In 2009, the world met WikiReader. This is a single-purpose gadget that holds all of his 6.5 million articles on the English Wikipedia, from cockroach population declines in post-Soviet states to a list of lists of lists.
Perhaps you’re stranded on the world’s least populated archipelago without the internet and want to read about an 18th-century woman who convinced a doctor she gave birth to a rabbit. may be the list of dinosaurs in All you need is two AAA batteries and your trusty WikiReader.
The aesthetically unremarkable Daughter Gizmo measures 4 inches by 4 inches and has a resolution of 240 by 208 pixels. It has an e-ink display with a somewhat clumsy touchscreen that fits better on a stylus than a finger, and its outer body has just the WikiReader logo and three buttons: Search, History, and Random. it’s simple. Some might say it’s perfect. It has also disappeared from the market since his 2014 when her parent company, OpenMoko, shut down his WikiReader.
But the device didn’t really die, thanks to a very private and very dedicated person called Jack who keeps the decade-old device’s usefulness alive. Jack sells his SD card with updated content for $34 for him, or $29 for a digital download (without his new SD card, Wikireader content is completely outdated). is). Jack first developed a new SD card for his 2015 content, which took him over a year. Set up your Ubuntu environment and modify Wikipedia downloads to be handled by WikiReader. “It took him five to six days to process the Wikipedia download into his WikiReader database, so each test cycle he took a week,” Jack said. input on mail. “It all took a very long time.”
He sells “only a few a month,” but keeps updating every year. The 2022 update is he available from July.
“Many of our buyers are seniors or in their 50s, and we’re buying for fathers in their 80s,” he said, noting that many die-hard WikiReader fans “do not use computers or the Internet. ),” he added. He continues: Sold to the Philippines, UK and Australia. He says some of his other buyers want offline access to Wikipedia for travel and flights. Other customers are inmates who live in facilities that allow small electronic devices. .
We have a strong WikiReader subreddit of 189 people and Jack believes he is “the only person in the world who makes updates and makes all articles (at least those that can be viewed in WikiReader) work”. ”His SD card is for sale on eBay, Amazon, and jacksuniversal.com, with the appropriate tagline affixed.
For WikiReader owner Ryan Michael Moberly, having Wikipedia accessible at all times is very important. he jokes
Wikireader is not created To Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that manages Wikipedia, issued a statement endorsing the device upon its 2009 release. A representative of the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a public post: The official WikiReader web page states, “Socrates pondered more important things than bandwidth. So do it.”
Disappeared but not forgotten
WikiReader, like many Internet gadgets these days, has been relegated to dusty shelves and basement bins. Take, for example, Kin, the social networking device that Microsoft spent his $1 billion on developing, which saw him pull out of the market after two months due to poor sales. There was also the legendary Twitter Peek. It’s a light blue handheld device made specifically for Twitter that sounds like a torture device. For $8/month you get Internet access, but only Twitter.
Twitter Peek received widespread criticism (it’s on many “worst product” lists). Shortly after its unsuccessful launch, Twitter Peek shut down his service in January 2012, abandoning users who paid $299 for “lifetime service.” Wow. These days, Twitter Peek graces collector’s shelves and failure museums. Perhaps one of the reasons Twitter Peek didn’t intrigue me was its horrible user experience. You have to click on a tweet to read more than the first few words, defeating the purpose of a site full of bite-sized posts.
But surprisingly still existing WikiReader remains relevant. I bought it on eBay a few months ago and was pulling it up on the subway when I started to wonder and had to scratch my itch. Unfortunately, I’m crazy. Cause I’m lost This device has suddenly become indispensable for me. Spend less time scrolling through Instagram and more time scrolling through Wikipedia articles on mondegreens. Online encyclopedias are good, but sometimes offline encyclopedias are better.
