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.

Comments

Dead Tree Society

[guinan]

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.

Re:Dead Tree Society

[Ryan Amos]

The GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Color both used reflective LCDs, and both with poor results. Yes, they're cheaper than normal LCDs because you don't need a backlight, but they're also horribly dark and the contrast is awful. The cries of bloody murder over the GBA screen should be evidence of this. On top of that, the things are fragile as hell, the only reason they work well in the GBA is because they're buried far below the casing. Reflective LCDs are a good idea, but they often need their own external light source in order to be usable (which defeats the purpose.) Hopefully nobody in their right mind would use one in an eBook thing.

Re:Dead Tree Society

[fwc]

I can't see anywhere else better to attach this, so I'll stick it here.

I have an RCA eBook. I'm starting to get to the point where I prefer to read via the ebook vs paper. The reasons?

* The ebook is readable in bed without any external light to disturb my significant other.

* I can read the hundreds (if not thousands) of books available for free on the internet from project Gutenberg and the like.

* I can load up 72MB worth of ebooks into the unit and as a result, not have to worry about not having something to read.

* It has a dictionary built in which is very helpful when you come across that word you go "what the heck is a ....."? You just click on lookup and then the word.

* Although I haven't used it this way, you can do notes and annotations into the ebooks.

On the battery issue, I chose the REB1100 because it has 20-40 hours of battery life. I think that 20-40 is conservative.

I saw someone else mention that color was needed. Although I can think of some cases where color would be nice (biology texbooks, art textbooks, etc.), for "paperback" reading, give me a good readable monochrome screen any day.

The main gripes I have are related to the slightly flaky usb support, the lack of a slightly dimmer backlight selection (20% is too bright for reading with the lights off at night), and the @#*$ publishers which think that they can sell an encrypted ebook usable only on this device (which might have a couple of year lifetime) at the same price that a paperback (which I can loan and share and keep) sells for.

On that last point, I will say that there are some publishers out there that have figured out that encryption is not good. In fact baen books have figured out that giving away books is a good way to improve sales, even of the books you are giving away!

I really think that quite a few of the naysayers out there about the ebooks haven't had one to play with.
No,
attempting
to read
a book on
a palmpilot
doesn't count.
You need
a big enough
screen
to be
able to
get more
than two
readable
words on
a line.

Having a decent number of words-per-line and page is a good thing. It also helps if you have enough resolution to set a serif font which is easier to read. The other thing is that the REB has done well is to be ergonomically designed so that the page advance button is right under your thumb when you hold it. This is the other major problem when trying to use a palmpilot as a comparison - the advance buttons are definately not under your thumb when you hold it in a comfortable reading position.

On the device mentioned in the article, it looks like this screen helps increase the viewable area. If this is the case, then I think it will definately be an improvement. I'm not sure about the color though - except I do recall from my early computer days that green was somehow determined to be easier on your eyes than white. Perhaps someone else can come up with a reference.

Re:Dead Tree Society

[Chelloveck]

The reflective LCD used in the Sony Clie is marvelous. Perfectly readable in high-light conditions, and has a frontlight that makes it readable under just about any condition.

Now, if only I could read it while wearing polarized sunglasses...

potential sales

[devnullkac]

Samsung sees potential sales of flat panels for electronic books at 24,973 units this year.

Very precise estimate. Is this a conversion from sort of metric unit count?

Green?

[rbeattie]

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

Re:Yay, Monochrome

[Ilgaz]

and do you have any 32bit colour novels?

Monochrome is practical

[RobinH]

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.

Foldable? Why not use it for size?

[BlueOtto]

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.

Remember!

[Captain Large Face]

If you fold up an eBook, do you have to remember what page you were on, or can you buy an eBookMark?

E-Texts are a publisher's dream and that's it

[xtal]

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.

I used to champion paper, but. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

Once I picked up an old Dell latitude for chump-change, I began toting it around the house, treating it with as much respect as a Fisher-Price toy, or one of those old Bell Rotary phones. Indestructable. --I was downloading mountains of reading material and using the thing like a book.

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