Fan Efforts to Build an Open Hardware E-Book Reader

Not Another E-Book LLC is an effort by contributors to the Baen forums to build an open (i.e., no stupid DRM) e-book reader.

Essentially the idea is to put together a spec for the reader, then get enough people to sign on to buy one to contract with an manufacturer to produce the device. The group’s mission statement says that,

1. This is a reader by us for our own use and for any other book lover who just wants to read books without being trapped into anyone else’s business plan.

2. We will not lock you into any one format, or try to dictate your choice of download sites.

We don’t want anyone doing that to us and we’re not going to do it to you.

3. This is a bare bones reader. That means you can carry a small library with you and we don’t have to charge you the earth for it.

If you want something that does text messaging you’ve bought the wrong device.

4. No DRM and no hidden “gotchas” what you see is what you get.

5. We intend this reader to support as many formats as possible

Very nice effort. Personally, though, I’ve given up on separate e-book readers and have been using Mobipocket on my Treo to read books.

A friend whose wife uses Mobipocket tells me the app is a real pain-in-the ass to use with DRMed files, but I’m converting straight .txt/.doc/.html files to the Mobipocket format using Mobipocket’s library manager. The program as a whole is pretty slick and does a pretty good job of preserving highlights and annotations which are extremely important to me.

A dedicated e-book reader would have to be extremely impressive to get me to add yet another device to my gadget bag. I carry my cell phone everywhere and so always have the latest book I’m reading with me. It’s not perfect, but the convenience more than outweighs the negatives (which, in the case of the Treo, is the small screen size, but after a few hours my brain adapted to reading smaller chunks and constantly scrolling).