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The Development of E-Paper Technology

Posted by Soulskill on from the ubiquitous-and-cheap-please dept.

Computerworld takes a look at the development and the future of e-paper. Brought into the mainstream by e-book readers such as the Kindle, e-paper is rapidly becoming its own industry. The article notes some of the current limitations of the technology and looks ahead to a few of the upcoming ideas, such as the Fujitsu Fabric PC. Quoting: "The resolution of EPD screens is improving rapidly. Active-matrix displays like those used on the current generation of e-book readers can work at relatively high resolutions (the Kindle screen displays 167 pixels per inch), and Seiko Epson recently showed off an A4-size (13.4-in.) display prototype with 3104 by 4128 resolution, about 385 ppi, that uses E Ink's electrophoretic ink on a Si-TFT glass substrate."

10 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Cheaper ebooks, please by f97tosc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The biggest challenge is that ebooks still cost almost as much as paper books, and distributors still take more than 50% for simply having the files on their servers. This is to be expected from Amazon, who make most of their money selling paper books, but I think I will wait until some independent alternatives come up selling cheap ebooks, and giving 90%+ to the authors.

    1. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by hkmarks · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think lack of sales, if that was an issue, are probably a supply problem rather than demand. Anyway.

      There are tons of shortcomings with the Kindle that prevented it from being as popular as the iPod. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Amazon really looked for input before launch. Frankly, I heard about it less than a week before it was launched. The lack of hype probably didn't help, but there are problems with the device itself.

      1) Books are less popular or "cool" than music. Books are not "status symbols" unless you're trying to look well-read... and then it'd be better to have a bookshelf of leather-bound tomes.
      iPods play music (which can be passively consumed for a long period of time and thus has more apparent value)

      2) A good portion of the books that people want to read will never be available on the Kindle.

      3) It's difficult to put the books you already own onto the Kindle.
      Music CDs (and other formats, with some effort) can easily be transferred to an iPod. iTunes made a large library of music available.

      4) The Kindle is not cool looking. It has too many buttons, it looks a bit cheap, the screen can't be appreciated from photos.
      The iPod is clean, distinctive, and simple-looking.

      5) The Kindle is only available online from Amazon. That is, when it's not sold out -- which it was for months after launch.
      The iPod was hard to find for a while, but it was available from many retailers right away.

      6) The Kindle doesn't support Wi-Fi; instead it works off some cellular network that few people really understand, which is only available in the US anyway.
      The iPod just plugged into a computer using a cable or dock. Maybe technically inferior, but easier to understand.

      7) Kindle is only available in the US. I'd totally buy one if they were available in Canada, but they aren't. EBooks have the greatest appeal where paper books have the least availability.
      The iPod was available everywhere. I think it only supported Macs at first, but that was soon rectified.

      8) The Kindle is limited somewhat in file format support. Notably, they don't support PDFs natively.
      For music, MP3 is the only format that really matters. Apple did co-promote their lossless format, and that probably helped them.

      9) Buying a Kindle to read books is not economical for light readers. The device itself costs $400, and if a Kindle book costs $10, and an "average" real book costs $20, you'd have to buy 40 books just to break even. Except that some books will not be available for the Kindle anyway, and you'll have to buy them as paper. (The majority of books I buy, for instance, have photos, diagrams, or illustrations, or are textbooks that are not available in digital formats.) When the Kindle breaks or becomes obsolescent, the books become useless. (Of course, it's still not a bad deal if you read a lot of novels, or want to download newspapers.
      Music needs a player anyway, and an iPod is smaller than a portable CD player or a stereo.

      10) The Kindle lacks storage space. It's expandable, but what does it have again? 128MB? How much does a 1GB stick of flash memory cost again? $10? (Of course, text-format books don't take much space -- but pictures, comics, or podcasts do.)
      The iPod had 5GB of memory, enough for many albums and even a modest music collection.

      11) The Kindle is too large to fit in a pocket and too small to display letter or A4 sized documents. Even if it did support PDFs. It's about the size of a paperback. That's not horrible if you're reading novels, but it's not optimally portable, nor optimally useful.
      Even the original iPod fit nicely in a pocket.

      12) Kindles weren't hyped much and lacked branding. Amazon isn't known as a tech company at all -- they're known as a bookstore.
      iPods had the force of the Apple community behind them. Apple is known as a superior tech company.

      I'm positive that availability was the biggest obstacle, though. How many people would have bought them if it was as simple as going to Best Buy?

      It'll be interesting to see what will happen with the first e-paper reader that gets into stores.

    2. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by jc42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Instead of making a book for $2.00 and selling it for $10.00, they can transfer the file for a fraction of a cent and charge $9.00. Huge increase in profit margin. And sell you a book reading device for hundreds. AND eliminate the used book market. And eliminate library borrowing.

      And have you thank them for it. Damn, this "intellectual property" thing is a great scam.

      And, as has happened in the music and movie industries, none of that huge increase in profit will go to the "artists", i.e., the authors.

