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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."
Hey, I have a bunch of those. I call them "books".
Anyone have any idea on what the refresh rate on these things is? I've always imagined the whole e-paper thing must be fairly slow at scrolling/turning the page - but I hope I'm wrong!
i have one problem with this: memory stick; e-paper has to be flexible in the sense that it cant only support memory stick, thats like releasing paper that can only be written on with a special brand of pens, for the e-paper thing to take off we need multi format e-stationary
where's the source for their modified linux?
Seems like every time an announcement like this is made a week later we find out they aren't making the source available..
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
and can be seen in sunny environments? Erm, is that right?
So the question is, would this be possible? Can the screen refresh its contents fast enough for normal computer use? Can it be used interchangably as a regular monitor? If so, this thing sounds great.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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 ?! )
Nothing new here:Link
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.
What's the point of 170dpi? My Palm has perhaps 40dpi at the most and it has perfectly readable text.
I think this is a case of a company marketing a product for a niche that doesn't need anywhere near the complexity or cost of the product they're pushing.
You people think this is neat? Just wait until the toilet paper in public restrooms stream commercials. Try taking care of business then. Paper and monitors, please don't mix the two.
Japanese keyboards are like qwerty, but each letter/number has a kana (like a syllable) associated. There's a key next to space bar that change keyboard mode (hiragana/katakana/roman).
Japanese has an alphabet. I dont see why people think asian languadges are so difficult. They are often structured much better and are far easier to learn. Personally i found japanese to be far easier to learn than spanish. Oh and for anyone who thinks that its hard to memorize a word that uses symbols nto letters think of it this way. Every work in english has a certain way to spell it. When you see a word on paper you take the letters and turn it into a meaningful word in your head. Its the same with asain languadges. Instead of letters they use slashes and in some languages circles. You 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.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
As cool as this is, how inexpensive can it get, and long is it gonna take to get there.
But actually, when you think about it, it's only the price of about 4 toner cartages (that's for a small office laser printer, don't know what other ink prices run...feel free to elaborate on this).
Well, beats having a huge keyboard with a seperate key for every character :)
_ de tail.JPG
Although the other way to do it would be to have a keyboard with kanji radicals and enter them to build the character you want to create.
You can set most operating systems to do the kana/kanji conversion for you. You enter the characters using phonetic romanized spelling and the OS converts to the japanese equivilent, first to kana characters, then to a kanji character, or selection of kanji characters for the user to select from.
A bit offtopic, but here's a (very) early Japanese typewriter. I don't imagine people running it could manage many words-per-minute.
http://www.officemuseum.com/Japanese_typewriter
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Does this unit have support for PDF's? Lack of PDF support is what kept me from buying the last generation of dedicated ebook readers.
What do the tools necessary to be a 'publisher' cost and what restrictions do that place of what you can use them for? It will do little good if the 'publishing' tools cost $5000 - $10000 USD per year.
I can't help thinking that this technology is "borrowing a page" from the MP3 players like the iPod.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Very close to my ideal writer's tool: a portable writing pad consisting of a high-resolution B&W screen like this, a fold-up wireless keyboard, a long battery life, and just one application: a word processor. It should run entirely from flash memory . And a $400 price tag would be sweet too.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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 dont see why people think asian languadges are so difficult.
Try find a kanji in a dictionary...
Try read a japanese text with a dictionary...
Try speak a word you read frist time (kanji usually has 2 way of reading)...
Korean has a easier way of writing, but sometimes they use kanjis too.
PS: IANAT (I am not a troll), but i do have a lot of work studying japanese...
Yep, the jp106 keyboard layout is QWERTY, but has a few extra buttons to handle jumping between character sets. The space bar is much smaller as a result.... and the backslash is replaced with the yen symbol. And yes, in Japanese Windows as there is no backslash, you can imagine what the filename paths look like. I just wish the keyboard would work properly with DOSbox and Bochs... for some reason the DOS emulators get confused when dealing with Japanese keyboards. I can't get the colon to come out.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I thought the whole point of having ePaper in the first place was to have an inexpensive alternative to LCD which could be used in places LCD couldn't (like on product labels). At nearly $400, I don't see the ePaper providing a noticable savings over a comparable B&W LCD display, which could easily be used in a similar device. "So, 10 out of 10 for style, but minus several million for good thinking, okay?"
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
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.
The technology behind these things sounds very similar to the Fisher-Price MagnaDoodle, which is a kickaround portable whiteboard that I cannot live without. It uses iron filings suspended in a white opaque oil, and it has a dot pitch of about 1/6" inch. The electronic version of these sound really great - especially the nonvolatility of the display. There is little doubt that these things are ultimately going to trounce LCDs.
This particular implementation, however, does not sound appealling due to the advertising whores that want some screenspace and the DRM that cripples its functionality. If they can sell these things for under $400 at such low volumes, then much better device that use essentially the same display technology cannot be too far off.
