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Proposal: E-books and E-book Readers

This question floated in my mind because of this which is related

The reason is I have seen some amazing projects in mobileread that extends the features of these dedicated e-readers beyond its purpose, like adding built-in led, a weather display, music player, android port, and so on. To other projects that has pretty much has less or no relation to ebook reading at all.

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I am for it as long as it does not change their functionality away from being able to show ebooks (or installing a complete multi purpose operating system).

This means jailbreaking it to add functionality to read other formats, have better [pdf] viewers, allow more advanced syncing options or other encryption standards for wifi connections should be included. Also tools like journal apps, clocks, music players or reminders should definitely be allowed. And so should be operating systems like duokan for kindle, which is just another e-reader interface.

I do however not really regard installing Ubuntu or Android on the reader as on topic (I am not speaking of them already being installed in the first place). But I would like applications to be, that allow i.e. to log into the existing OS to change necessary parameters not accessible from the user interface .

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    This makes sense. If a user wishes to install Ubuntu, we can direct them to Ask Ubuntu. If they're trying to install Android, we can send them here.
    – Nathan Osman
    Commented Feb 20, 2013 at 1:58
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I'm all for it if we can nail down some sort of scope. Just "eBook" readers. Not Android.

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  • You can not necessarily draw the line between those two. I think the first Sony readers came with Android as their operating system. But I understand what you mean. It is a question of whether it is an ebook reader and whether you can still consider it to be one if you replaced its original OS with a general purpose Android.
    – Tim
    Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 12:56
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I think that modding e-readers should be on topic as they would mostly be off-topic elsewhere on StackOverflow.

As many are Android or another Unix you could argue they would be on topic on Android or Unix & Linux But off topic on SuperUser as they are not general purposing computing hardware. So my main question would be how would an interested user know where to go as they could well not know what the OS is. Also modding questions are likely to form around fonts, dictionaries, syncing etc which are more common to an ebook reader rather than the OS, also answers might involve editing the ebook on another device rather than modding the device to get the effect the user wanted.

The more complex modding/hacking could be off topic as the details would require more knowledge of the OS, ie the user would have to know what OS it is and be able to use the OS and so be able to find or ask and understand questions on other sites.

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