      But this may change. The Internet has made it materially easier for musicians to reach their audience. Musicians can now set up their own web site, and completely eliminate the middlemen. There's still the advertising part of the business, but that never did much for 99% of the world's musicians anyway. Eventually this new distribution system may end up benefitting them.

      There are signs that authors are figuring out the same thing. There are a few authors that put their stuff online first, to get their name out there and build up a population of readers. They are figuring out that they can periodically publish their stuff and sell it to readers who have already read the online edition. There are small print shops figuring out that this is a source of business, just as there are small local recording studios and CD makers who will work directly for musicians and not take all the profits.

      The times, they might be a-changin'. But not in the eyes of the big publishers, who don't yet understand what's hitting them, and think that they can increase their profits without sharing with their authors.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    3. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by thesandtiger · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm a student, too. I also do a LOT of traveling. And I own a Kindle.

      I will say this: why would you want paper textbooks when you can have a textbook that allows you to do a full-text search? Also, you can make plenty of "margin" notes. And highlight a row and look up words or Wiki any term you see in there to get a (very rough but generally sufficient) bit of info on anything in a text that makes you curious? Most textbooks are horribly indexed in my experience - full-text search makes that irrelevant.

      As for getting books cheap, how does "free" grab ya? I've been downloading tons from gutenberg and other sources like that, there are MANY places that allow you to get a bunch of books for free (legally) and of course, torrents to get them (not as legal) for free as well if you don't have qualms about that. It is trivial to convert from one format to another with free software and, really, the DRM is, as usual, only a minor speedbump for anyone who wants to circumvent it.

      I do think the $10 for a "bestseller" type book is way too much for this kind of thing, but I don't really read a lot of those. There are plenty of ebooks available for less, though - $9.99 is the high. I've bought maybe 10-20 books through amazon and spent a total of $15 or so, give or take a few cents. I've used both the amazon paid and free conversion services (the difference is that the paid one takes your document from whatever format to the AZW format and sends it directly to your kindle for ten cents while the free version just emails it back to your address and you have to manually load it onto your kindle) and it has been great.

      Would I have bought it if I hadn't been given it as a gift? After using it quite a bit, I can say hell yeah. This is the kind of thing that people need to use for awhile and see how it works before they can see just how useful a tool it is. If they had these available for people to play with at bookstores they'd probably sell quite a few more.

      --
      Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
    4. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by uniquegeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's why textbooks are $20 and they offer ebooks of textbooks, right?

      $100+ is typical for a textbook these days. New editions of material that doesn't change are put out every 1-2 years. And how many wonderfully portable digital copies do we see?

      Textbook theft from lockers was a big thing at my university (8 years ago). As a result, I never took textbooks to school, and did most of my coursework at home (very inconvenient at times).

      When I go back to school, I'll probably use Tesseract, as LinuxJournal suggests.

  2. A couple vids by religious+freak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's a vid of the fabric PC...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AOp8oYZwTk

    With a working model "3-4 years out", I'll believe it when I see it (e-ink has always been ~5 years away as long as I can remember). But at least they're moving towards something, and maybe this time, it's different, I dunno.

    And as long as we're talking pipe dreams of flexible, usable computing materials. This one from Nokia is by far my fav (I found this via the lifeboat.com foundation website)...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs

    --
    If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
  3. Free conversion of already bought books is key by uuxququex · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've got a library of around a thousand books, paper ones. So, let's say I switch to ebooks from now on. What happens with my old books? NOTHING, that's what.

    If there is a way to download or buy (at very, very low cost, remember, I already bought the rights to read the text) all my old books then, and only then, I'll switch to an e-book reader.

    As a matter of fact, I'll switch today I that means getting back the imperial cubic truckload of space my books take up now.

  4. The future of e-paper is: by MrMista_B · · Score: 1, Interesting

    DRM.

  5. Re:Until e-books are easier to read than paper... by ThinkComp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Um, I think Slashdot's new comment system has some issues. What I typed was...

    I've developed Interbook, which gives paper books some of the benefits of being electronic, which ironically enough, most e-books don't even have yet.

  6. Re:The future.. by gary_7vn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You are absolutely correct that ebooks are not completley environmentally friendly. But that does not mean that they never will be. I would argue that even with all the problems you mention, it does not even come close to the devastation caused by the NYT alone. Managed forests are not good things, they don't have a natural ecosystem, and that space could be a park -- not rows of exactly the same age and type of tree. One ebook, which weighs a few ounces can hardly be worse than the potentially tonnes of paper that it could/should/would replace. Paper mills may run on bark, but that means they are burning bark which is dirty like hell. You also left out the cost of storing books/mags/newsapers until such time as they must be discarded, or at best, recycled, which also uses more fuel to transport them and then yet more chemicals to turn them into yet more books et al. Kenaf and hemp are much better alternatives, but only until such time as we can get paper into the museum, where it belongs.