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Sony To Launch E Ink-based eBook In April
Holly Gates writes "Sony will launch an ebook based on E Ink technology in Japan in late April. The screen is about as big as half a paperback book and has a spatial resolution of ~170ppi. The device includes various edictionaries and audio playback functionality. I am a hardware engineer for E Ink by the way, but I figured slashdotters might be interested." An anonymous reader notes that it is supposed to "display over 10,000 pages on a single set of batteries."
Since the last deploymenty of e-ink (the billboards), I eagerly awaited smaller implementations. It seemed like the billboards were just a proof of concept, since each pixel was quite large-- not suitable for computer diplays. However this looks like it will be really big (backwards pun not intended).
I hope I'm not being hasty in saying so long to luminescent displays. It certainly will be strange reading from a moving, reflective display, but I think it'll be much easier on the eyes, and well excepted. Kudos to Sony, and I hope other OEMs adopt quickly.
I've been waiting for a device that I could use just to read information off of. My big complaint is that it will most likely be sold for $200-$400 instead of $50-$150. For $200-$400, I'd rather get a PDA. But if they could get these things under $150, then they'd sell like crazy. Actually, this tech could help PDA's increase battery life.
I would be the first to say that I would rather hold a book than one of these.. but with the ability to search entire books you've read, I don't care how weird, or uncomfortable it may be, I would buy one of these to just load up old books I have already read and have them available for search. Amazon.com's search inside a book implimentation is rather weak, and doesn't cover all their books, maybe in the future when you buy any book it can come with a password to download its contents to your E-Ink reader. I know some things like this are available now, but not for all books, certainly not Foucault.
The article is more about the display hardware - which could be neat. Its success depends on the operating system, and how books are sold and stored.
All the DRM-enabled e-book devices (Rocket) and formats (Palm reader) introduced so far have failed. No one wants to buy an e-book that is tied to a specific bit of hardware, or one who's access disappears if you lose your Passport account (MS Reader). Some devices won't even *permit* unencrypted data.
I hope that the designers realise that. Actually, the designers probably do, but the marketing guys or the managers will insist on it.
"...this novel e-Book reader offers users an enjoyable experience and the freedom to access material at their convenience."
My convienence does not include intrusive DRM, thank you.
Not that I will get my hopes up...
Man, now you've got tons of people who can't pronounce CLI, you want to have them mangling the pronunciation of the LIBRI too?
As a side note - why in the world are e-books so damn expensive? I'm sorry, but if I can get a paperback for 10 bucks, I'm not going to shell out $25 for an e-book. Kazaa, here I come!
Either the publishers won't give it much support, or it'll be so burdened by DRI software that consumers simply won't care about it. If they have to pay each time they read a book...
...don't you spend a good portion of your day looking at your 72DPI monitor? This would be about 2 1/2 times sharper than the text you are reading now. I think your eyes will do just fine.
^nA! Creatures in my Head
it's gotta be reasonably inexpensive...
it's gotta NOT have a closed proprietory file format
it should be able to (or be upgradable to) display the standard formats out there - basic text files, html based files with gif/jpg/png, acrobat pdf files that support search...
have or allow viewers for regular MS file formats (ppt, word, excel, visio, etc)
E-ink should be nice and easy to read and nothing like looking at a crt or lcd screen. Would be nice to have higher dpi however it is being called "first generation"... if the company does this right and it at least gets a good following we should see some improvements in features and resolution.
I will not ever use this technology.
It's a BAD idea. My books are my books and the information that's printed in them will always be there no matter what, as long as I take proper care of them.
No matter what happens in the world, say some political wind blows and they decide that certain things are politicaly incorrect, with a few clicks of a mouse e-books planet wide will be "revised" to reflect the new "acceptable and correct" line of thought.
History will be rewritten to suit those that have the power and need to rewrite history.
I have many sets of encylopedias from the 20's through the 80's and I can see with my own eyes how history is being rewritten. LOTS of "facts" are revised on a regular basis. If you think it's not, you're living in a dream world...
The trick would be, to have an open text format so that ANYONE can create an ebook that can be read on it. That way you can say, import all of the texts from Project Gutenberg. You'll never run out of reading material.
This is not a sig.
