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First Folding-Screen e-Book Reader
MJArrison writes "Yahoo is carrying a Reuters story about a laptop that isn't much more than a foldable LCD screen. It's very small screen 6.7"x5" appears to be a strange black on green monochrome, so it better be cheap. It's made by Samsung and will be launched in Korea first." It's a start; I can't wait for them to integrate an IBM 701cs style camber for both screen and keyboard. T. adds: Rather than a general-purpose laptop, it looks like this is being pushed as an specialized device for reading e-texts.
Havn't we come a long way since the 70's. I'll stick to my stinkpad thank you very much
for something that would appear to be quite pricey, surely you wouldn't be buying this before ebooks became even a _little_ bit more mainstream. Even then, wouldn't a software ebook reader suffice? Personally I think ebooks detract from everything that's good about reading a book. (err, novel that is)
This technology will probably have many interesting and innovative uses, but will ultimately fail to replace the paperback.
Reasons:
* Books are readable in bright light with very little eye-strain. LCDs aren't.
* You don't have to worry about the batteries dying when you are at a particularly engrossing section.
* Many e-book vendors have crippling levels of copy-protection.
* Books are cheap: dropping a book into the bathtub is annoying, but its not going to put you out a few hundred dollars.
That said, I think this is neat as a note-book (think spiral) replacement for students: especially if they implement a graffiti - type input system.
Very precise estimate. Is this a conversion from sort of metric unit count?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
In my humble opinion, these things need to be part of an ebook before they catch on.
COLOR. High resolution. Backlight. Portable (ie lightweight). Long battery life.
Don't get me wrong, ebooks will be a part of all of our lives within the next decade. Kids won't be lugging around text books for much longer. I've read quite a few ebooks on my Palm and it's not great, but shows the concept really well. Especially when I read Spanish eBooks, because I can instantly look up a word that I'm unfamiliar with using a dictionary package without having to grab another book, losing my place, forgetting the word, etc. Copy-paste-lookup-return->keep reading.
I already spend most of my reading time using the web. No more newspapers or magazines except maybe on Sundays... Decent portable readers or even M$ Mira devices will erase these last dead-tree vestiges from my life alltogether. (Horrible as M$ may be, they've got a good idea with Mira.).
Okay, that's it.
-Russ
Me
Hmm - could this screen use Light Emiting Plastic technology? I read somewhere some time ago (memory... failing...) that light emiting plastics had been developed, but only in Green so far (which could explain the choice of colour). The advantage was that they would be much cheaper to produce than LCD displays, as you dont get a ridiculous failure rate in the manufacturing process.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
I like the idea, but the screen looks awful, I can't imagine it's better to read black letters on green background. :)
Maybe it's again time to check the ISO 9241 book regarding standards for ergonomic design of workstations, etc
From all these years of creating computers, we should have learned a thing or two and I can't image that black on green is it.
It is so important to the sucess of a product like that(and the whole concept) that reading a book doesn't put more of a strain on you eyes than a normal book. Because otherwise I'd stick to normal books no matter how many virtual books I can carry in my luggage.
Now let's get back to the good old yellow text on a blue background.
my sig
I'm glad to see that digital consumer electronics are finally starting to take off again. A few years ago, the only market-safe products were game consoles, but now we have cellphones, PDA's, DVR's, and now e-book readers. Think about how nice it would be not to have to lug a shitload of textbooks around. I'm looking forward to the day when these kinds of devices are ubiquitous, and people are trading e-books as easily as mp3's. It's time for information to be free.
How the fsck did they arrive at 24,973? Who are the 27 awkward bastards who stop it being 25k? Any why not approximate anyway?
When they come up with Electronic Ink on Power Paper, sing me up.
Samsung sees potential sales of flat panels for electronic books at 24,973 units this year.
'nuff said. Did they get their accounting department to design the thing aswell?
p.s. dont let Dymitry get his hands on one of these babies....
What's so bad about monochrome for an eBook reader? All of the books I read are certainly printed as black text on white paper. Why on Earth would I want to display different paragraphs in multiple colours?
If you want to create a commercially successful product, you have to choose what features are included and which are left out. For instance, if I compare two cell phones, and one has a colour screen for $100 more, then I'll likely choose the monochrome one if all the other features are identical. The colour screen gives you zero added value, so why bother? Perhaps elitist techies will pay the extra money for the cool factor, but I imagine that this device is trying to target more practical consumers.
Perhaps if you were interested in picture books... then maybe I could see it.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I agree with the other posters that I do not see this taking off as a pure e-book - after all none of the other e-book systems have really made it into the mainstream. But if you coupled in a grafiti-style system, this kind of thing could easily replace laptops for on-the-go professionals who do not need the full power of a laptop, but do want more than a Palm offers. Attach this thing to a wireless modem and you can surf the web with considerably more screen real-estate than a Palm or PocketPC, but without the bulk of a laptop.