In his enthusiasm, Ukita lets slip that flexible electronic paper which can handle Harry Potter-esque moving images and colour is in the research and development labs and may be just two to three years away.
Having not read any Harry Potter, I may well be missing something obvious, but what is so 'Harry-Potter--esque' about 'moving images and colour'? Why not just say "can handle moving images and colour"? I'm pretty certain we had them before Harry Potter came along.
Or is it just a desperate attempt to interest people in the article?
"The e-paper is coming to reality in the form of a 6" screen" Whoa - wait - hold the phone. Paper does not have a screen and it does not require batteries. E-paper looks like a sheet of paper (but stronger) and is imbedded with tiny spheres that are rotate from the white side to the dark side by a device that looks like a printer but requires no ink. A couple of companies are working on this and they need to sue Sony's arrogant butt!
..yet. Give it a generation or two to iron out the problems that bound to pop up, and practicly everyone will buy them. The first videorecorders, personal computers, walkmen, mp3-players and whatnot wasn't perfect either, but these days 'everyone' has one.
For me, I would like to see this for at least half the prize and with the ability to display colour photographs (but then, a lot of the books I read has colour pictures in them), as well as support for wirtually any fileformat that displays text under the sun - as well as beeing able to display photographs from my digicam. Oh, and add a CF-card slot to it too, please ;)
Seriously thought - drop the price in half and I'll prolly buy one, memorystick, monocrome text and all.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Sounds cool...as long as it doesn't crack in half when I fall asleep on top of it...
-tom
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.
Don't you also love slashdot's auto- href captions?
Here is source http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/EBR-10 00EP.html
Oh and for anyone who thinks that its hard to memorize a word that uses symbols nto letters think of it this way. Every work in english has a certain way to spell it. When you see a word on paper you take the letters and turn it into a meaningful word in your head. Its the same with asain languadges. Instead of letters they use slashes and in some languages circles. You 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.
True, but when I don't know how to spell a word in english, I can guess at the spelling because I know the sounds the letters make. I don't think that is possible in Japanese.
-Colin
Japanese is a highly phonetic ( and also highly inflected) language. They have had their own phoentic alpabet for centuries. There is particular resourcfulness in typing this alphabet.
The problem comes in two forms. The first of which is an early resistence by the intelligensia to actually use the Japanese alphabet (which was the invention of mere women). Chinese was the language of culture, and most Japanese works written before and around the time of the invention of the Japanese phonetic alphabet were not written in Japanese using the Chinese Kanji, they were actually written in classical Chinese (sometimes with a certain amount of skill, but often rather crudely). Much as the learned of Europe wrote in Latin, even though Latin was not their native tongue.
With this dissimilarity, many of these people had a language that was either descended from or a close relative of Latin. Chinese and Japanese have no common base. They are very, very dissimilar.
And just as these European scholars, when they did write in their native tongue they couldn't help themselves from sprinkling it liberally with Chinese.
And so, despite their being a native alphabet, the Chinese Kanji became imbedded in the native style of writing.
No we come to the second issue. Why don't they just, in modern times, simply drop the use of Kanji and write in Japanese? Because Japanese is a highly polyglot language, just like English. It has adopted into itself many foreign words, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese (the "Japanese" word for the kimono's (actually a western word in a sense, although composed of a Japanese phrase)undergarment, "Juban," is the Portugese word for "undershirt," gibao,( And the pattern of the garment itself is transformed from its traditional Japanese form into the European form)), and, of course. . . Chinese.
But, as I've already pointed, out Chinese and Japanese have no relation, in particular Chinese is not phonetic, and thus there is no way to spell these Chinese words in the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So they need to use Kanji.
Had the Japanese encountered the Spanish before the Chinese things would have turned out rather differently, as the Latin alphabet is not only a very good fit with the Japanese language, it fits Japanese a bit better than it does the Germanically derived English.
KFG
Looks like they've been thinking - the costs for purchasing/renting content seem fairly reasonable. However, no mention is made of own content. If I can't convert my own stuff to their format with no restrictions, they wont be getting my dollars.
The best thing about my reb is the rocketwriter.
Yay me!
W00t! Now I can have a digital power book just like Penny in the cartoon.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's perfectly possible to do this with both hirigana and katakana, which are the Japanese phoenetic 'alphabets'. With these there's no weird stuff to get wrong like spelling something 'f' when it should be 'ph' or other oddities in the english language. So you basically just write it down as it sounds. No problem what so ever!
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Sony has been pushing their proprietary "memory stick" which uses heavy drm called "magicgate" in all of their products hoping that the sheer number of devices they can put it in will give it a valid/default market base.
... must have found the source of all evil and drunk from one of the fountains in the lobby of the building with the catchy logo over the entrance.
/. is brave enough to set up 'inleague.withsatan.com' to point to the Sony website?
