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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."

32 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. one page version by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Informative

    The printable version

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    1. Re:one page version by truthsearch · · Score: 4, Funny

      Trying to conserve e-paper?

      --
      Developers: We can use your help.
  2. 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 ndogg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One would think that they would have figured this how with how successful their MP3 biz has been. I guess they have different folk working in the Kindle dept.

      --
      // file: mice.h
      #include "frickin_lasers.h"
    2. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by Nyeerrmm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd agree, but at this point I dont think the appeal is price. Its partially the coolness, like a nerdier iphone, and partially the convenience. I'm a student and move around a lot, so being able to keep a large collection of paperbacks without the necessary bulk of boxes is really appealing; of course, you still want real dead-trees for textbooks and such. I can also imagine if you fly a lot, its nice to be able to finish a book, hop on the internet, and buy a new one, rather than walk to the opposite terminal to find something at a shop.

      That said, a better business model, particularly one without the DRM, would be nice and is still making me wonder whether I should buy one.

    3. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Informative

      kindle ebooks (generally $9.99) are cheaper than hardcover ($20+), but more expensive than paperback.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    4. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by David+Gerard · · Score: 3, Funny

      What coolness? Kindles are selling like Zunes. Amazon wanted to make the iPod of ebook readers, and they ended up making the Zune of ebook readers.

      --
      http://rocknerd.co.uk
    5. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by brainnolo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So, do you purchase books because of the amounts of paper? I would say that what one purchases is access to the content of the book, so the price of the media shouldn't be too significant to determine the price. I find most of the books I buy to be greatly underpriced for what they contain, so I really wouldn't complain about having them in a convenient format *and* at cheaper prices.

    6. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by Tychon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I fail to see why they should be.

      Assuming the gracious amount of 25% royalties and say, a $10,000 advance, as an author I'd only be making $60,000 from a book if it managed to sell 200,000 copies. Bestsellers can be anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 or more copies. With around 175,000 new books put out every year in the US alone, I doubt that most of those books put out will even come close to bestseller status.

      Taking into account that many authors manage maybe a book every two to four years, $1 is unreasonably shortchanging them.

    7. 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.

    8. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Marketers love people like you. Heck, why shouldn't they? Who wouldn't like to be able to price their product solely on perceived value rather than on production costs plus a reasonable profit?

      Like, back when they shifted from LPs which cost $2.00 each to make and sold for $8, to CDs which cost 50 cents each to make and sold for $15... and it worked, people bought it, people accepted the higher price, the cartel-created massively higher profit margin.

      Man, with customers like that, the sky is the limit as far as profit margins go.

      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.

      --
      This space available.
    9. 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.
    10. 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.
    11. 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.

    12. Re:Cheaper ebooks, please by uniquegeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I used to do digital prepress layout work, so get off your high horse. I'm very familiar with all the other costs, including the specialized machinery and processes that have to be done by hand. I'm saying $100+ for a text is excessively expensive when you consider: a) other low-run books are much cheaper b) all books have prepress work involved c) you don't have to market textbooks to the same degree other books are marketed (because you have a captive audience and low competition) d) ebooks, (which don't require plates and trees and the process of making physical books) are still not presented as an option e) ebooks would be more useful to students, but no one gives a damn because it's much easier to make money off four pounds of dead tree It's not even that profs are making a killing because of their niche expertise. They aren't. One of my engineering profs (who is appropriately nicknamed "God" by both students and faculty) was so pissed about the whole situation, he told students to photocopy his book from the bookstore. He makes peanuts off his texts. It's all about keeping the golden goose in its cage.

  3. The future.. by Mystery00 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The future of E-Paper is hopefully affordable prices, right now an iPod Touch is more accessible with a lot more functionality.

    Something that's meant for nothing but reading should be as cheap as actual paper, otherwise what's the point.

    --
    "we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
    1. Re:The future.. by JohnSearle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Something that's meant for nothing but reading should be as cheap as actual paper, otherwise what's the point.
      The point is portability, environmental savings, storage / archiving.

      You might say that the environmental savings wouldn't be as big a point, since the production of the units probably put out quite a bit of pollution... but with paper there is the ongoing ink that needs to be used, transportation from central printing sources uses a lot of fuel, virgin woods being felled, etc.

      The E-Paper should be cheaper, but not the cost of paper, there are reasons that go beyond the simple bottom line.

      - John
    2. Re:The future.. by samkass · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You can't grep paper.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    3. 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.

  4. price, not technology is the issue by peter303 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd buy lots of ebooks if the price was attractive, say $5 to own it, or $1 a day to read-rent a book. At $20 a book, or even some of Kindle's $10 books, thats too high. And I dont care so much about technology. I wasnt agravated by reading the free 500-page "Secret History of Star Wars" (mentioned in Slashdot recently) on the FSF PDF-viewer.

  5. Is it really 13.4-in diagonal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Seiko Epson recently showed off an A4-size (13.4-in.) display prototype with 3104 by 4128 resolution, about 385 ppi
    sqrt(3104^2 + 4128^2)/385 = 13.415 in. Holy cow the math works out.
  6. 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
  7. 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.

