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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
From TFA:
Q: When do you predict we will see the real e-paper revolution?
A: It has already started but will become a real mass market in about 2012.
So that 's what the Mayans were worried about!
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
My main thought is that since it's by Sony it'll be drenched in poisonous DRM.
I owned a Newton Messagepad back in the day. I've read fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novels, news articles and heaps of other stuff on everything from a PDA to one a laptop connected to Second Life. The only place ebooks have a decent chance of success is to replace the two tons of textbooks most schools require their students to carry. Otherwise it's hard to beat the convenience of Dead Tree Format.
Rumors are flying around that Amazon is going to release their own e-ink device any day/week now. A version of it went through the FCC a while ago since it might have a wireless modem in it. It will probably be more expensive than the Sony, but might have the ability to download newspapers and magazines directly.
Bookeen is coming out with their own device any day now that's really similar to the Sony reader but will use different file formats. They all read RTF, TXT, etc... but if you want to buy a new book, it's likely to have DRM in the file. The DRM file format that the Sony uses is different from the DRM files that the Bookeen and Amazon Kindle will use.
The Iliad is bigger and can render letter size PDF files without the hassle of the smaller devices. It has wifi and a writable screen that you can take notes with... but it's supposed to be slower and more than twice as much money.
I want one really bad, but I'm waiting to see what Bookeen and Amazon finally release before I throw down my cash. Sure they're all kind of expensive, but you can load up with free classic books from Project Gutenberg and you'll save money in the long run (if you read a lot and are too lazy/busy to make trips to the library).
http://www.mobileread.com/
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/11/amazon-kindle-meet-amazons-e-book-reader/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/03/kindle-edition-books-appear-on-amazon-reader-launch-imminent/
http://www.bookeen.com/
http://www.irextechnologies.com/
They're actually quite nice.
The e-paper screen is *beautiful*. The only thing you'll miss is a book light. It's very nice and contrasty (but more like black on a dull grey background), and the text isn't buried under glass, but appears on the surface, like real paper. It's a nice matte surface, so glare is a non-issue, and is extremely readable in all lighting conditions except pitch black (like a regular book).
The bad thing - if you want to use its internal memory, you need to use Sony's software (a poor imitation of iTunes). But luckily, it accepts Memory Stick and SD cards. Just plop in it text files, RTF, or PDF files onto your SD card and away you go (making this the OS agnostic way of using it - just need a card reader and external card). The other issue is ghosting - when the screen updates, the parts that were black don't return all the way to background color, but leaves an imprint. Not to worry - another refresh will fix it. Might be slightly irritating if the book lines alternate.
The other bad thing is when it needs to refresh the area - what happens is it inverts the entire screen, then writes the new image to it (in an effort to alleviate the ghosting).
But the screen is really nice, you can easily forget about such issues. Just remember the flashlight if reading beneath the covers.
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 latest incarnation of the Sony Reader plugs in to a USB host and shows up like a drive, to drag files over. It can handle .txt and .PDF as well as JPEG and MP3. Feel free to totally ignore installing their software and never using DRM. I have one and it is fantastic for taking with me when I travel.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The new model will show up as USB Mass Storage, so you can just plug it in and drag files across. No more Sony software.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You missed the point. E-paper as the name implies isn't a replacement for computer screens. It's a replacement for a printed paper as in newspapers and books. Most of the people still get their knowledge from dead trees and e-paper for them is more or less just like paper, only better, since you can "print" on it many times.
I am an avid ebook reader using Palms for the purpose for years, but as soon as I can get an e-paper reader without stupid limitations at a reasonable price (which for me is anything south of 250eur), I'll go that route. I mean, that would be the best of both world: paper book with the ability to (non-destructivelly) bookmark, annotate, search, copy text at will.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
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
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
I regularly read newspapers that are days old and never minded their lack of "freshness".
Apart from a few very specific things (maybe stock markets or the weather), freshness has no impact on the interest or validity of news.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I once got 17 cents for a textbook I paid $50 for.
If I had the choice, I would go e-book all the way.
Randy Hall
(I wrote this up for the bookpeople mailing list....)
.lrx)
.rtfs is _awful_, allowing widows and orphans and pages to end on a hyphen .pdfs which break at a line end become two distinct hyperlinks (this may be a problem in how the user guide .pdf was created)
.pdfs especially for this and leave page numbers off?
The local Borders store set up a display w/ one of these yesterday and I spent a while playing with it. Initial impressions:
- nice size, _very_ thin
- crisp, sharp greyscale display --- very readable
- uses GPL software (there's a list of utilities in the user manual as well as notes on where to d/l the source for the software)
- decent interface w/ sensible buttons and okay layout
- supports pdf, txt, rtf, bmp, jpeg, gif and png files as well as the proprietar? BBeB books (.lrf and
- plays mp3s
- switches from portrait to landscape and back quite easily
- nice magnification mode
On the downside:
- ~2--3 seconds to switch from one page to another sometimes one gets a distracting flashing
- sometimes one gets ``ghosting'' if the new page has a lot of white space where text or image was before
- the text H&J when displaying text files and
- the font used for displaying rtfs uses oblique, not italic for emphasis
- sidebars of some of the text font characters, ``i'' most egregiously is not good resulting in poorly spaced text
- urls in
- while one can play an mp3 while reading, controlling the mp3 functions require going all the way back to the main menu --- would've been better to've over-ridden the number buttons for use as audio controls while an mp3 is playing.
One can't help but wonder if the status bar at the bottom can be turned off --- it displays a persistent page number --- perhaps people will format
More information on the reader at:
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=16184
Apparently this is an updated model and the text updating used to be even slower.
Borders didn't seem to have a mechanism for selling BBeB books in their stores though which is strange since they can be stored on memory cards (Sony proprietary sticks and SD memory cards).
William
(who found it inspiring enough to want to put some more effort into getting his Fujitsu Stylistic to boot off of a compact flash card in a CF-IDE adapter, since he uses that to read a _lot_ of ebooks and the hard drive noise is distracting (and to make them, see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html which includes my version of _The Book of Tea_ which is in the TeX Showcase))
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.