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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."
Basiclly an electronic newspaper is a self-contained, reusable, and refreshable version of a traditional newspaper that acquires and holds information electronically. (The electronic newspaper should not be confused with newspapers that offer an online version at a Web site.) The near-future technology - researchers expect to have the product available as soon as 2003 - will use e-paper (electronic paper) as the major component. Information to be displayed will be downloaded through a wireless Internet connection. A number of versions of the future technology are in development, although there are two frontrunners: Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is working on a newspaper that would consist of a single sheet of their e-paper (called Gyricon), while Lucent, in partnership with a company called E Ink, is working on a multi-page device (also called E Ink).
interesting times for sure.
CBDS
free ipod and free gmail!
It seems that no matter what I try, I have a time time absorbing and retaining information from e-books. Something about reading off a screen as opposed to paper just seems to shut off a part of my brain or something.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
Good viewing in direct sunlight (or so they claim) might make this the first ebook platform worthwhile. The only problem is, if it costs more than $200 it will probably be a tough sell. I can get a lot of books (especially used) for that, and not have to change to batteries. But for those who like to take their entire collection of books with them (sort of a book iPOD) this might a neat device. 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.
"The Electronic Paper Display is reflective and can be easily read in bright sunlight or dimly lit environments while being able to be seen at virtually any angle - just like paper."
by far, thats my biggest complaint with handhelds (palms, etc). The screens are so hard to read in the daylight. Infact, the black and white palms seem easier to read in the day light than the color screens.
Also, phillips rollable display Amazing!
Can it display PDF's? Lack of PDF support is the only thing that stopped me from buying one of the current Ebook readers.
it would be great if they can bundle good collection of books free with this device, specially the free ones like from project gutenberg. true, people can download their own books too, but it won't cost them a dime if they ship pre-installed or privide removable media with copied books. that would allow them to test the device in the store or during the trial without wasting too much time and money (buying e-books).
my biggest problem with e-book was that there was no way to try the device without getting locked into it or spend too much time installing software on PC etc before I can find out how comfortable it was.
The way these thing work is pretty cool. You basically have to thin sheets like a sandwitch, and in the middle are tiny little balls that make up the pixels. Each ball contains smaller magnetic material that can cause the ball to display either black or white (depending on which orientation the magnetif field is). Multiply that single ball times a several thousand and you have a very simple low power display device. Most of the other solutions for eInk are the same, and i believe this version was made by MIT.
- tristan
That is, the enormous weight of all their books is too much for their tiny frames. With more and more other crap being shoved in there, kids can barely take it. There was once a time that kids could leave their textbooks either at home or school. The kid could take one book home for the homework that night.
Now, every class assigns twenty minutes of homework every day, even for elementary school kids, and most of the teaching is done directly out of textbooks. That means having all the books in both places. Insanity.
This sort of thing could change all that. Instead of four thick textbooks, the kid would have a single nice little device... textbook manufacturers won't want to make their books available electronically, but at least the assignments can be sent home this way. All those photocopied sheets and such.
Many copyright barriers, but luckily, one of the few things that can break through even the most entrenched laws is a serious threat to the health of children.
If your books are printed on acidic paper, which they probably are, you had better get them laminated or deacidified before they become brittle and crumble. I'd be interested in seeing a study on long-term storage, since CDRs decay in sunlight, magnetic surfaces (tapes, hard drives, etc.) have the problem of adjacent regions slowly affecting each other, and even our own brains don't store memories accurately. If routine backup is the only way to make sure data stays around, what about the problem of having a copy of a copy of a copy [...] of the original.
I don't know if there is an alternate version of the format, but I've bought a lot of Palm Reader encrypted (secure) books from www.fictionwise.com, and they are not tied to a specific Palm. The encryption is based on my name and a hash of the credit card used to buy the e-book.
When I switched from my old Palm IIIe to a Tungsten-E, all I had to do was enter my name and credit card once and all old Palm Reader books worked fine.
Your main point remains valid - if it can't use other e-book formats I certainly won't buy it.
Otherwise, I'm very interested - the Tungsten-e's screen is great but it's way too small and the battery only lasts a day or two of e-book use (on my old Palm IIIe a pair of alcalines would last 3 weeks or more).
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.
.txt books floating around the p2p scene. Even if it is difficult to "rip" a book, the collective ation of the internet says that only one person has to do the work for the efforts to be availible to all. If the book-reader is so much better than the dead-tree paradigm, then the readers will make it standard. It's just like mp3's -- add value over a CD (no more heavy cd case, hours of music w/o moving a muscle) and the technology took off. With the ebook, the right device could lead to mass downloading of searchable, lightweight books. No more having to lug two novels through the airport because you're almost done with one. The publishers can either jump on board or run around screaming and suing (the RIAA strategem).
