> Also, that £8 price was the subsidised price when purchased with a mobile contract
So there never was an £8 reader, it was more likely a £30+ reader that's cost was hidden in the mobile contract or the hopes of you using their book store as it sounds from the wiki that it was a proprietary format
> The internal format seems to be basically uncompressed Bitmaps of 3 or 4 bits per pixel. Font size can be specified in the source book but not changed after the transfer.
If you could make an e-reader for £8 presumably including profit in that price so it doesn't have to be subsidized by vendor lock in book stores or mobile contracts you wouldn't want to use it. The screen would be underwhelming, the plastic creaky, file transfer slow and possibly wired only and the processor slow. It would be ewaste before it's even off the production line.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on nice quality versions of things aligned with your tech ideology, and if you do there will be more things like that in the world. Cheapo disposable tech is actually bad because it all ends up having to be subsidized by exploitative practices like data selling or ads to actually profit from it.
So there never was an £8 reader, it was more likely a £30+ reader that's cost was hidden in the mobile contract or the hopes of you using their book store as it sounds from the wiki that it was a proprietary format
> The internal format seems to be basically uncompressed Bitmaps of 3 or 4 bits per pixel. Font size can be specified in the source book but not changed after the transfer.
If you could make an e-reader for £8 presumably including profit in that price so it doesn't have to be subsidized by vendor lock in book stores or mobile contracts you wouldn't want to use it. The screen would be underwhelming, the plastic creaky, file transfer slow and possibly wired only and the processor slow. It would be ewaste before it's even off the production line.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on nice quality versions of things aligned with your tech ideology, and if you do there will be more things like that in the world. Cheapo disposable tech is actually bad because it all ends up having to be subsidized by exploitative practices like data selling or ads to actually profit from it.