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Digital Books Start A New Chapter
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on the latest advancements in eBooks, and how this time they might just take off. From the article: 'Portable devices are becoming lighter and more appealing. The most important step forward may be in digital ink, the technology used for displaying letters on a screen. A small company called E Ink has created a method for arranging tiny black and white capsules into words and images with an electronic charge. Because no power is used unless the reader changes the page, devices with the technology could go as long as 20 books between battery charges'."
From all indications, the vast majority of people have never read 20 books (not counting comic books, of course.)
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I only care about e-books if the following conditions are met:
1 - The image has to be inert - no glow effect of any kind. Ideally it should look just like paper.
2 - The "book" has to be waterproof. I read in the tub.
3 - The technology has to be sturdy. ANY portable technology should be sturdy.
4 - It has to be affordable.
5 - In the event of a crash I need to be able to replace the books in it without charge.
If I'm going to read, oh, say 100 books over the life of the product, it better cost me less for the unit plus the e-copies of the books than it would to buy the books outright. Otherwise there is no point.
Oh -- they hate DRM and only distribute standard unencumbered formats. They have this quaint notion that if they treat their customers well, their customers will respect their copyrights.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
There isn't any "burn-in" - at least not in the traditional sense. Over time, the pigment capsules degrade which leads to a reduced contrast ratio. Initial specs have contrast at 8:1 going down to 5:1 at the end of its life (after ~40,000 hours of "normal" use).
As far as residual image, yes this is an issue - although not a show-stopper. E-Ink currently has 6 waveforms for updating the image, each with a clearer image being presented at the cost of time and "flicker" during the transition. If you update a page of text to a blank (white) screen, you can still read the previous text as a faint residual remains. When covered with new text, however, this ghosting is not that significant of a issue.
I must say, having recently viewed the technology, it has a very promising future. We'll just have to wait and see how close that future is depending on how well the new Sony reader does...
In theory, theory always works in practice. In practice, theory rarely works. <><
It's been ready for many years. I've been reading books on Palm devices for a decade and O'Reilly has a great web-based subscription service.
The only issue has been that the "real" ebook readers have all utterly sucked because the idiots that make them are so concerned with controlling what their users read that they produce a product no one wants to buy.
The cake is a pie