There are lots of
I think the textbook manufacturers have the most to fear. College kids are very sensitive to their book bills. Saving $100 on a book for a non-major class seems too good to pass up. Combine this with easy internet access and a nice device to let you take your electronic book to class, the cafe, or to a sudy group, and you have just undercut prentice hall, wiley, and thre rest of the big players.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
ZMcNulty or Holly Gates, or anyone who's actually gotten to play with one of these things for a minute:
I'm curious (and I'm sure a lot of people on slashdot are): how long does it take the book to refresh the screen when you turn the page?
This seems important for two reasons: if it's really slow, like to the point of being a visible lag time, it would be sort of annoying to read a book on it. I used to read ebooks on my PDA, and there were lots of annoying things about that (tft screens suck in bright light, the batteries die really quickly, the screen size is so small you have to flip the page every paragraph, etc). But the biggest annoyance was that it would sometimes take a whole second or two for the PDA to flip the page.
The other reason is that if the refresh rate of the EInk is fast enough, you could presumably run animations on them. Which would be a pretty cool application. Although 10k screens at 25fps yields only about 6.6 minutes of animation, so they'd have to work on the battery life.
Also, does anyone know what kind of processor and OS this thing is based on? Sony uses PalmOS for their PDAs; although PalmOS would be overkill for a simple device like this, I wonder if they bothered to build a whole new one.
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First off, this is obviously made for Japanese readers expect the "screen" to be on the right hand side for a US release if it happens.
That said, the main fault I see with this (aside from aforementioned political ramifications of the maleability of electronic content) is that I'm used to reading books in a "butterfly" style, that is across two pages of an open book.
If someone were to make one of these with two reading surfaces and a simple "next page" button on the lower right corner (and a previous page on the lower left) and bind it like a book, I would be all over it.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
If I buy this ($400), and decent OCR software (too danged much!), I can scan all my books in, oh, 8 zillion hours. That's assuming I can upload the scanned text to the reader. Then I won't have any need to spend big bucks on more bookshelves.
Alternatively, I can get a sheet-fed scanner (~$300), and slice up all my books, to scan through them more quickly. Then I can stay warm (451) all next winter burning the pages.
There just isn't a really good solution, but still, this is the product I've been looking for for years. Why did it take so long? If I can get stuff for a reasonable price, without having publishers performing a colonoscopy, I'll go for it.
The PPI (Pixel Per Inch) resolution of this ebook dislay is really great, that will provide enough pixels to make nice shaped letters and make much it more pleasant to read from a display. Contrast and virtually zero battery consumption are added bonuses.
2 1/
More PPI is the way monitors and displays should go. But for most of 20 years monitors has stayed more or less fixed with a dot size of 0.25~0.28mm giving about 100 PPI.
In the meantime hordes of consumers and marketing departments has kept all talk about monitors based on display size in inches 15", 17", 19"...
Most notable difference was when IBM introduced the T220 display in 2001 which has amazing 204 PPI giving a total display of 3840*2400 pixles at 22" - and it looks great. Unfotunately the price level for the time being is also great, about 8000 EUR.
They have a new version of it called T221 here:
http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/intellistation/t2
Hopefully in the future more consumers and manufactures will realise that display quality (PPI) is getting more important than size.
Take catalogs for example. Sure, you could look up what you want online. I do that almost all the time, and I'd be one of the first to buy a Web-connected e-ink catalog. But when you just want to browse, I can't stand having to click-tap-scroll-push-wheel through the pages. I need to be able to put my thumb on the side of a book, flip through and feel the breeze in my face while watching the pages go by...
Seriously though, until they can think of a better input device to navigate an eBook, they'll never replace paper. I'll get an eBook. You'll get an eBook. We'll all accept whatever's out there, eventually (we'll probably even begin to like DRM!). But IMHO, paper is here to stay.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
Think about libraries, their limited inventory of books, possible royalty payments for authors, expensive real estate taken up by bookshelves for browsing, limited number of copies of each book, lost or damaged books, etc, etc - replace all that with a bunch of kiosks that could be located anywhere. Governments and academic institutions should be jumping on this bandwagon. I wouldn't be surprised to see some developing countries implement this first.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
I might read English on this thing, but if you know Japanese, you can see from the pictures that the resolution is still crap compared to paper. I read almost all my news online, but almost never read sites in Japanese, unless they use flash, because the resolution is just too horrible. You can see from the photos that even a not-so-complex kanji like 'yami' starts to become jumbled together on this thing. Japanese paper printing technology is second to none on the planet. I'm still going to prefer printed Japanese for a long long time (at least 5 years ;).
If it will hold my entire O'Reilly library and have a good viewing, bookmarking and search interface I'd be interested.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
If only takes a small amount of power to change the pixels why not attach a small solar cell rechargable battery combo to the e-ink-book?