It is a small wonder the owner of this url has not had his pants sued off yet. Perhaps somebody on
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
well, AAA batteries, 10,000 pages reades, 500 books in memory, why in Hell have they packed such a wonderful geek-toy with this poor memory and energy technology? For 350 euros more or less they should have put at least memory for enough books you cannot read in a lifetime and battery for reading them all.
DON'T PANIC
I think finally e-Books can get off the ground!
Clicky-click, I want my "Mastering Perl Regilar Expressions" while sitting at the sofa. Here it goes.
No more giant bookshelves, no more eye-strain while reading from CRT or LCD screen.
It's silent revolution, guys.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Surely some company/educational instititution will snap these up like pancakes....
...but the battery life would depend on how long you spent reading each page. You can't just say "it will last 10 000 pages" - someone might spend 10 seconds to read a page, or two minutes...
"Ur" probably able to store a bookmark on the flash memory card. Just think, "u" no longer have "2" worry about losing "ur" bookmark.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I never tried to learn Japanise, but I've tried to leran Chinese. Looking for character in the dictionary is a science in itself. There are special sytems for look up in the dictionary - "Four corner" and "Root", which are qute difficalt to learn. On top of it there are communist-modified characters and classic character. And prononsation with tones. In fact chines could understand more easy student speaking without tones, then student reproducing tones not perfectly...
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?
They have gone to extrodinary lengths to develop a new display technology that is "easily read in bright sunlight or dimly lit environments while being able to be seen at virtually any angle".
Well guess what else would do the same? A good old B&W LCD display like your watch has had for decades. It uses practically no power, is old and cheap technology, etc. Well, the one advantage is the slightly increased viewing angle, but only a small improvement.
I've been ranting on and on here on
Now to end the ranting, and provide some insight...
Price: it's about 3X too expensive to even consider (and I've just covered how it could be much cheaper).
I'm sure this won't support HTML, PDFs, or any other common file format, which immediately kills it for me. Also, images are a must.
Storage. I standardize all my devices on CompactFlash, no exceptions.
Size. No dimentions are listed, but I bet it's large. I want something about 7"x9". Small enough to be carryable, large enough to read easily.
Batteries: AAA batteries suck. AA batteries are FAR better. Much more power, only slightly bigger.
/.?
So, can anybody improve upon this device? Fixing the first 3 is required, but for the rest, I'll bend. Maybe a PalmOS portable with a huge screen?
Also, if I could find a non-backlit LCD screen (even if only 16-shade B&W) with a VGA connector, I'd buy it in a second. I'd keep one back-lit color-screen for multimedia, and use this for everything else. Really now, do you need color (or a headache from the backlighting) when reading
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I found the dimentions... My mistake. This thing is quite close to 7x9. Although much of it is wasted for those buttons on the bottom, it's big enough, and small enough.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
>>"Electronic paper is to paper, what paper is to clay tablets."
Wrong.
Electronic paper is to paper, what a bicycle is to a fish.
Which is partially the reason why Mao favored china standardizing on Esperanto.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Philips invented the paper, they work closely with Matsushita, so I'd wait for a Panasonic competitor to hit the market. Matsushita seem to have come up with a lot of neat stuff over the past year, hopefully it's a renaissance that will continue.
I have a sony digital camera which is excellent but the memory sticks are shiat. They hold so few photos. My camera on 3.2 megapixel gets about 80 photos on a 128mb stick. My mates olympus gets 200 plus on the same settings and card size.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Pretty good and accurate write up, however there are a few missing points. There's a good reason that the Japanese continued to use the Kanji (Chinese Characters) even when they started accepting the useage of Kana (phonetic alphabet). Although the Japanese Kana is strictly phonetic, there is no way to specify the intonation of the Kana, thus this must be recognized by context. The Japanese language does have subtle differences in pronunciation, but the written language has no way to reflect this. As an example, take the English word "Bear". It sounds the same as "Bare" but means something entirely different. However, you don't need context to notice the difference in the written language, whereas in Japanese Kana you would, because it would be written in exactly the same way. What's a bit interesting is that in the English spoken language, you WOULD need the context to realize whether the speaker means "bear" or "bare". In Japanese, the word "Kuma", depending on the pronunciation, can mean either "bear" or "dark circles under your eyes", but the pronunciation is different, and can be recognized immediately.
Back to the original issue though, the Japanese language also has many words where the context is required to understand the meaning. For example "Kumo" (spider/cloud), "Kami" (hair/paper), "Hana" (nose/flower), and so on, all have identical pronunciations.
Under such circumstances, using full Kana will result in a very difficult to understand sentence that is long, flat, and hard to read. Using Chinese Kanji for specific vocabulary makes it very easy to read. The Kanji provides the context, and often the pronunciation.