I think the iPod is the right analogy. I think the combination of usability and capacity makes it a breakthrough- too many people are averse to reading from luminous, pixelated displays. But carrying around a *readable* library in your pocket is invaluable- think of grabbing your corner table at the local coffee joint, hacking away on your laptop and having a separate, readable screen that can show you any O'Reilly book ever. It would be especially great for students- not to mention the possibilities of making course texts available at a reduced price, how many times have you had to load a pile of cumbersome books into your knapsack for a study session across campus at the library?
I have a lot of interesting books sitting on my shelf at home- it'd be great to have the ability to pile even just 2 or 3 of them into my pocket and take them anywhere.
Still takes a lot of Oil, Water, and Electricity to recycle that paper.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Agreed.
I have a palm OS-based color screen phone and I can't use the darned thing in daylight because the screen isn't visible. The non-color screen palm devices are much more readable in direct sunlight.
Bring on something readable.
And how long before we have the pda/camera/phone/e-book combo device?
My sigs always suck.
Burn them to CD-ROM if you want.
And if you think paper doesn't get revised, go to a bookstore and buy a new edition of a book you read long ago. You'd be surprised how often things get revised. It's not just that the cover art gets revised to show the actors from the current movie version instead of the original cover art, or the blurbs on the back get revised for more current advertising value, or the books get subtitled (e.g. "Farenheit 451 - The Temperature at which Books Burn".) They don't get revised as fast as Whitehouse.gov speech transcripts, but they do get revised.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Still takes a lot of Oil, Water, and Electricity to recycle that paper.
As it does to run a huge computer sever, and hundreds of clients that access that server. I don't know which way would be more environmentally friendly. It would interesting to see a study on that.
But for those who like to take their entire collection of books with them (sort of a book iPOD) this might a neat device.
That is a big selling point for me. Not so much the ability to take my entire book collection wherever I go, but just being able to keep my enitre book collection in a small place. About 2 weeks ago I bought 2 big plastic tubs and filled them up with books so I could store them in my attic because they were taking up too much space.
The biggest question in my mind, is just how much support are publishers going to give this thing? Judging from ebook platforms of the recent past, probably not much.
Right... I was wondering the same thing. I was real interested in eBooks several years ago when I first started reading and hearing about them. But unless you wanted to read some pretty obscure stuff, it wasn't useful.
The only problem is, if it costs more than $200 it will probably be a tough sell.
Are you kidding? If it is as easy to read as newspaper, than imagine the change for students, especially college age. Instead of constantly carrying heavy textbooks everywhere, you just have one appliance that holds all your information.
Imagine the cost savings in buying textbooks if there is no more physical costs involved. If there is something like a 60% discount for e-books, you could pay for the thing in one semester. Of course that would require the books be available on whatever format that is required, but this has killer app written all over it.
Also, I dream of having all of my reference books, my whole O'Reilly shelf, in one easy-to-read, portable, cheap-when-compared-to-a-laptop device. If they could integrate some sort of note takening interface on this, even at 1/2 the battery life, I would definately buy one for $200.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Why would they design it for alkaline batteries, instead of recharging it like a cell phone?
At 30 Frames/sec, a battery life of 10,000 pages is less than 6 minutes.
Its a "low power" technology only when slowly flipping through static pages. But for more active screen work, scrolling, its not going to have very good battery life -- even at 2 frames per second, its only going to get a hour and a half. Even animating the pointer will drain energy if done at too high a frame rate.
I expect that for PDA applications, this display wil be better than the current crappy generation battery-sucking machines, but not as good as the old Palms and Psions.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I don't mind the device having DRM. Like you, I too have a problem if that's all it allows. IMO if it allows anyone to create their own "books" then it should do well. Being able to send a book directly to another one would be very useful and cool.
They need to take a lesson from the iPod: DRM and non DRM audio files allowed. Although I suspect Sony has already figured the profit on the exclusive sale of books for this device.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Well, at least there's the Library of Congress, who's whole point is to archive all books published in the US to keep for all time. Hopefully it won't meet the same fate as the Library of Alexanderia. So long as the library isn't destroyed, there's really no way that all of those millions of books could possibly be replaced with revized editions or mysteriously dissapear.