I have an old Norand tablet PC and say what you will about their useability for some things. For surfing the Net on the couch, they are EXCELLENT!
Samsung sees potential sales of flat panels for electronic books at 24,973 units this year.
;)
nice prediction!!! how the hell they do that!!!
From the article
. . lick, YEP BOSS ! Our POTENTIAL Market is 24,973 units, how many of those we will sell I cant say , but thats EXACTLY how many we COULD sell ?
"Samsung sees potential sales of flat panels for electronic books at 24,973 units this year."
Where the hell does someone get such number ?
I mean do they have some little man hunched over a 10 key in their market reasearch department saying.....click....click....zzzztttt.....click..
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
When I first saw the news item, I thought they meant it was foldable so that it could be packed very small and made to be pocketsize. This is not the case. Looking at the picture, all that they used the 'foldability' for was to make it more book-like - two pages. I think that is a wasted use of the technology - they could have just as well used two LCDs to accomplish the same thing (maybe they did). Regardless, it's not anything astounding, imho.
I think the only time eBooks will become mainstream is when technology allows a full colour screen to play DVD quality video, show static text, and everything else your iPod, PC, TV, Tivo, etc does.
Can't be too far off - just look at the laptop market - 5 years back you were considered cool if you had one at all - now every bastard has at least 2!
Why invest in a single use device? Multi use devices are on the way.
But when i saw this thing i started to see potential. The display sucks (green?), but the look and feel of the overall product is great.
It opens like a book and it has the lay-out of a book. That's a MUCH better idea then the PDA style eBooks you see today.
You can sit down with this thing and hold it with both hands like a book. And it's big enough to read from a reasonable distance.
If they would replace the display with an eInk-like display (looks like real paper), i could be convinced to use it. Especially if the fonts would be anti-aliased and if i could surf, read email with it.
This thing combined with e-ink would rock!
* Books are readable in bright light with very little eye-strain. LCDs aren't.
eInk is readable in bright light. + backlighting is probably possible for under-the-covers-reading
* You don't have to worry about the batteries dying when you are at a particularly engrossing section.
According to the eInk site a display can run upto two years on two AA batteries
* Books are cheap: dropping a book into the bathtub is annoying, but its not going to put you out a few hundred dollars.
These books could be made so that if you close them they are water and shock resistant.
If you fold up an eBook, do you have to remember what page you were on, or can you buy an eBookMark?
The only place these things exist are in the wild fantasies of book publishers, and maybe in the heads of the RIAA if they have sound that can be hijacked. They're just a vehicle to get strict content controls on published media.
The only thing I reference electronically is API references and other programming documentation, and then only if it's occassional, otherwise I'll get a paper book and/or print the damn thing. I can scribble on paper. Paper never runs out of batteries. Paper is easily replaced - hard to beat a 600dpi printer and 500 sheets of paper for $5. Paper is easily readable in crummy light. I can fold paper up into bits and take it with me.
These devices date back to the early 90's if not before then. They've never taken off, because it's damn near impossible to compete with paper. Contrary to popular belief, paper is even environmentally friendly - anyone who thinks that these gadgets are hasn't been informed about the nastiness of semiconductor manufacturing, which makes a pulp mill look pleasant. A single tree - or maybe two or three, if you use a lot - will provide a lifetime supply of paper. Burn it when you're done and plant another tree. The futility of trucking back old paper is the subject for another rant.
E-texts make sense if you distribute the PDFs and then have them printed on demand from there - A lot of the references I use are available on PDF, and I'll print just the sections I need (and scribble all over them), and I can truck the PDF's around with me on my notebook just in case I need them. That's not the model that these guys are looking for.. and pdf's aren't going to cut it for most novels, I want something I can hold in my hand and put on my bookshelf.
"The next generation will use these.. blah blah", is a load of hooey too. I'd rather my kids use plain old crayons and newsprint spools to scribble all over and break than one of these. Even in schools, I just can't see pouring over a monitor trying to learn something complicated - the interface just doesn't match my paws.
Instead of wasting money on crappy e-text screens, how about peopel work on organic LEDs or other technologies that can let me afford dual 24" or 30" wide-aspect monitors for my desktop.
..don't panic
"When I was back in school, I had to lug six 3000 page textbooks up seven flights of stairs (or wait an hour for the elevator)..." will be a story I can tell my grandkids [and this story is actually true].
If you can invent a device that allows me to eliminate waiting in line for two hours buying textbooks at the campus book store, I'll get it.
If you have a device that will make my backpack 50 lbs. lighter, I'll get it.
E-books are the perfect solution for high-school, college, graduate, and medical/law/professional students who are encumbered by weighty dead-tree textbooks. Forget how nice it would be to look up any word in the book in an instant, or leave marks that you can later remove, the simple fact that one small ebook can hold all of your texts (and notes) is a seller, IMHO.
