In the past, I’ve written about the Kindle. Specifically, I griped about the lack of support for smaller news organizations wishing to use the Kindle and pondered the direction of future eReaders.

Today, I received an email announcing a new device that has the potential to add an interesting disruption to the ereader market, the WikiReader Pocket Wikipedia.

It has a reflective monochrome 240x208 capacitive touchscreen and a 8 GB MicroSDHC card. The card is formatted in FAT32 format and contains a snapshot of Wikipedia. You can subscribe to receive updated MicroSD cards, or you can download data yourself. It does not contain any sort of WiFi or 3G networking. It does not have a complicated digital rights management system. It is just a very simple device to read MicroSD cards and display them on a reflective monochrome screen. Very simple.

What caught my attention is that it was produced by OpenMoko. The other device that they produce is the Neo Freerunner. “The Neo FreeRunner is a Linux-based touch screen smart phone ultimately aimed at general consumer use as well as Linux desktop users and software developers.” It is about as open a cellphone as you can get, and I’ve long been considering getting one. I’m just hoping they’ll come out with a nice 3G version including a decent camera.

I followed up with William Lai at Openmoko to find out exactly how open the WIkiReader will be. For example, would it be possible for me to load books from Project Gutenberg on a WikiReader. Will responded that everything is and will remain very open, that they are working on a developers’ site, and that Project Gutenberg would make a great card. I could easily see a geeks market in MicroSD cards with interesting texts emerging.

It is hard to tell what else developers playing with a very simple open eReader might do, but it is precisely the sort of tool that can be a great disrupter and the WikiReader is well worth watching.

It is worth noting that all of this is based on what I have read online and in emails from OpenMoko and PR people. In light of the latest FTC guidelines, I should note that I have not received a free WikiReader or Freerunner, but if anyone provides me one, I will gladly disclose that and write a much more detailed description of experimenting with the devices.

(originally published at DigiDayDaily.)