One misperception is that the invention of Kana by women allowed them to write strictly in Kana alone. This is neither true nor accurate. As the parent had mentioned, the full Chinese Kanji writings of the time were written in a crude interpretation of the Chinese language, and was more often than not pretty poor as Chinese. It had it's own structure that was vaguely Japanese in grammatic structure, but you couldn't read it directly into Japanese. Hard to explain, but it was sort of a written language that was a language to itself. There was no way you could read it straight, it required interpretation.
This meant that writting in Kanji required more than the knowledge of the written language, but a background in an entirely different spoken language (Chinese) too. Just imagine if English was merely a spoken language, and the written language was Russian. (French and Spanish are way too similar to English than Japanese and Chinese are.)
By creating Kana, which was phonetic, it was possible to write sentences that could be read as Japanese by filling the gaps that the Chinese-esque writing simply "assumed". (I suppose you could say that prior to Kana, the written language was similar to Arabic where you need to assume the vowels by reading the context, as there are no vowels in the written language. Or so I'm told.) Of course, this was a very "Femminin" thing to do, and naturally was NOT a "Macho" (=Manly and Intelligent) thing to do in those days.
Either way, the use of Kana was gradually accepted, and the written Japanese language evolved a little at a time. It's still evolving today (as is the case with most any active language) so even works from 100 years ago are hard to read or understand. The Japanese written language is still very different from the spoken language, but it's much more Japanese these days. There is also a trend in decreasing the ammount of Kanji and increasing Kana, although I believe this is more attributed to lower educational standards these days, with people that can't read a lot of the more complex Kanji. For better or for worse, that's the case.
As a side note, Kana itself was derived from Kanji, and was a "simplified" form. I'm not sure how the Korean language evolved, but they too use a mixture of Chinese characters and their own phonetic characters. (Although it's rarely seen... the only areas I've seen Kanji in Korea were in a few signs, and occasionally in newspaper headlines.)
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
...however, most people can't type using the Kana-key layout. It's superior in that you can REALLY type fast (one keystroke for a phonetic sound), but 99% of the population that types using a keyboard uses Romaji input method.
;-)
Let me explain a bit. Say you were to type "Kuma" (bear). You would, literally, type K-U-M-A, which would display the two Kana characters "KU" and "MA". Press the space key, and voila! You have a list of Kanji characters to select from. The invention of the front end processor (which converts the kana to kanji) made it possible, and these things are wickedly smart. Back 20 years about you converted to kanji, and often had to go through a long list of possible matches. Today, the FEP actually reads the context and very often gives you the correct match on the first try. It's pretty cool when you think about it.
Given the fact that you can type using the QWERTY layout, and use the space key to convert to Kanji, there's really no need for a Japanese-specific keyboard. Most Japanese typers wouldn't have a hard time at all using a standard American keyboard, as long as the OS is in Japanese (meaning there's an FEP). The only thing they would have trouble with is a few specific differences in the keyboard layout, specifically things like doubt-quotes, quotes, colons, semi-colons, and all the shift+numerals. Of course, you can change settings in Windows/Linux/*BSD to give an American keyboard a Japanese layout, and then things would be pretty cool. It's weird though, I warn you, to be getting a different character than printed on the keyboard. I use a Japanese OS on an American model ThinkPad, and everyone else seems to have a problem until they realize I've remapped the keys.
isnt that exactly what a tablet PC is?
Besides that mistake, you have made many others.
LCD can musster up to some 120 dpi and it has other problems, too.
Power useage, for example. Good LCD is almost bound to have backlight, but even without it, it cincumes way more than this thing.
This is due to the fact that it has to be periodically refreshed, and this takes power.
eInk bsed stuff needs power jus when changing display constent, not for refresh.
Besides, it uses polarisers, so it can never look wquite lake paper, which is essential for this application...
Whats the point of having a link in the article to the US exchange rate? I think the practice of having too many links on a page makes it completely unreadable.. (eg. wikipedia)
On the one side, the article is telling me about reading novels on that device. Someone who is reading for fun isn't necessarily very interested in reading novels on such devices or even spend 220 Pounds for it or pay for books if he can them them for free at the local library.
/. even report on that if nearly noone is gonna buying or even using it? :-)))
On the other side, there is no support for persons like me who just want to have a portable library including my own book and script scans... there's neither enough storage nor is the display's size sufficient. And, additionally, how the hell may I convert GIFs, JPGs and PDF scans to the BBeB format? How do I use it as a news reader if there's no WLAN support to browse the web or to check out scientific articles from PROLA and other online publication services? It is a PDA with enhanced contrast but without colors and wihtout the functionality.
Maybe the max 5.000 pieces per month figure accurately representes these problems... so why does
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 can also jump anywhere in the book based on percent, so if I can remember where things are in the book based on the percentage (not unlike remembering approximate page numbers in a dead tree book) then I can jump to that area very quickly.
