User:Kim/Project Proposal (e-reader-server)

What do you want to make?

Build a low-tech server on an old e-reader device. The server serves a community of texts.

How do you plan to make it?

Prototype documentation
As of today (oct 2nd) There is no working prototype. However, here are the steps I plan to undertake:

1. get an e-reader device
   1. pin down requirements that device would need: Supports Host mode and Wifi connection
   2. find used (cheap) devices: online, in second hand stores or from friends
2. get familiar with the e-readers hard and software
3. start installing the server
4. more conceptual phase starts here: what is the server serving, under what conditions and to whom?
5. documentation

Why do you want to make it?

I have been curious about servers, 'hidden' infrastructures such as website backends and the inner live of devices. At the same time I feel drawn to text as a technology and text production technologies equally as much as to physical books. The e-reader-server is a junction of all these interests.
Setting up this server I want to examine: what impact does the choice of device have on the content a server presents and the way it is presented? In what ways are texts a community or community forming?

e-reader technology is clumsy in its operation, it has been around for long but yet never reached a stage of full optimization. I find that sympathetic. Teh fact that it is a device purely built for text (e-pub) gives it some interesting characteristics. At the same time, most e-readers are quite closed off and build for linearity, depending on the model, there is little space for user agency, exploration or mis-use.

Who can help you and how?

Two friends of mine, Karen and Marie, both have hands on experience with setting up small servers on repurposed devices. In my prototyping research I encountered a few forums and wikis that provide in depth technical resources about e-reader devices.

Relation to previous practice

I have always felt drawn to books and read a lot. However I do not understand my interest in technology and the digital environment I work in as opposed to that. Textual production and preservation has always been (to some extend) technological, just as citation, long before the internet, spun its webs of ideas and references. This also becomes apparent in material qualities that, like a rudimentary move along as technologies changes, such as the spine, a part of a books anatomy but also a tag that is used in xml for e-pubs.

I have never set up a server myself yet but with Terms of Service explored our class server cerealbox as a temporary, communal subject through scripting and writing.

Relation to larger context

Low tech, self hosting, text based/ intertextual, implications for library and preservation