Imagine the cost savings in buying textbooks if there is no more physical costs involved. If there is something like a 60% discount for e-books, you could pay for the thing in one semester. Of course that would require the books be available on whatever format that is required, but this has killer app written all over it.
:(
I am perhaps a Troll or someone of little faith, but i think they will sell them the same price as the dead tree ones and take the magin profit for them. As an excuse, you know, everybody will copy them like MP3 !!! bouhou
hear my tale of woe.
I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket eBook in the year 2000. This is essentially the same device (and is content-compatible with) the Gemstar REB1100. I have bought approximately $400 worth of content for it.
All of its technical and usability characteristics are quite good. I can read for pleasure on it for extended periods of time and get lost in an immersive reading experience.
Gemstar has folded their eBook operation and pulled the plug on their servers. The DRM-protected content is keyed to a hardware serial number. When the device finally fails (and its battery life is now down to about half what it was originally), I believe that to all intents and purposes I will lose all access to that paid content.
Meanwhile, I have 25-year-old paperbacks that continue to be perfectly accessible.
What is needed to make eBooks popular is not any technology breakthroughs, but something that will hit greedy publishers over the head with a clue-by-four. When strangers see me reading on this thing it is often a conversation-starter. The conversation usually ends when they ask me what eBooks cost. I say "About the same as a hardbound for books that are only out in hardbound, and about the same as a paperback for books that in paper," they stare at me in disbelieve and the conservation ends right there.
And that doesn't even speak to the issue that I can't lend these books to my wife or my son, and couldn't even if they owned compatible eBook readers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
so your complaining that the e-book can be changed so you prefer the hardcopy but you also claim that hardcopies are being changed.
I'm failing to see how your reasoning fits your conclusion as both mediums are equally subceptible to revisions.
The advantage of electronic books is that a simple program can be written to compare previous versions to new versions to see what exactly has been changed in seconds.
Try that with a hard copy of an encyclopedia.
You're also making the faulty assumption that all changes are bad. The reason history gets "revised" is because as more work is done more facts come to light. It's not always the case that the revision is a step in the wrong direction. It's more often the case that a revision corrects something that was wrongly assumed in the past.
It's also the case that competing versions of any topic exist at the same time. You can't very well compare versions with hardcopies nearly as easily as you can with electronic versions. Because it requires searching. Electronic searches are always faster and more comprehensive than manual searches. When you're manually looking for name or word it's easy to overlook a mention in large volumns. An electronic search will never miss regardless of the size.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If it does PDF, then plaintext and HTML are no problem, since you can convert to PDF pretty easily. Converting simple documents the other way is possible as well, though it might need some manual tweaking.
However, Sony has been quite heavy-handed with DRM on their MP3-players (stupid ATRAC3 formats and such), so I don't know what to expect from them with respect to eBooks. Time will tell.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Since it's digital, you can use error-correction code when storing the data and also compare checksums of the copies.
You can be reasonably certain that you made a completely perfect copy if everything checks out.
For those who know where to look, you can find a fair amount of copywrited text content online. The thing is, what the hell do you do with it? You really don't want to read an entire novel sitting at your desk. And printing them out? Easier to just buy the book.
Until now. Assuming this device can display content unencumbered by DRM, its only a matter of time until these files become more prevalent.
I'm not sure what it all means, though. The publishing industry has been vigilant about making sure digital copies of their media stay out of the hands of pirates, and probably think they've been very successful. But the real reason text content hasn't been traded much on P2P networks is because of the lack of an acceptable playback device.
So, now what?
The screen is too small for a textbook. You can't even fit a decent diagram on a screen that size. The technology is applicable, although one nice thing about textbooks is the ability to mark them up, and this device lacks that capability. Also they're only going to probably knock about ten bucks off the price of a textbook for edelivery and you're not going to be allowed to sell it - they won't sell them electronically unless they can DRM them. So it's probably not going to be useful for textbooks any time soon. If you want to bring about freedom from commercial textbooks, you're going to have to support the people writing Open-license textbooks. Open licensing is our only reasonable defense against the serious financial down sides of capitalism.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Textbook manufacturers won't go for this because they 'claim' printing costs are the main reason textbooks cost are so high. If they offered an electronic version of a book it'd totally ruin the scam they and the colleges have setup.
bryan
The bookstores will still kill you with costs no matter what form the book comes in :-/