviously didn't know metric units, he just proposed sheets with proportions of 1 to sqrt(2)

Please note that nobody knows how american "letter" aehm.. "standard" came into being, or why it is 11 inches tall (and not 10 1/2 as it was in the history)

Originally Posted by NatCh

Is there any actual advantage to it aside from being able to fold an A4 in half to reliably simulate two A5's?

Yes. There are quite a few advantages.
See a VERY interesting article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...oldid=80262785

Not the last of those advantages is that it is THE STANDARD.
The only countries that did noit adopt the standard are:
USA, Canada. Yes. Even in The United kingdom they use ISO standard since 1959.
;-)

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Bandito

Umm, forgive me for being picky, but I fail to see anything better, or for that matter, worse, between:

A5 is 5.83 x 8.26 inches
A4 is 8.26 x 11.69 inches

and

A4 is 210 x 297 mm
Letter is 216 x 279 mm

Now, if A4 was 200x300 mm, there might be something to crow about!

That is one ... interesting comment

Take a look.



Surely there is a difference between A5 and A4 (like two times difference). There is small difference between A4 and Letter (that we can ignore for a moment). Hence there is a difference between pair with difference and pair without one

Anyway, whole brouhaha is about the Reader size and A4/Letter sized PDFs.

Even if one print A4 sized pdf on two A5 landscaped pages, it would be very hard to read. Sony Reader (and probably STAReBOOK STK-101) useful screen area is almost two times smaller then A5.

The conclusion? To read A4/Letter sized PDFs we need A4/Letter sized Reader, and whoever will be making it should keep price down

[slayda]

I think this thread has unraveled!

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by kacir

Exactly.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799). He was an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).
He obviously didn't know metric units, he just proposed sheets with proportions of 1 to sqrt(2)

Please note that nobody knows how american "letter" aehm.. "standard" came into being, or why it is 11 inches tall (and not 10 1/2 as it was in the history)


Yes. There are quite a few advantages.
See a VERY interesting article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...oldid=80262785

Not the last of those advantages is that it is THE STANDARD.
The only countries that did noit adopt the standard are:
USA, Canada. Yes. Even in The United kingdom they use ISO standard since 1959.
;-)

Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.

[andym]

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.

I was not talking about the use of measuring system, I was talking about standard for paper sizes. They still use "letter" format for paper as standard and not A4

;-)

[yvanleterrible]

The black bar near the bottom looks like a nice place for a solar cell!

[Egghead]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Sorry to contradict but Canada is officially metric.

Well, so is the United States - "officially." But that just goes to show you how stubborn we are. Even though back in the 70's the government said we had to change - nobody did.

[NatCh]

Heh, like we'd take the gubmint's word for what's O-fish-all.

[yokos]

imho: starebook looks nice.

[OT] nice discussion here - to sum up we need a paper formats thread!

[ElaHuguet]

Originally Posted by andym

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

Or the iLiad, at 8" diagonal, which is nearer still.

[doctorow]

Looks like they are going to OEM the STAReBOOK (for which more can be found on this Chinese website).

Attached photo shows the IBOOK eReader V12 which is supposed to come out sometime around May 2007. And supposedly it can be equipped with WiFi or/and BT.

Isn't it slick?

[bhaggerty]

Originally Posted by andym

The US vs the Rest of the World is all very amusing, but these readers are meant to be a replacement for paper books which don't use either A4 or Letter paper. Most paperback books are 8" by 5" so a six-inch screen seems like a reasonable approximation.

I'd really love for someone to come out with an A4/Letter sized reader. 99% of the content I use for work is letter size.

There's a market niche not being served by the current products. As you note, they are laser focused on replacing the paper-back book. That's interesting, but to me it's a lot less interesting than replacing the stack of printouts I carry home every night and keep stacked up on my desk all day: research reports, SEC filings, westlaw printouts, journal articles, court motions, company presentations.

What matters to me: a4/letter, thin, light, e-ink screen, good battery life, processor fast enough to render PDF, keyboard to search.

What doesn't matter: touch screen (nice for notes, but as the iliad has demonstrated very hard to do right), backlight (printouts don't come with backlight), mp3 player (seriously, it's enough of a hassle to keep my ipod updated, i don't need to worry about syncing another device), color (99% of what i read is black and white), content (this is a different product than the sony reader - i can honestly see owning both that and this).

How big is this market niche? Well, the only person I can speak to for sure is myself, but others in finance might use it too. I'd imagine that sales and technical service representatives would dig it. I bet attorneys would find it useful.

The closest thing on the market now is the fujitsu stylistic. I'd buy that in a heartbeat, but $2k is north of what i'm willing to pay.