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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."
I think this guy might have something to say about the name. :-)
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iThink tHis is aGreat iDea. iMean, yAy!
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649.00 Euros = 825.9823 U.S. dollars
I'll stick with books if only for the pure satisfaction of the ritual of turning pages. And of course, books are a less painful loss when left someplace by mistake (or stolen).
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
From their FAQ:
Which formats do you support?
In order to stimulate the momentum in electronic reading, iRex Technologies will support as many formats as possible in as open an environment as possible, respecting the rights of owners of content and IP.
Ok... So what formats are those again? This sounds, to me, like they will only support DRM capable formats... Which makes this a non-buy in my opinion.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
iThat iProduct E-name eSucks
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iUgh, an e-New iContender for the worst eBuzz.com i-Product iName, turbo gold deluxe II.
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As someone who reads books almost exclusively on my handheld device (10 years of Palm, now Windows Mobile), I don't see what the point of this is.
As it is today, with a good-sized SDRam, I can carry all the books I own in my pocket for easy access, anytime, anywhere.
If I want to carry around a bulky device to read books, I already have a notebook PC, which includes MUCH MORE capability than this silly thing. And at todays insanely low hardware prices, $825 will get me TWO notebooks, or even a pretty-decent gamer portable.
And especially considering that the ebook market is tiny on top of the above, who do they expect to buy this?
If Microsoft can't get it done, these guys sure won't
"You're either outstanding, or outprocessing"
This sounds, to me, like they will only support DRM capable formats
It supports PDF, TXT and HTML, among others. Plenty of scope for non-DRM'd files.
Whether or not anyone will sell you a book in a non DRM'd format is another quetsion, but if they will the chances are you'll be able to read it on this.
My main problem with it is that I can buy an awful lot of dead tree for 650 euros. I'm still waiting for a really good e-reader. I would be happy to pay somewhere around 150 pounds to get an A5 size tablet that I can read PDFs on. Wake me when that happens.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
in all fairness to /. - what else could they do on an issue like this? They had to report on it or everyone would say "This site is crap, digg reports on stuff like this...". If they report on it you want them to put a link to a site where you can buy it. I remember when someone submitted a list of "spy gadgets" with no link to where you could buy it and people were up in arms. So it needs to be reported on and needs a link to where you can buy it... all gadgets will be reported on because thats why were here; to know first and be at the cutting edge of nerding
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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.
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.
Making the text larger so I can more easily read it is DRM dependant!? Anyone suggesting "DRM will never get in your way unless you're a thief" needs to be kicked in nuts.
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IMAO* "iLiad" is the first in this line of product names that is actually any good. It's witty since it's a thing that reads books, and the iLiad is a book that is on the bible-ass-kicking level of hot-damn. Iliad already starts with an "I", so all they need to do is change the capitalization, meaning the whole thing isn't nearly as contrived as the rest of these product names.
The name's easy to remember since it already rings a bell for most people who have spent more than a day in a school, so for evil marketing purposes it's also a keeper. Only thing actually wrong with it is that it won't show up in google because... no wait, I just checked. They've somehow managed to get it listed as 6th.
Pretty decent branding, I'd say.
Not that I'd buy the silly thing. Got a laptop that I acquired for 10 that's portable enough for me.
All rites reversed 2010
I agree. Digital ink is one of those technologies - like flying cars - that's been around in sci-fi for decades and yet somehow never seemed to be realized in real life (even though, unlike FTL travel or universal translators, it doesn't seem that hard to create). It's one of the technological advances that I think will have a geuinely huge and lasting impact on digital media.
Just think about it - any portable device (other than an audio device) has pretty much been constrained to indoor use. Take a laptop outside and try using it. And sure, $900 can buy a lot of paperbacks, but try carrying them all with you at once. On top of that, $900 is what it costs now. What did the first CD or DVD player cost?
And on top of that, you have to realize that this is much, much more than just the capacity to carry around a library with you. With searcheable documents and note-taking ability it's going to grant users the capacity to carry around a library, card catalog, and user-created index.
I've been waiting for this to come out for years. Of course I'm not in a position to get the first model (too expensive, and I imagine that some things like text recognition won't be working quite right) but I honestly believe this is one of those products that will (if quietly) really change the landscape of digital devices. As far as I'm concerned it's 10 times more useful than a laptop for most non-tech-related uses already.
We give out laptops to middle and high school kids in my county. What a waste! Textbooks are pain in the ass to read on laptops. And that horsepower is wasted on kids who don't code, can't game, and don't even use cool programs like Mathematica or something. For note taking, reading, and research this is a real breakthrough. Toss in mp3 support and it's like any bibliophiles idea of portable nirvana.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how they draw the line between eBook devices and laptops. What functaionality will end up where? What will distinquish one from the other - or will they merge into one ultra-device if digital ink gets full color, etc.?
