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Electronic Paper's Past and Future
Iddo Genuth sends us to TFOT for his extended series of interviews around the question of how electronic paper will change our lives in the next few years. The article leads off with the "father of e-paper," Nick Sheridon, who came up with the idea almost 35 years ago at Xerox PARC, and goes on to explore how e-paper may evolve past its current incarnations in the likes of the Sony Reader.
Can I still write on it?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Sony's e-paper reader is a disaster, I looked at it at Fry's and couldn't force myself to like it. Ghosting, low contrast, and most unpleasant is the low speed of updates (about 1 second to flip the page, with awful flickering all the way.) It is also a single purpose reader, nothing more. I ended up buying a Sansung Q1 Ultra, it is not perfect but at least it is a usable tablet with a Windows OS so you can load stuff onto it, run Mozilla, do things (802.11 + Bluetooth) and in general I like it. The handwriting recognition is excellent, though it has a keyboard as well. Some say it's slow, but as long as it's not your primary gaming box you would be OK :-) A tablet has many uses, and speed is not needed for any of them (as long as it's fast enough to decode MP3s.)
I'm actually not sure that stable-image type displays (what I would generically consider e-paper) are going to be the first widespread paper-replacement. As nice as their low power consumption is, their bit depth, color, contrast, and refresh rate are all horrible at the moment. And while they are certainly improving in those areas, things like LCDs and OLEDs are improving in power consumption and form factor as well.
I came to this realization when I looked at the new 505 revision of the Sony Reader's marketing, and it occurred to me that I'd rather get an iPod touch. Recharging every few days instead of every few months is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make for real web content and video (while Sony could probably put some sort of basic very-static web browser on it's reader despite the display's low refresh rate if they wanted to support HTML, video and quick interactivity are going to be out of the question until there are fairly major changes in the display technology). And, as more and more content moves online, from static paper to dynamic computer screens, moving content is only getting more prevalent (rollovers, pull-down menus, AJAX widgets of all sorts, and even content in flash and other plug-ins)...
I kind of suspect that e-paper has missed the window where it could have widely succeeded with a refresh rate measured in seconds rather than milliseconds. Stable-image type displays may have to get their refresh rates down into the low-double-digit milliseconds (and coincidentally gain high bit depth color and decent contrast) before they can take on to the mainstream.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The Sony's PRS-505 is at $299. I will wait until the price drop to 199. I have seen the epaper made from E Ink, it is very easy on the eyes and the latest Sony ebook has made a significant advancement in the refresh rate.
There are tons of copy right expired content online. I can't wait to curl up on the couch and read a good classic novel.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
If you believe there is some other interest group that would favor e-books over paper, I can't find one. Every "normal" book reader would pick a paper book without thinking. That's what libraries have, right? Only a geek would choose an obscure electronic device for such a mundane use.
Great, we've managed to replicate yet another crappy input device which is still many levels below direct neural interfacing. Seriously, we're almost 2010... c'mon guys, I'm not lashing out until the Logitech (TM) Direct Neural (TM) connection hits the shelves. And cerebral subprocessors... I mean, I'm still trying to do maths with my woefully inadequate brain - and why can't I use Google by thinking about it??
People from 20 years in the future will laugh at us for our crappy IO devices. Still, they'll all be wearing badly done external implants. Now the people of 100 years in the future with internal bio-processor implants, I'm really jealous of.
First of all the PDF functionality is non-existent despite the claims. However the .doc .txt translation is fan freakin tastic. Pictures are pretty crisp and the major bugs with it were patched. I imagine sony has some evil rootkit what have you on my computer, but quite honestly the program hasn't done anything I can think of as invasive, and other than being a little slow it's ok.
Right now I have a slight gripe with the browsing ability on the reader itself when there are lots of books or documents on it. The ability to magnify documents and books is also really nice and it is really easy on the eyes. This is definitely still first gen hardware, so you can wait for better, but honestly this thing keeps me sane on train travel, airplanes, etc. I often just copy whole online articles, paste them in word, and then browse at my leisure on the go.
