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Sony Launches First Commercial Electronic Paper Display Reader
prostoalex writes "The e-paper is coming to reality in the form of a 6" screen with higher than usual 170 dpi and $381 price tag. It runs a customized version of Linux, and being Sony-branded, supports MemoryStick. The British journalists claim that three AAA batteries keep it up for 10,000 pages, but it's not too clear whether they've actually verified it, or just read the press-release. The manufacturers are hoping to sell 5,000 of these a month as their best-case scenario."
For me nothing will ever beat the feeling of actually having the paper in my hands. Sorry folks, it may be mean to the trees, but nothing has the same feel as an actual paper book.
--Obyron
Does anyone know if you can upload some "free" texts (HowTo's, gutenberg, etc) to this device ? The article only mentions BBeB, which has rather tight restrictions ... (i'm not permitted to read my books after 2 months ?! )
It doesn't really need to be fast -- in a real book, you don't flip the pages all that often. Plus, this device uses power when changing the state of the pixels; my guess is that actual animation would drain its batteries fairly quickly.
>|<*:=
Now they need to make the power supply and electronics smaller, and the display bigger (at least 8.5x11). Add the ability to be able to roll it up or fold it and put it in your pocket and I might think about getting one.
Minority report is approaching.....
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Unlike displays we are using to watch movies and play games, e-paper does not need insane refresh rates and even if it's 5 frames per second, allows for better quality reading due to very high contrast ratios.
:)
Remember that this is black and white (at best greyscale) technology primarly designed for reading text. It will definitely be faster to change page than for you to flip the page of the book when reading.
I can't wait to get my hands on those. E-books are finally readable
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
this technology has a little way to go yet before it really kicks ass. for one, they don't have color yet, and secondly, the contrast ratio isn't that great- it looks more like black on grey than black on white. in another couple years, i bet they'll have this with higher resolution, higher contrast, and full color, and probably fast enough to do any computer activity on it. What will also be really cool would/will be full bleed- no more frames around your screen- image from edge to edge. This technology is what will hopefully finally make the paperless office a reality. Portable, high resolution reflective displays. Right now, we probably use more paper than ever, because technology allows us to communicate as much as we want, but we hate reading it on the screen...
i like the idea of the high resolution display. :)
with 170dpi you will get
a) more text on the screen
b) detailed typography (text in bold, italic, different fonts)
c) a appearance that is closer to a real book and therefore better readable text (i guess)
Not because I miss the touch of a real dead tree book. Not because it doesn't bend. Not because it's expensive.
I won't buy it simply because it's ridiculous that the content expires in two months. What's the point of being able to load up to 500 books on that device if they expire 60 days later????
You [need] to remember how to spell each word you read in order to read it just like asains must remember what each symbol means to read.
That's not true. In English, you can speak a word you've never seen before by sounding it out (and I'm not sure if the irony was intentional, but your post had quite a few spelling errors).
Japanese does have an alphabet (IIRC, there are about 25 symbols - and each symbol can be written using 2 English letters, from a set of about 10). But they also have thousands of symbols that represent words, which need to be memorized. If you hadn't seen one before, you'd have no idea how to pronounce it, so you couldn't just ask someone what it means over the phone like you could in English.
And I think there are some Asian languages that don't have alphabets at all.
Personally i found japanese to be far easier to learn than spanish.
The language seems to have a fairly logical structure, so conversational Japanese shouldn't be too difficult to learn. But could you read a Japanese newspaper? To be considered literate, you'd need to have 1945 symbols memorized.
because it's not very efficient for fast refreshes, just for static content, like pages in a book.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
in a real book, you don't flip the pages all that often
Unless, of course, you are searching back a bunch of pages quickly, like people do all the time while reading novels with tricky plots.
The ability to flip quickly through a book is a powerful search mechanism. I remember the shape of important pages, how the text was arranged. I'd bet that people do this in other ways as well, such as remembering the first line of a page, or words along the outside edge.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
It's not a dupe. The first story said they were going to launch it, with some few details. Now they have launched it with more details and some first impressions.
The ability to flip quickly through a book is a powerful search mechanism.
Wouldn't google for your ebook be even more powerful?
I'm always annoyed when I have to scan back in the text for something pertinant, myself, when on a computer I could just ctrl+f it.
Actually, Japanese has 3 alphabets: katakana, hiragana and kanji (Chinese characters).
There are 47 characters in katakana and in hiragana. There are about 2000 commonly used kanji. In kanji, there are usually multiple readings (on/kun yomi), which somewhat complicates things. However, if you understand the meaning behind kanji, you're doing pretty good, probably same if you can recognize Latin rootwords in language X.
Kanji generally require correct stroke order to write. Japanese people have a tough time writing things by hand since they have often forgotten how to write many kanji. If they need to write something down, they will often do something on the computer, select the kanji the computer recommends (after checking the choices) then writing it.
Additionally, some kanji are really complicated to write. "taka" is pretty tough and when I went to buy stuff when I was in Tokyo, nearly everyone needed to look it up in their books to figure out the kanji so they could write it down on the invoice.
Chinese has about 20,000 from what I've heard. That's a lot.
On the plus side, you can write hiragana and katakana the exact same way you hear it. In English, you need context to know the difference when writing "aunt" and "ant". "whole"/"hole" anyone? In fact, if someone hears a name and doesn't know the kanji, it is written down in hiragana or katakana.
Anyway, personally I did better in Japanese than Spanish as the parent apparantly did, but that is due to my motivation. At least in Spanish you can guess that "interesante (sp?)" is "interesting". "omoshiroi" doesn't seem quite as easy to me.
We should have the sources, right?
If we can compile them and upgrade the device, there should not be any problem: we will probably be able to display whatever we want.
Any other clue about that?
Obviously, you are thinking of another time of "ePaper".
And it does not help that you didn't bother to read the article at all.
I agree with you there... But I have never been able to find a device like this with a B&W LCD display. Until there is such a device, the issue is a non-starter.
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Moving books is fun. They smell nice. It is nice to look at all the old covers. It is nice to remember when you first read them, and why, and whether they were good or bad or useful. This usually happens as you unpack them. You will never get any of that with a set of books stored on a Sony device.
this is actually impossible to test - in a stateful display, whether you drive a pixel depends on what image state each pixel starts on and what image state you go to. so, unlike an lcd, if the pixel doesn't change, you don't apply power (more or less).
thus, going from page a to page b may drive 1/2 the pixels, but going from page b to page c may drive 3/4 of the pixels. thus, from page b to c requires a lot more power.
Any electronic device that uses such a trickle of current that batteries can last for months -- is an electronic device that should be powered by built-in solar cells. Indeed, this particular gadget appears to be frugal enough that if you have enough light to READ its text, then you probably have enough light to power it.
I think it depends somewhat on what kind of book you're reading. Novels are read slowly and sequentially. Reference material is flipped through quickly and often - hence the importance of a search facility.
Think about how you look through a dictionary: flip through pages quickly, focusing on the index word at the top of the page. The pages flipping by are just a blur until you get close and then flip page by page.
But honestly, I would rather read reference material on-line anyway. But a small e-book novel that I could take with me to the beach - that would be cool.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
in a real book, you don't flip the pages all that often
;-)
Unless, of course, you are searching back a bunch of pages quickly, like people do all the time while reading novels with tricky plots.
I believe that some scientists have developed "text searching" technologies that allow computing devices to "search" through the words in a file. Hopefully this device could make use of this new advance, and "search" the pages a bit faster than you could flick around the pages of a book...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.