It is also nice how the book stays on the same page when you "close" it (quit the program) and them "open" it again (open the program). Say hello to the end of traditional bookmarks and/or dogeared pages. :D
I can't imagine why this bookreader would be any different...
Incidently, reading eBooks on a PDA is great for reading on a train (such as those you find in Japan). You can read one handed and use the scroll buttons to flip the "pages" (great when you are standing up and have to hold on to a handle)...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I think on screens you can display Latin at 4*6 pixels, Katakana at 8*8 pixels (with an extra character for accents) and some Kanji at 16*16 pixels, but that is really not very readable.
This gets rated 5??!! This posting is so full of nonsense and inaccuracy that it's not even worth replying to. Short message : disregard everything said here, it's all wrong. There is plenty of real information on the net about Japanese orthography - if you're really interested (and it is a fascinating writing system). Omniglot.com might be a good place to start.
'tty' based messaging concepts are obsolete.
resigned
Two thumbs up to Philips who are the actual creators of this "paper-like" display.
Two thumbs way down to Sony for implementing it tied to DRM and content expiration. Thanks for nothing, Sony.
Sigged!
Which part of Japanese was easier to learn? That its grammar is almost the exact opposite of English, or that it uses 2 native alphabets plus 1945 daily use Chinese characters?
...up to 31 "slashes" in some cases, which multiple radicals (about 74 of those exist) to boot..still sound easier than Spanish?
"Instead of letters they use slashes"
Come live here (in Japan) and see how many foreigners can actually read a newspaper, navigate the public transportation system or fill out an insurance form without any assitance. Among people living here 5 years or more, you'll find the number really low.
Sorry to flip out a little, but people who shrug off Japanese as an easy language have obvious not much exposure to it outside of anime.
I see a big market for a roughly palm pilot sized gadget similar to this but it would be very cheap and loosing it wouldnt be a big deal, inside it would be a dumb terminal with a cheap low-powered wireless connection. The usefulness would come from its ability to connect to other things and use them as hosts (this needs quite abit of companies working together) for example it could connect to the phone in your pocket and thus become the interface to your phone (it would send back the position you pressed on the screen), and would obviously be able to access the net etc and view things stored on your phone - including books you'd downloaded, it could also interface with mp3 players, cameras etc etc. Public places like airports could have a stack of them at the entrance - you pick one up and the host computer can tell you where you are and where you need to go (it knows what wireless 'cell' you're in) and give you something to read while waiting, you dump it on a stack as you board the plane and its durable enough that the cleaners can dunk them in disinfectant before returning them to the entrance. It can naturally can tell if you try to steal it (although its cheap so no big deal) and if you really wanted to be big brother you could require people carry one and enter a code regularly to proove they still have it. This would be the ultimate disposable device.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Obviously, this will save quite a few trees if it catches on. While this is better for the environment in at least one way, I hesitate to assume this is a "green" device. What about all the typical dangerous metals/compounds/whatever that go into electronic devices? Does the good it can do really outweigh the bad? I'm not saying it *isn't* better--I really don't know. Does anyone here?
Picture
They'll be using sub-pixel imaging.
Read all about it.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
version of pop-up books!
They, (actually, we :) had encountered the Indian writing system about the same time as Kanas were invented. But it did not contribute to the Japanese writing system. Indian writing systems, being syllabic, indeed well suited to transcribing Japnese. Also, the majority of the intellectuals in those days being Buddhist monks, some of whom were familiar with the Indian wrting system, adopting a writing system derived from an Indian system might have happened if they were willing.
However, it did not happen. The Japanese already had a system of transcribing their syllables in Chinese characters, called Man-you gana. Hiragana and katakana were different ways of simplifying that Man-you gana.
A benefit of this development, or more precisely the fact that the Japanese used the Chinese characters to transcribe their language was that it allows us to figure out the pronunciation of Japanese in those days.
On the other hand, the knowledge of Indian writing system did contribute to the Japanese culture in the form of the table of 50 sounds. That was inspired by how syllables are arranged in Indic grammer, especially Sanskrit. Columns of consonants and rows of vowels, arranged to reflect the positions of vocal organs when a syllable is pronounced. This table, too, tells us how the syllables were pronounced in those days. So, for example the sounds that are pronounced as "ha" "hi" "fu" "he" "ho" today must have been pronounced as "pa" "pi" "pu" "pe" "po" because the the column for them is placed between "n" and "m". Pretty neat.
A few (maybe long answered, in that case, ashes on my head and tears in my eyes :-) questions:
Where can I find BBeB specs?
Can I use it without the DRM?
Is there a developers kit or something?
As it is (some kind of?) XML, other formats should translate nicely?
Thanks a lot for any help.
Mr. Chu Bong-Foo (also known as the father of Chinese computer) has developed an e-book system in LGPL. In ordered to be an replacement of paper textbooks, it is written in *Assembly* to lower the requirement of hardware. In 2002, it has been used by houndreds of students in Mainland China. I think the most amazing feature of it is that it doens't need power to retain the content on the screen, but only needs power to change the content.
