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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!
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
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 ?! )
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.
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).
for the e-paper thing to take off we need multi format e-stationar
Well it won't happen here. 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.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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????
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.
Don't you also love slashdot's auto- href captions?
What's the point of 170dpi? My Palm has perhaps 40dpi at the most and it has perfectly readable text.
As already mentioned, higher resolution is easier on the eyes.. and recall that this is a japanse product which means it has to be able to display japanse letters (kanji and katakana I believe they are called) which needs a higher resolution then the latin alphabet to remain readable.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Here is source http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/EBR-10 00EP.html
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
It is a wonder why anyone buys Sony at all these days. I know on principle that I'm not going to lock myself into their products or media when I can't use the cards interchangeably with other devices I might own.
You need a license for the other formats, they are not free
What about one of those USB flash pen/thumb drives that are showing up everywhere? Universal in nature and not proprietary.
Their DRM is barely used
But yet it lies in wait.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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?
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.
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.)
If you had RTFA you would know that it only takes power to refresh the screen not to maintain a static image. So the battery life is 10,000 pages whether you flick through one a second, or spend an hour on each page.
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
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.
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.