Other customers have been inmates who live in facilities that allow small electronic devices. I've sold to the Philippines, U.K., and Australia.” He says some of his other buyers who want offline Wikipedia access for trips or airplanes. “Many buyers are elderly people or 50-somethings buying it for their 80-something fathers,” he said, adding that many avid WikiReader fans “do not use a computer or the internet (think 90-year-olds).” He continues, “You wouldn't think there is a market for this, but there is a small one. He keeps doing annual updates even though he sells “just a few a month.” The 2022 update has been available since July. So each test cycle was a week,” Jack told Input in an email. “It was taking 5-6 days to process the Wikipedia download into a WikiReader database. Jack sells SD cards with updated content for $34, or $29 for a digital download (without the new SD card, your WikiReader’s contents are totally outdated.) Jack initially developed a new SD card for 2015 content, and it took more than a year to get the Ubuntu environment set up and fix the Wikipedia download so it would process for the WikiReader. And it’s been off the market since 2014, when parent company OpenMoko pulled the plug on WikiReader operations.īut the device didn’t really die, thanks to a highly-private and tremendously dedicated figure called Jack, who keeps the utility of the decade-old device alive. It has an e-ink display with a rather janky touchscreen that’s better fit for a stylus than a finger, and its outer body has only the WikiReader logo and three buttons for search, history, and random. The aesthetically unremarkable aughts gizmo measures 4 inches by 4 inches, with a resolution of 240 by 208 pixels. All you’d need are two AAA batteries and your trusty WikiReader. Perhaps you are stranded on the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world without internet and you want to read about the 18th-century woman who convinced doctors she had given birth to rabbits. In 2009, the world met the WikiReader, a single-purpose gadget that holds all 6.5 million articles on English Wikipedia, from the depopulation of cockroaches in post-Soviet states to the list of lists of lists.
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