iRex's iLiad E-ink eBook Reader is Now Available

An anonymous reader writes "iRex has just started shipping its e-ink eBook reader, the iLiad, starting today (July 3rd) — making it the first e-ink reader commercially available outside of Japan. It is available for purchase though iRex's website, for 649 euros (ouch!). Hopefully this price will come down before Sony releases their eReader later this summer."

Comments

$825.98 US Dollars

[neonprimetime]

649.00 Euros = 825.9823 U.S. dollars

Re:Yeah, but what format?

[Ethan Butterfield]

Odd that they didn't copy their supported format list from their product spec PDF, but oh well. In any case, if you check out that PDF here, they list the supported formats as PDF, XHTML, TXT and APABI (only in China). Support for OEB files as well as MP3 playback is due in an August/September firmware update.

Re:LCD Paper providers?

[spinozaq]

It's not LCD paper. It's eInk paper. The technology is quite different from LCD. It's much closer to an etch-a-sketch then an LCD.

Expensive, 2 seconds per page flip, no backlight

[lonesometrainer]

Even for an early adaptor this thing is disappointing.

1. VERY expensive, Euro 649 (that includes VAT over here) for a black+white ebook reader. I'm come on... Please leave the WLAN out next time.
2. VERY slow, VERY slow. Page flipping sometimes takes 2 seconds, sometimes 3-4. That's bad for a newspaper, but it's simply unusable for a technical documentation where you're searching for specific parts, etc.

see mobileread.com for videos.

3. No backlight, I (as a consumer) don't care wheter that's realizable or not, but I would like to have some sort of backlight. Yes a book doesn't have a backlight, too. But my books at least don't cost 650 Euros.

Nice is: a 1024x768 resolution, everything else is not usable for my purposes.

I'm waiting for the next generation.

Re:LCD Paper providers?

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I don't work for e-ink or erad?? but I have used their (e-ink) product. I won't self promote the product, but it is commercially available.

There are some other companies, but the cost is more than $3000 for dev kits (I remember it being ~$15000 for a rather non-impressive dev kit). The contrast ratio is also not as impressive as e-ink (white/grey vs white/black) and the power requirements are different (eink is 15V @500mS for switching, as opposed to 18V @ 800mS for others)

The displays can be driven at lower voltage, but the time for switching is longer (5V == 1.5seconds), and may be a usability issue for many applications.

I believe (but not certain) that e-ink is the only electronic paper company with design wins. Others have fun demos - but nothing can be bought by a consumer at this point.

The cost for a sheet of e-Ink depends on the features you are looking for. They have the straight segment displays, which are ~$2 for something like a 10 segment display, to active matrix like technology which is much more expensive. (Volume dependant, of course -- ours was 100k) The displays are expensive right now, as there is no 'standard' size. Everything is custom made, regardless of company. This should change as the tech gets a little more mature.

The big feature of e-ink (and it's competitors) is the battery life. All the solutions only require a drive current, there is no refresh.

My solution (10 segment display) added a whopping 2 mA to the total current consumption (all passive components needed to ramp from 5V to 15V), there is no noticeable peak as the display itself consumes 1mA when switching.

The biggest problem is environmentals. e-ink technology is effected by humidity and temp (like other displays). They get around this by providing an environmental boarder to protect the display.

Of course the other major feature is that the screen maintains state without power for a long time (days to months to years, depending on company). So if you have an application that requires infrequent updates, and can afford some cost for battery savings -- this may be a good solution for you.

And nat- this is new tech, so pricing should go down as early adopters buy and volumes increase.

Re:Too late, too big, too expensive, no market

[tjkslashdot]

The main advantages of OLED epaper is lack of eyestrain for long term reading. In addition, OLEDs can get much higher DPI resolution for lower power drain.

Now, that being said, this Iliad seems pretty poor on resolution: It has a stated DPI of 160 (the Sony has 170, which isn't that much better). This means you have to hold it at 105 cm (3.5 ft) to get maximal resolution on your retina (assuming perfect 20/20 vision). Now, a PDA generally does worse here (needs to be at 204 cm [6 ft]). Note, that average reading distance is about 30 cm. There is a long way to go (about a 5 times increase in dpi) before we get to good print resolution.

Re:price? quality?

[Martin Blank]

The price of the books is a real issue (I intend to use the Sony Reader for the significant number of technical papers I have, plus a number of classic books from the Gutenberg Project, among other places, and may well drop a note to the publishers about the prices they want to charge), but the device readability is the star here. PDAs will last most of a day, whereas the battery life of such readers is measured in page turns -- typically several thousand of them. They're reflective instead of backlit, which means that they can be used in bright light, unlike PDAs. Finally, the form factor is designed to be more comfortable to read than a PDA.

I read documents on my computer and used to on a PDA all the time. With the PDA, I can't keep my attention because I have to flip to a new page so often, and the form factor isn't quite right for comfort. On computers, it's better since I can look at more text at a time, but the inability to take it some places due to battery life combined with the weight factor (my notebook weighs about seven pounds) just makes it too inconvenient for constant use.

Please note that this is a developers version

[mean pun]

Although the website is not very clear about this, iRex considers the current version a developers release. On this page there is this sentence:

To individual consumers who have sent in their request for notification, we recommend to wait for our consumer version, which will have a more extended functionality (September 2006).

Re:DRM WTF

[mean pun]

WHAT THE FORK???

Calm down. Take a DEEP breath. Think quiet thoughts. Take a DEEP breath again.

Ok. Good.

I fully understand your frustration with lock-in book readers, but if you read the product specifications you will see that it does in fact support open document formats: PDF, XHTML, and plain text. With a little extra thought you will also realize that they may have difficulty supporting annotations on these formats. PDF supports this (except when disabled in the document), but for XHTML and plain text you'll have to think where to store these annotations, and if you want this at all. Similarly, not all other formats may be scalable, for example because they are bitmaps. (I don't know what the APABI format is, but that may well be bitmap.)

You're not the only one misreading this, see other treads under this news item. It clearly demonstrates what happens when a company doesn't have a PR department.

Yes, they also implement DRM-ed formats. I don't care, as long as they support the open formats.

Other technologies are waiting in the wings

[smartalix]

Don't forget that none of this development is going on in a vacuum. Cholesteric LCD (www.kentdisplays.com), Iridescent display (www.qualcomm.com/qmt), and electrowetting display (www.liquavista.com) technology are all reflective bistable formulations. Any of these could leapfrog E-ink and make a better, cheaper E-book.

Pics of these technologies at the last Society for Information Display Show is here:
http://www.smartalix.com/Consumer/SID/page2.html