I was envisaging something with the same reading qualities as a book, not the same qualities as a piece of paper. So something that folds once to fit in a (large) pocket, opens up to the same dimensions as a paperback, has switches for page flipping or whatever. Maybe I'm married to the past and have to move beyond the book paradigm, I don't know :)
Wireless for the win, I guess. I just carry USB to mini-USB cables everywhere though, which has the added advantage of charging the device while I'm transferring.
I'm waiting for e-ink based devices to grow in popularity, include an optional back light for night reading as the ones I've seen don't come in such a flavor, and for virtual libraries becoming popular web 3.0 era e-businesses. Once all this happen (and we know the last one WILL happen), I will buy oneof this devices and be happier than kid in a candy store.
The Universe is shrinking all around my head.
I am a happy owner of an iRex iLiad, which has a fairly large display (8" vs the Sony's 6, 16 gray shades vs 4), and it is absolutely brilliant for reading. I used to read some books on a Sharp CL860, but the eInk is so much better on the eyes it's hard to describe. I can write on it, which makes it excellent for academic purposes - I read and make changes to quite a few papers and articles. And it is excellent for Sudoku solving. :-)
The sweetest thing though, is that it runs Linux and has an increasing amount of community applications. It uses GTK, so quite some apps have been ported, and several nice changes has been done to the in-house PDF viewer. Together with some scripts on a PC, the iLiad can wake up in the morning, download the newspapers off the WIFI for me and turn itself off.
Only bad thing (except for the steep price tag) is that the battery only lasts for about 10-12 hours on a charge, as they in one way or another managed to not make it able to suspend...
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Depends on the subject. One of the most irritating things about being a law student is that by and large your books go out of date really fast. Almost every book from my undergraduate degree, which I only completed earlier this year, is now in a different edition. E-books would be really useful from our perspective. Not to mention the fact that libraries can only stock a limited number of journals and case-books.
Tomorrow, I may eat another house plant
Eh, you can, but you're going to get the best results regarding display quality (because you can control font and size), as well as not waiting (feels like an eternity) for the reader to format the file itself.
If you do want to just drop books in, at least convert them to Sony's native book format. They really do tend to be better. The tool I use for this purpose is called BookDesigner, and it makes for some very comfortable reading. Still have the formatting wait though.
While I'm at it, PDFrasterfarian can format your PDF files. You can crop the pdfs, force one pdf page to use two frames (thats usually what i go for) portrait or landscape modes, all free stuff. Google should lend you a hand finding these.
for the record, i own one of these, and i absolutely love it. my only real gripe is the lack of backlighting, but i think i might be able to hack something up to make a frontlight that wont send a glare back at me.
Fast-forward several years. "Browsing devices" are the "VHS moviecams" to epaper's version of Polavision. Before anyone starts ranting against web-browsers, let me point out...
- the ORIGINAL web, as developed at CERN, was text-only with browsers like lynx
- you can read files on your local drive with Firefox or IE or Lynx
Note that I said "browsing devices", not PDAs, or micro-laptops. I think that cellphones with browsers are going to be far more of an epaper-killer than laptops...- there are a lot more people already lugging around cellphones/smartphones than will ever buy single-purpose "ebook readers"
- many cellphones/smartphones already have browsers built-in
Which do you think the average person WHO IS ALREADY LUGGING AROUND A CELLPHONE/SMARTPHONE more likely to do for casual reading...- buy yet another $200 device that they have to lug around, or
- use the cellphone/smartphone THEY'VE ALREADY PAID FOR AND THEY'RE ALREADY LUGGING AROUND to accomplish the same task
In a world where cellphones/smartphones/PDAs do not exist, a $200 stand-alone "ebook-reader" might have a market. In today's world, fuggedaboutit. Most people will end up sticking a USB stick into a cellphone/smartphone/PDA and reading text directly with their browser. Verizon subscribers, however, will find that their cellphones are crippled, and they have to upload the file to their account, and Verizon will charge them by the kbyte for the uploads.I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Can it handle cbr/cbz files for comic book reading like CDisplay does (besides the fact that it's only B&W) ? Heh, that's literature too !
Non-Linux Penguins ?