One of the commercial version is sold in Taiwan for NT$5000 (US $150). Two AA batteries for viewing 15000 pages. The resolution(6.5'' 640*480) is a little lower than the Sony one. You can download converted TXT/PDF/HTML and read on it. (More pictures here)
Once these become affordable I can start reading all the books living at project Gutenberg in a sensible way!
This article mentioned This Press Release which said that the E-Reader would be available in April. The press release has pictures of the device.
All the corporate control freaks still think of consumers as sheep that need to be told what they want.
:
Do these two statements really belong to the same product?
> "but the sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months"
> "Whether the convenience of having an armful of books in a pocket-sized reader is worth forsaking building up a physical collection remains to be seen"
Yeah, I'm going to build up quite a library of books... which evaporates every 2 months.
BUZZ! WRONG. E-paper is a great new technology; But this product will be a miserable failure, and nobody at SONY will have any clue why. Perhaps they will take some lessons from the RIAA and blame poor sales on pirates and start litigating, raiding, suing, and raising prices.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The utterances of experts. Name one, then.
Hiragana and katakana aren't really alphabets. They're alphasyllabaries.
Kill two birds with one stone by killing a bird with a stone and then picking up the stone and killing another bird.
Why I'm responding to AC Flamebait, I'll never know...but that joke falls flat on it's face because most japanese words end in a vowel.
Here's a link to the japanese LIBRIE site (http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/LIBRIE/) if you're interested in getting a look at it.
What I've found is that it's no substitute for sitting down with a real book, but it's great when waiting around at the post office, eating lunch, or any time I have some time I'd like to read but may not have planned for and brought a book.
The article and Sony seemed to be concerned with content, with the focus on this product that you can get a cheaper eBook than a real book. That, to me, is not a compelling reason to buy the thing. The collection at the Gutenberg Project would make it compelling for me, and I'm surprised that the eBook world has not embraced that in their marketing. Perhaps it's because consumer technology traditionally enables the sale of "content" (records, DVD's, etc.), and pointing to free content might be a no-no to publishers of current works. But if they wanted to sell the hardware, it would be a pretty gutsy move to advertise "thousands of free classic titles".
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
6"? Humph. Let me know when I can get one of Arthur Clarke's "newspads".
Students spend upwards of 500 dollars per semester on books... with one of these babies, the student would make one large purchase at the outset of their studies and then "lease" the material from the university for every semester thereafter for a much lower cost, where it would automatically discontinue access to the material some time after final exams are over. A lot of students end up wanting to unload their used books anyways at the end of a semester, so this would have a lot of appeal for those sorts of people. For some courses, I do want to keep my books, but for the rest of them, I don't really care... I'd just as soon sell the darn things the day the course is ended and hopefully get _some_ of my money back. As long as students had a choice whether to buy the real thing or lease the electronic version of a particular book, this might not be a bad idea, at least from the perspective of the student who quite often isn't in the best of financial positions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Panasonic's SigmaBook has twin 1024x768 screens and runs on two AA batteries. It also reads memory sticks I believe. http://neohio.craintech.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?art icleId=2872
As far as I can tell, you can actually order these right now from Japan for $350-$400:
http://www.sigmabook.jp
Oh, it will also let you roll your own texts with BMPs.
I'd like to scan all of my textbooks using an ADF setup. Bulky textbooks are a major pain in my back.
I thought E-paper was supposed to be a piece of disposable paper on which you "printed" text by changing the color of the pixels embedded into it. So you could print the same piece of paper over and over again.
But those would be regular old 8.5x11" sheets at negligable cost.
So... why is this called e-paper rather than just a plain old e-book?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
http://www.eink.com/news/images/
Good for them!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Good design. Check out the slashcode, revise it with your feature, and submit the patches to the slashcode project. Send Rob a notice, and he might roll it out as Slashdot++.
--
make install -not war
i've wanted a laptop with electronic paper for ages now!
we're almost up to a lightweight laptop with a battery life of weeks, but no one wants to make one it seems. put together a decent low-power cpu, an electronic paper display and some type of flash and you're there. and all of that is smaller so you can devote some more room to batteries.
but no, they just focus on bigger hard drives and faster more power hungry cpu's.
sigh.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
But is it compatable with papyrus?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
that's like half a price of a notebook now aday.
Selling that thing when the economic isn't so good is like asking for trouble. personally, $200 is a maybe, and $150 or less, I would buy it if it will support every book later on.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If picture worth a thousand words, how many megapixels is it? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I'm not terribly knowledgeable about linguistics, but I do know that Korean is written in a bona fide alphabet that separates vowel and consonant symbols (contrast to the two syllabaries {katakana and hiragana} used by Japanese). It's invention is attributed to a king many hundreds of years ago.