Further, there are ways that electronic texts could win over paper, mostly by leveraging their electronic advantages. Textbook authors could add some interaction to their example problems/illustrations, perhaps allowing users to step through solving them, which would be one advantage over paper texts. Second, self-tests at the back of the chapter could really be improved [over flipping to the back of the book and back for the answers]. Third, there exists the potential to display 3-dimensional models that would allow users to view complicated structures by rotating them in 3-space, which would be great for chemistry/biology/physics/medicine texts (among others, I'm sure). Add in animations, and well, I think I've made my point. Anyway, I don't think dead-tree books will go away, but ebooks could find their niche with some innovative thinking.
Why this product fails to provide COLOR is beyond my thinking. It seems they think they have a replacement for paperbacks, and I really don't think they do. So, I agree with you wholly that this product is not targetted at the right audience, but I disagree that there isn't a market for them, and that they can't compete with paper.
Completely unrelated: if I mention that the sales estimate is silly, do I get modded up too?
It really IS convenient, cross referencing is doesn't involve stopping in the middle of a passage and then going, "Shit, I guess I have time on Tuesday to head down to the library, cuz I don't have a copy of N title."
My only complaints with the lap top were:
-Too heavy & awkward, buttons in the wrong place for when I'm reading on the sofa, in bed, on the toilet.
-It's nice to have a keyboard just in case I want to take notes, but I think the awkward-value outstrips the usefulness. A keyboard should be attachable, or should fold away and be completely un-obtrusive when not in use.
Lap tops are typically designed for maximum comfort when they sit on a table. Lounging in bed makes them really difficult. Pivot software doesn't take into account that a laptop control mechanism has a fixed physical position, (DUH! --Way to make your software 'user-friendly' guys. Hint to GUI programers: ALWAYS provide an 'advanced tab', underwhich EVERY option imaginable is provided even if those options will be of no use to 99% of users!!! The 'user-friendly' philosophy of giving the minimum number of options because of fear of confusing the computer illiterate is the single most infuriating philosophy of the last 20 years, bar none!)
So basically, it looks like the guys over at Samsung are finally on the right track here.
But let me make a final point:
Just like books didn't put an end to theater, and film didn't put an end to books, and television didn't kill film, and the internet hasn't killed any of the above, digital books will NOT replace the hard copy.
While projects like the Gutenberg are cool, they are subject to massive change and instability. On the extreme side, -as Fascist State has more than enough power to shut down the internet in an entire nation, to regulate content according to the whims of a few. A nuclear strike or a handful of comet hits could make my digi-book not work, either through an EM overload pulse, or simply by destroying the electrical power infrastructure.
Digital Information can be great, but it requires a whole pyramid of layering support technologies, all of which must work perfectly. The pyramid needed to keep paper funtioning is much smaller and much more easily maintained. If worst comes to worst, I can make my own paper and get a bunch of clerics to hand-copy stuff with feather pens.
I just wish that books were printed on acid-free paper. A sixty year life-span on your average sheet of typing paper is pretty lame!
-Fantastic Lad
I don't know. I'm pretty hostile toward "web-usability" experts, but blask on white is the easiest to read to me, and I'm sure for most people. It's the ulimate contrast, all colors on the absence of color. Any other combination means that both the text and the background contain elements of each other so will blend, even if only slightly.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
every Ebook I have found sells horribly and usually ends up in BesTBuy on clearance for 1/3rd the price and they still dont sell..
why? the stupid content control... You want to make it impossible to copy a commercial E-BOOK fine. go ahead, but if your hardware will not let me upload my own texts, guttenberg books, or other books (Hey, maybe I want to read that Movie-script my deadbeat brother in hollywood sent me.)
they dont, not without special hacks, cracks, Leet D00d software etc... well the general techno-public.. the people that would buy these items dont want to screw with that, and we dont want to spend $299.95 to read only your companies books.
make an Ebook that will display and allow me to read any txt file I throw at it (rtf support would be great too!) plus read those super protected,triple key protected e-books you buy (and they better cost 1/2 the printed version plus be easily backed up by me) you might have a ebook reader that would sell.
Until then most of us use palm pilots and the project guttenberg reader.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Trousers aside, are you suggesting some sort of Dick Tracy / bionic arm affair? I can't see it, myself. I wear jackets when I'm outside, short sleeves inside, and a watch.
It does sound familiar, though. 2001, maybe? I can picture guys typing on their arms...
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Dropping a PDA or e-book reader in the bathtub is annoying but won't put you out a few hundred dollars either--assuming you had it in a sealed, trustworthy ziplock bag (I suggest the kind with the "gripper zipper" that closes verifiably) the way any sensible person would use such a device around water. Go ahead, try it--it's even easier than reading a paperback in the tub, as you can easily work the page-turning controls through the bag and you don't have to worry about getting water spots on the pages.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org