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."

Comments

Think "Free"

[mumblestheclown]

as if working for Sony.

go ahead, push the troll button. It doesn't make it any less true.

Re:i hate sony

[zero_offset]

Worst of all, the Sony Memory Stick is a "dumb" format. Unlike Compact Flash, all of the read/write electronics are in the device itself. This probably makes the Memory Sticks cheaper to produce, although you'll notice they don't sell for less, funny how that works. Compact Flash, on the other hand, has most of the read/write electronics in the CF media itself. This means the device is potentially simplified a bit (probably not much chance of affecting the price significantly, but less to break over time), but more importantly it means you can gain important read/write speed improvements just by purchasing newer media.

When I bought my camera, the best LexarMedia CF cards had a write speed of about 8X. Today they're about three times as fast, and that translates almost directly into faster "ready for the next photo" speeds.

Granted, this aspect probably wouldn't matter much in this specific e-book application (unless maybe you can search book content? seems likely, the article mentions a keyboard), but it's a great illustration of how the Sony format sucks in comparison.

Aside from the obvious fact that Sony itself sucks.

DRM

[danila]

Sony can take their DRM and stick it up their arse. And to think of it, how perverse is it to call a DRM system "Open MG"? From where I stand, there is nothing open about it...

I am sticking to pirated ebooks, thank you very much (and occasionally some publishers like Baen who "get it"). And I will continue to do so, unless it occures to major publishers that the inherent qualities of electronic books are easy distribution and easy modifiability.