The parent poster, Chuck Bucket, is a plagiarism troll. This post was taken from this site. Mods, please check the post text on Google before you mod it.
Sapere aude!
I've been waiting for an e-Ink based bookreader to come out for a while now, but this one is not very appealing. There isn't much detail in the article, but from what I can see, the Sony design seems to have a number of flaws:
1. It's "similar in size and design to a paperback book", but the display is much smaller than what you'd be looking at in a paperback book. A lot of space seems to be taken up by margins, and about 1/4 of the display page seems to be used for a qwerty keyboard. Why the heck does a bookreader need a keyboard so badly that it's worth eating up valuable display space? Why does it need one at all? Furthermore, even if the display covered the entire "page", it's still only displaying half of what a paperback would display. I thought one of the advantages of the e-ink style technologies was that you could make them thin-- why didn't Sony build a clamshell design with displays on either side?
2. Unlike a paperback, a user of an ebook has no way of roughly estimating how far into book he or she is. I can't read Japanese, but in the picture, the display appeared to be entirely text; I'd at least put in some kind of scroll bar showing my relative position within the book. It's not at all clear from the article how I'd be able to sort all my 500 books, bookmark pages, or switch rapidly between specific points in different texts, but the fact that they don't mention any of those things is a bad sign.
3. Why is it using AAA batteries? Why not lithium? It's not clear what storage system it uses, but wouldn't an iPod-like 50GB hard drive store more than 500 books? If so, why aren't they using that?
4. The LIBRIe "allows users to download published content". I do not wish to be allowed to download published content, I want iLibrary. I want to be able to sort and manage a large number of ebooks by a wide variety of characteristics (author, ISBN, date published, subject, title, etc.), I want the ability to create hyperlinks between different parts of different books, I want the ability to "highlight" text (college-textbook sense, not word-processor sense)-- and turn different sets of highlighting on and off. I don't see any indication that the LIBRIe has anything beyond basic connectivity.
5. As other people have pointed out, it should be able to read plaintext, PDF, and HTML at a minimum. The DRM stuff is the final nail in the coffin, for me.
I was really excited by other slashdot stories about e-ink, but if this is what it ultimately amounts to, then I'll stick with paperbacks. Despite claiming "we know that the quality of the experience and ease-of-use are important in driving consumer adoption of mobile devices", they seem to be pretty unclear on both concepts. I guess I'll have to wait for Apple to develop an e-ink thingy....
The size of the screen could be mostly overcome by the e-book format not being physically limited in number of pages -- the extra content can just be shuffled into more pages in the book.
;) 2) logical trains of thought in most textbooks generally seem to me to be longer than a few paperback pages but often are only a couple of textbook pages (particularly in introductory texts), so the shorter pages would make it a bit harder to follow the train of thought in the smaller format because of the increased page turning necessary.
This wouldn't be done in a traditional textbook for two reasons 1) the biggest reason IMO who wants a paperback book sized textbook that while small in width and height is 2000 pages long 3-4" thick (unless its machinery's handbook, but thats a reference anyway
While the first is easilly overcome by effectively removing the limit on pages the second would require reformatting, or rewriting the content (ie a substantial amount of money) for a smaller page, but might not be a bad thing for teaching kids brought up on Video games, sound bites, and 30 second commercials.
But the basic point I was trying to make before I began rambling is that you could get around the major limitation of the smaller page by increasing the number of pages in the e-textbook - even having the diagrams on its own page (though again this could make it harder going from a traditional formatted book to flip back and forth between text and diagram, but a specially formatted book might make it even better than a traditional book -- oops rambling again).
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Will the experience of especially fiction be different when you don't know when it's going to end?
-I am an elective eunuch.
Because I stopped buying Sony after the DMCA was passed. You know, all that money they get from consumers is why they can buy Congress-Critters.
Too bad the rest of the don't like the DMCA world voted with their walets. Guess the lack of nice shiny kit is too much to bear.
I'd love one of these but I won't buy it if I can't display unencrypted .TXT, .DOC, .PDF, etc. files without having DRM shoved in my face.
.TXT version on the net. (P2P, usenet, http, etc.) I load the .TXT version on my PDA and throw the book on a shelf. I can load that .TXT version on either of my PDAs, my laptop or any of my computers. I can transport it on any form of media. Floppy, CD, DVD, CompactFlash, MemoryStick, USB hard drive, USB flash drive, etc. That's the kind of flexability I want in a reader.
These days I buy a book in paper "format" then search for a
You know where I can really see this being useful? For displaying music. I sing in a choir and organising music is a pain. During rehearsal skipping to the same page the conductor is looking at can be very time consuming and confusing. But with a set of connected ebooks (or emanuscripts, if you like) he conductor could always make sure people got the the right page instantly. It could be equally useful for orchestras.