Oh yeah - and did we mention 21 hours of battery life. Now THAT is starting to look like a portable device.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
I saw this device last month in Moscow at the World Editors Forum, where Dr. Caroline Pauwels of the Free University of Brussels discussed a field test being conducted in conjunction with De Tijd, a daily newspaper published in Antwerp, which produced a daily e-paper edition. They gave the device to 200 people, both print and online readers. The test was continuing but she talked about some preliminary results:
* Slow.
* No search.
* Difficulty setting up wifi connections.
* Good quality display, easy to read.
The bigger picture: She called it an "evolution of paper" but not an evolution of newspapers, and raised questions about whether editors are prepared to evolve into a medium where RSS feeds/aggregation, interconnections with other resources, and conversation are expected and demanded.
I briefly examined the device, which seems a bit larger than the e-paper device Sony has been selling in Japan for a couple of years now.
I can even buy a PS3 and a couple of games for that money!
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
You don't want a backlight, you want a traditional light that shines onto the page, like you do with traditional books. Backlit screens are harder to read over long periods. This is pretty much the whole point of e-ink.
1024x768? If I'm not mislead about the resolution of e-ink, the screen on that is likely to support 4-8 times that resolution.
Where'd you read the part about 2-4 seconds for a page refresh? If true, that would really suck.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
(IANAMD), but I think a backlit display is probably one of the biggest causes of eye strain. The whole point of buying an e-reader, for me, would be the e-paper.
My dad prints out hundreds and hundreds of pages daily because he simply hates reading backlit displays.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Great, I have been waiting SO LONG for something I can read documents and books on without having to carry around a stack of documents and books.
Now, what's it say here?
You can change the font size of your text to suit your own reading comfort. (Format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE FORK???
Write and comment in articles (format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE [utensil]???!?!?!?!?!
I mean WHAT???
Sabotaging your own product like that is supposed to be the exclusing domain of Microsoft and maybe Sony. Now every small startup's jumping up on the 'make a product that's expressly designed so that others will actively desire to avoid using it' bandwagon.
Seriously.
Well, I guess I won't be buying one of those. I don't know or care exactly what DRM would prevent me from making notes on the text I'm reading. There's no real justification, but doubtless in some idiotic sense it counts as 'distributing a modified version'. Maybe nothing I would ever want to read would decide to be un-zoomable. But you know what? Why the fork should I even have to think about it for a second??
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
have you noticed that lower case letters in front of words have just exploded lately? 3 such words in the title of this article!
I'm with you. IMO they made some serious mistakes. First and formost is the cost. Secondly we have something which ties in directly to the first, which is the inclusion of (of all things) an mp3 player. Is it some new dictum that all new hardware will evolve to a point where it includes an mp3 player?
Anyway, it's too expensive. I'm an early adopter, but I will not pay that kind of money for a mere ereader. A portable screen like this should cost 300 euro's max...and that's for the first run of the tech. But then they have to go and include an mp3 player?!? WTF? WHY? I do not want one on my ebook reader. Either make an all purpose device like a palmpilot with this screen or just make a simple no-frills reader. Preferably just the reader, as everyone and his dog has a better mp3 player. It increases cost and size (chip, jack) and drains the battery. AND PEOPLE WHO WANT THIS THING TO READ ON DON'T WANT AN MP3 PLAYER! THEY WANT TO READ BOOKS!
I mean, shoot, my phone has an mp3 player which I never use, as does my palmpilot (which I do use the mp3 function on). I love the screen on this thing....but just not for that money. My guess is they'll never re-coop their investment, as they screwed up their market research on who wants one of these things and what they want on it. They should have diverted the mp3 R&D towards creating a html help (.chm) reader for this thing, as that's what it's sorely missing.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
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
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
Why an MP3 player? Well, they probably had something like a sound chip (maybe even build in) from a PDA. This thing uses a 400 MHz XScale processor. It is very easy to add MP3 in software, and the software is probably even already available for this kind of configuration anyway. So why? Because it is already there.
:)
As an early adopter, you definately do no like spending. If you look at Blu-Ray, you would have to put in a hell of a lot more cash to get one of those. I think the eInk market is in potential much, much bigger. For most companies at least, this is not much of a price to pay. I would love having one of these things, if only for not having to lug all the documentation to company meetings (and printing them out). Give me a single purpose eInk reader over a laptop anytime.
The resolution of 1024 x 786 would be the largest drawback for me. A laser easily does 600 dpi, almost 4 times the resolution, giving my eyes some much needed rest (what am I still doing here behind my computer