Academic Korean writing (I've been told) still uses lots of Chinese characters. I get the impression it's a style/showoff thing.
Like English, with germanic-derived and latin-derived vocabularies combined ["hate" versus "detest"], Korean has "native" Korean words and chinese derived words.
You are considered an eloquent speaker if you use a lot of "chinese character words" -- words derived from the Chinese that in previous decades might have been written with the Chinese characters, but these days are probably spelled out like almost everything else. This is somewhat analogous to English, where the sentences comprised of latin-derived words are usully considered more erudite.
Also, I thought the idea of digital paper was that it was supposed to be, well, flat. This thing is built like a calculator.
Is there something here I'm not getting. . ? It looks like re-packaged old technology to me. --Not that I haven't been looking for something like it; the screens on PDA's are just too small. But this isn't the holy grail, I think. And it's certainly not worth three hundred and something dollars.
Not for something which might as well be an old LCD display, (and which may very well be just that.)
-FL
Kanji are terrible. There's no way around it. By sixth grade, children are expected to be able to read and write 1000 characters--half of what you need to be a functioning adult. It's ridiculous. If a western child can't read and write by age 11, he gets enrolled in the Special Olympics.
If a 'western' child is expected to know everything they need to know as an adult at age eleven, why are English classes mandated up to age 18, with an additional two years in college? Kanji aren't easy to be sure, but I'd wager they're just as difficult as the wealth of non-phonetic vocabulary required for Western students. Words like 'rendezvous', 'necessary', and 'ersatz' are all difficult to learn for kids, yet they make do.
The equivalent Japanese sentence would be something like "Migurushii inu ga imasu." ("There is an ugly dog." The subject is implied. I shit you not.) It's not easy for a westerner to wrap his mind around.
Yes and no; if a Westerner tries to attack Japanese like it's a Western language, than yeah, they'll have a hell of a time; on the other hand, if you're capable (and willing) of twisting your worldview around, then it's a hell of a lot easier. The Japanese language is much less concerned with concepts of ownership and time when compared to the European languages, and instead focuses more on relationships.
This is why things like 'Migurushii inu ga imasu.' make sense -- it's the fact that the dog is ugly that is important, not that it's your dog. If you wanted to emphasize the ownership, you could ('Watashi wa/no migurushii inu ga imasu.'), but you don't have to, whereas in Western languages, ownership is very important and almost never gets left out.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
The characters in the Japanese language (in the hiragana and katakana alphabets) are syllabic, not phonetic (as most western languages are). Japanese language phonemes are constrained to the pre-existent syllables and this is why it is so hard for native Japanese-speaking people to produce a liquid "r" sound (as in "lola": it will sound as "rora")
As for inflexion, the structure of japanese sentences is mostly comprised of a word+particle. This particle usually denotes the grammatical meaning of the preceding word, but in no ways it changes the way the word is written -- except for verbs. But Japanese inflexion doesnt go as far as finnish inflexion, for example, which can alter all words in a sentence. And most romance languages inflect verbs as well, so this is not unique to Japanese.
One big difference between a product like this and a real book is its attractiveness to thieves. If you leave a book behind and return an hour later to pick it up, chances are it'll still be there.
A device like this is more likely to be stolen even if the thief doesn't know what it is. So these devices end up being just another burden to worry about.
Kanji aren't easy to be sure, but I'd wager they're just as difficult as the wealth of non-phonetic vocabulary required for Western students. Words like 'rendezvous', 'necessary', and 'ersatz' are all difficult to learn for kids, yet they make do.
You know you're reaching when words like "rendezvous" and "ersatz" are your examples of words that people need to function in society. :) (And by "function," I'm talking about the level of ability required to do basic things like go food shopping and read directions.) The size of the "alphabet" used in Kanji compounds (1945, counting by character; a few hundred if you'd rather count them by radicals and variants thereof) is also larger than the equivalent in English (26; 30 in Spanish, although I believe that three of the additional four [ch, ll, rr] are no longer part of the alphabet in some countries; ñ remains) by several orders of magnitude. Also, please note that the purpose of my original post was to compare Japanese to Spanish, not English. With a few exceptions (most of which are colloquial and of foreign origin, such as the Mexican pronunciations of 'Mexico' and 'Oaxaca'), Spanish is a purely phonetic written language.
This is why things like 'Migurushii inu ga imasu.' make sense -- it's the fact that the dog is ugly that is important, not that it's your dog.
You're underselling the flexibility of English. I'd say that in that example sentence, the emphasis is on ownership. (The subject is "I".) One could easily say "My dog is ugly" or "The dog is ugly" and not stress the ownership so much (or at all). (Incidentally, I'd say that the concept of ownership in English is less artificial than you seem to indicate--it's not that we overemphasize the issue as much as the Japanese try to avoid it. Of course, as an American, I'm clearly biased.)
