Just a few days ago I wrote about how much I like Stanza for the iPhone and iPod touch and I still do. It opened up a whole world of eBooks for me I was previously pushing farther back on my to-read list every time I visited Amazon or startrekbooks.com. I actually thought, that I couldn’t really find an open eBook reader out there. And so far that’s still true, but at least now there is something for me on the horizon: txtr.
The txtr-reader is an eBook reader with built-in WiFi and 3G network support so that you can, as with the Kindle, be online all the time and get new books whenever you want them … something that I honestly don’t really care al that much about. What’s getting me quite excited, though, is that you can also simply put content directly onto it either via USB or MicroSD-Cards. At least I suppose that you’ll be able to do that given that the company behind this according to Golem claims that one of the goals of the txtr according to is to create a developer friendly environment with basically everything about the system being documented. The first logical step there would be to mess up the whole document-storage system ;-) And since you are able to access the storage directly via MicroSD I guess it’s kind of likely that the system won’t be another iPod database.
Part of the whole eco-system around txtr is also an online community portal where you can buy books, store your documents and let others know about what you like … I don’t really care. As long as I can get eBooks in a simple way (i.e. USB mass-storage) onto the device without any kind of lock-in to yet another proprietary platform, I’m happy. Now all I can do is wait for the 3rd quarter and hope :-)
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