The WikiReader
--------------

Here's another post that, like "Lateral Thinking with Withered
Technology", I've been sitting on for years.  I'm on a bit of a
quest to get as many posts in that category out the door as I can
in the coming months, I'm gunning for one each weekend at least.
This one is vaguely related, I guess in more way than one, to the
last, although I can't actually remember which obscure old hand-held
device I stumbled upon the existence of first, the WonderSwan or
the WikiReader[1].

As the name plainly suggests, the WikiReader is a special-purpose
portable device for being able to always read Wikipedia articles
on the go.  This is...not a device category which has necessarily
aged well, but bear in mind the WikiReader was launched in 2009.
Smartphones were very new, a lot of folks didn't have one, and
mobile data was slow and expensive by modern standards.  An offline
reader made some kind of sense, at least I'm sure it did in the
minds of the kind of people who thought it was important to always
have access to Wikipedia.  I'm kind of surprised I don't remember
ever hearing about the WikiReader in its hey-day.

While I'm sure the user experience itself was actually probably
pretty miserable, there's something conceptually captivating about
the device and associated service.  A diminutive little 10cm x
10cm (4"x4") thing which would fit comfortably in a shirt pocket,
with a monochrome LCD display, the whole thing powered by just
two AAA batteries and supposedly running for 90 hours off them,
it's maybe the youngest device to sit comfortably in that same
category inhabited by the the Cambridge Z88 or Atari Portfolio -
machines which seem to run for supernaturally long time spans using
ancient hardware on the most meagre and mundane of portable power
sources, making a quiet mockery of all our "progress" in portable
computing.  The textual content of all the articles was stored
on a removable microSD card.  For a yearly subscription fee, you
could get cards mailed to you twice a year with the latest versions.
I find the idea of receiving a new edition of Wikipedia in the mail
strangely delightful.  It's a model which acknowledges the simple
truth that digital content can indeed have a useful shelf-life.
Obviously there are things you can look up in the "live" Wikipedia
with an internet connection which you can't in a one or two year
old stored version, but this hardly reduces the stored version to
the level of uselessness or pointlessness.  In ye olde days, nobody
with a factual question they needed answered who could only find
even a five or ten year old set of Britannica to hand would turn
their nose up that as being uselessly outdated.  Knowledge changes,
but most of it doesn't change *that* quickly.

A modern incarnation of this device could, I imagine, be a really
fantastic thing.  It would use e-ink rather than an LCD, of course,
being delightfully readable outdoors, with nice crisp fonts and
even more ridiculous battery life.  It could include not just
the text of the articles but the images too, suitably scaled and
dithered and whatnot to look as good as possible - which certainly
would be good enough - on the e-ink display.  A Kiwix image of
all of English Wikipedia from a few years back including images
(and maybe other multimedia too?) is just a little over 100GB, and
with the images optimised for such a device would certainly be well
under 100GB, easily suited to a modern microSD card.  That would
be slow to search, of course, but some kind of index could be
computed once and stored on something quicker, maybe?  It could
run from 18650s instead of AAAs.  It wouldn't need to be limited
strictly to Wikipedia, of course, but any suitably-formatted body
of knowledge could on there.  A genuine Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy style repository of trustworthy knowledge, always available,
no data plans or roaming fees, no adverts, no fake news.  This would
have been - was! - the stuff of science fiction not long ago, today
it's eminently feasible, but doesn't exist mostly because, I have
to imagine, there just wouldn't be enough actual demand for it.
People wouldn't get it.

I happen to know how big that Kiwix image is because I actually
attempted a realise a very rough prototype of this idea a few
years back using an old tablet I had lying around, one of my
own early attempts at Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.
It didn't work out, for entirely tedious reasons involving filesystem
support which I won't get into, not least because I now realise
that actually I have briefly written about this before, in a post
from last September when I detailed using that old tablet for
outdoor phlogging[2].

Merely thinking about the WikiReader's content delivery paradigm has
done a tremendous amount to change my thinking about computing and
internet usage, and it probably played a big role in my decision
to launch OFFLFIRSOCH (yeah, I'm pretty sure I really have been
sitting on this post for that long).  I really think the idea of
content delivery via physical media in the mail is not as absurdly
outdated or anachronistic or quaint as it seems at first blush.
At some point in the not so distant past it would have been a pain,
involving expensive deliveries of multiple CDs or DVDs to take up
space on a shelf at home, being constantly put in and pulled out of
the optical drive because the disk in your computer couldn't store
it all at once.  Those days are dead!  MicroSD cards smaller than my
thumbnail, thin and light enough that they could be safely posted
in an envelope like a regular old letter, can contain hundreds of
gigabytes of content.  If you are one of these people who sincerely
believe there is no video resolution high enough that the human eye
cannot appreciate the increase, desperately hanging out for 32K to
come along, maybe this is nothing, but if you're an internet user
who mostly just reads and maybe listens to music, getting a fresh
delivery of hundreds of gigs a few times a year is an absurd bounty.
You straight up just cannot read that much stuff in your life, never
mind between deliveries.  But you *can* affordably store it (or at
least you could before the Industry That Shall Not Be Named drove
up prices), and if the right software were written, you could also
effectively explore it, with local offline search tools and even
with local recommendation engines that learned your preferences,
all of this in complete privacy and free from corporate influence,
without ever having adverts or sponsored results thrust upon you,
and immune from censorship unless the jackboots take the time to come
out and physically kick down your door and confiscate your disks.

The only thing you'd be missing out on compared to using the internet
like a normal person is the very latest six months worth of stuff.
I'm sure there's good stuff in that last six months, of course,
but I'm just as sure there was far more good stuff published in
the previous six months than I could possibly read in six months
of leisure time, so what does it matter?  Unless you seriously want
to advance the absurd thesis that the most relevant or interesting
or informative or insightful stuff is also always necessarily
the most recent stuff, it's hard to deny that the low price and
staggeringly high physical density of modern storage technology makes
the whole paradigm of "just have a high speed internet connection
that is on all the time, completely outsource search and discovery
to big companies, and fetch a disposable copy of each individual
thing you thing you want to read on demand" seem kind of obsolete.
Of course, there's such a thing as chatting to friends in real time,
which is nice and all and certainly doesn't translate well to SD
cards in the mail, but that's also something which actually works
just fine on cheap and low-power dial-up speed internet.  Anyway,
more on this in the future, perhaps...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikireader
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/tablets-acorns-and-clicky-clacky-typing.txt