Regardless of language, it seems like people can express the same range of ideas fairly consistently. (Observe that a lot of the things that you supposedly can't say in Japanese are very easily achieveable, albeit very rude, in colloquial speech and slang.) The difference is the level of subtlety and implicitness that Japanese encourages. Again, I'm not saying it's inherently more difficult from an objective point of view; simply that it's very counterintuitive to those of us raised on (at least partially) Latin-based languages.
Do you think I used enough parentheses?
You will probably know what you are talking about, but...
When I google for 'sony memory stick linux' I only see 'succes' stories along the lines of "I put my presentation on my sony memory stick".
What are the troubles you expect there to be?
Why isn't something like this used for predictive text or spell checkers?
Spell checkers (ok, i'll admit I've only really used the microsoft office one) don't even seem to gave basic grammar to help with the spell check (subject noun object - in that order to help pick the word).
The impression I got from your post is exactly the sort fo thing (or even mroe advanced) that is done to produce the kanji.
Okay, it looks cool, the price isn't too astronomical, and the underlying idea is great. That leaves only one question, and the answer to that question will be the same as, "Will I buy it?"
So, can I put my own content on it?
There are tens of thousands of free books in electronic form out there, and I'd like to read several hundred of them. I'm not particularly interested in renting DRM-protected books. If I want books that I have to give back, I'm perfectly content with the library.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
well, i'm glad i'm not the only one who though of that picture. :/
R.I.P.
It's really easy to read japanese, just pre-process the text... (for paper books this is sol):
http://www.popjisyo.com
That's only 40 Meg! 10,000 pages x 500 words per page x 8 characters per word (generous). My palm Pilot with a memory stick does a lot more and costs the same.
I can't wait.
First the CD reduced the size and weight of my LP colllection to a shelf.
Then I put the CD's into folders and reduced the collection to a few folders.
Then the DVD reduced the size of Videos, so I now have a large movie collection is also just a few folders.
But I still have about 20 boxes of books, and have given/sold/thrown away countless other books over the years.
I move cities a lot.
So when this gets to maturity I'll be able to get rid of all those books, DVD's and CD's, and have all my media stored digitally.
and I won't have to wait or pay for 1 week shipping to NZ (or whereever I live) to get my hands on Woodward's latest expose.
The next MPAA/RIAA will be the Association of American Publishers (AAP, www.publishers.org). Watch for legal dramas as the AAP resists the relentless digitisation of books, criminalizes "scanners" who rip books to digital media and tries to shut down book trading over P2P networks. Watch the AAP fail at all of these tasks...
First I bought a Seiko MessageWatch that received content via FM radio, and Seiko decided they couldn't make money off the business model and quit, leaving me (and countless others) with a worthless POS closed-standard watch. Then Microsoft announced they were starting an FM radio subcarrier data service for their new line of closed-standard FM data watches. I was soooo first in line.
Another time, my SO bought me a Gemstar EBook reader as a gift. I pretended to like it. Because nobody wanted to buy copy-protected EBooks, and the unit did not support the vast amount of free books out there (e.g. Gutenberg), Gemstar went out of business, leaving me and countless others with a worthless POS closed-standard EBook reader; ultimately, the 2 or 3 books I did buy expired with the lithium battery. Now, Sony wants to introduce a closed-standard ebook product that, presumably, will feature DRM content and will, also presumably, make it hard or impossible to read all those free etexts. Deja #&%#$ vu all over again.
In other news, once upon a time in the 1960s, the U.S. was involved in a foreign war.....
Yeah, there are some big things you're not getting:
1. It's higher resolution than even a modern LCD display, and way higher than those old ones.
2. You turn it off, and the picture doesn't go away. (More accurately, it only draws power when changing pages... I wouldn't be surprised if there's no on/off switch at all.) This is huge.
2b. Runs fscking forever on almost no power, as a consequence.
3. It's vastly more readable than those old displays, and probably more readable than your nice backlit TFT.
But in a way, you're right: The initial applications for this will be as a (vastly superior) replacement for monochrome LCDs. It's PERFECT for low-end Palm OS devices.
And can I just add: I want it I want it I want it.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Anyone remember the Data Discman?
Why mod him a troll? He's got a valid point. This would be so very much cooler if you could import your own content (slashdot dumps, Wired News, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, Baen novels...) and even more so if it had an analogue to M$ Journal
No problem there.
No, there's no reason for a backlight on a B&W LCD. Take a look at a Psion Revo some time.
Also, you'll see that the Revo lasts for something like a month on 2AA batteries. LCDs may consume a bit more power, but not enough to be a concern, and certainly not enough to justify a device that costs 4X what an LCD-based device would.
A B&W LCD is quite easy to read. It is not hard on your eyes like a CRT or backlit LCD are. It may not look exactly like paper, but why does it need to? I certainly don't think paper is the panacea of visual representation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ahhh. Yes, I see now. That IS cool.
-FL