  8. Just say NO to ebook DRM! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    Just say no to the DRM-infested Kindle!

    A better alternative is the iLiad Book Edition that is much more open (yes, it runs Linux and you can install your own programs) and has impressive specs (including optional wifi) and a very long battery life. It costs 500 â.

    Disclaimer: I have no relationship with iRex, I'm only a happy customer and a user afraid of what DRM can do to books.

  9. 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.

  10. I still like regular books by iminplaya · · Score: 2, Funny

    Where the only needed upgrade over the years is a new pair of glasses.

    --
    What?
  11. Re:Hey, with all this e-paper, why not an e-librar by kesuki · · Score: 2, Informative

    there Are electronic libraries. there are drm encumbered systems that have contracts with most library systems, then there is drm free project gutenburg, then there are a few other e-book libraries that cover more targeted groups than gutenburg and contemporary drm encumbered ebooks.

    http://www.overdrive.com/ http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

    although as different as night and day, both the above sites offer 'free' to the end user, e-books, one at the cost of the public library system, the other with books that have fallen out of copyright, due to the death of the author.

    --
    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  12. The death of paper - it's a good thing by gary_7vn · · Score: 3, Informative

    The kindle is not an ebook anymore than a model T was a car, or an MP3 player circa 1999 was an iPod. In time someone will address all the concerns expressed here. For now I will say that the Kindle is extremely ugly and I won't reiterate its many deficiencies. Having said that though, I will say that the day of dead tree data is over. Killing a tree, grinding it into a pulp with poisonous chemicals, then packaging it with yet more dead tree boxes, shipping it thousands of kilometers with giant polluting trucks, storing them in the huge museums that some people call libraries or book stores, until they are worn out, and then packing them up in more paper boxes and burning them or burying them somewhere is beyond stupid - it is criminal. As far as paying 10 dollars for a book, this is theft, it is too much. The only true value of a book is in its IP. The ultimate goal is to cut profiteers like bezos right out of the loop. For those dinosaurs who still love the smell and feel of books you can always recycle by collecting some old newspaper and wrap your kindle in that. That way it will even dirty your fingers - just like a cheap romance novel. The kindle of the future will hold hundreds of thousands of books! And in no way will the paltry power requirements and this tiny bit of plastic be worse than all that trash. Besides it will be solar powered. Why do we still have newspapers? It is insane! Megatonnes of waste so some dino can get his sports scores! I do not think so. Think about students who will be able to download the latest textbooks for cheap - assuming that we can get greedy billionaire thieves like Bezos out the loop. Impossible you say? They are already doing it in Korea, a country apparently not crippled by the turgid thinking of stuck in a rut bibliophiles. A book is a terrible way to acquire data, you cannot look up a word, check a reference, resize the text, and you sure as shit can not read your email in between. In 20 years there will, thank god, be no books. Just like you cannot buy a ridiculous film camera anymore. And good riddance to an outdated, polluting technology. Oh, there may still be specialty books such as coffee table books and the like for a while, but even those will be superseded eventually by superiour storage and display technologies. I do not love books; I love the stories and the information. And I do not love the dry dead corpses of what were once living trees that breathed, shaded, and were homes for animals. Save a tree, save the environment, and buy an ebook, just not the Kindle, it is ugly and Bezos has enough money. Most of it stored electronically by the way, not on paper - yeuch

    1. Re:The death of paper - it's a good thing by sweede · · Score: 2, Insightful

      oops i meant interesting.

      Also, the grandparent totally neglected to realize that the industries founded on paper support millions of employees in the US alone, not to mention the entire world.

      Hundreds of billions of dollars of income per year is soley due to paper and industries created from paper products (and i'm not talking about toilet paper or paper packaging products).

      If printed material were to all of a sudden disappear, it isn't like film where only a handful or less companies produced the material which resulted in the loss of maybe 1,000 jobs across the entire US, losing the printing industry would result in the loss of tens of thousands of printing companies instantly.

      --
      I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
    2. Re:The death of paper - it's a good thing by MythMoth · · Score: 2, Funny

      Did the paragraph die at the same time as paper?

      --
      --- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
  13. As usual, Microsoft doesn't get it. by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Informative
    The article quotes Len Kawell, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft:

    You're moving physical objects around and that takes physical time, not like LCD displays that change the state of electrons.
    He obviously has no clue how an LCD works. The applied electric field causes physical movement of the liquid crystal molecules, affecting the polarization of light. Granted the movement is primarily twisting of the molecules, but that is definitely a form of physical movement, not a process in which electrons cause emission or modulation of photons.
  14. E-Ink electronic picture frame by chappel · · Score: 2

    It'll have to wait for e-ink in color, but I'm looking forward to a digital photo frame that uses it. No power consumption while holding a static image - with a change per hour (or day even?) a slow refresh won't matter - high resolution, with an awesome field of view. It'll be a perfect implementation of the technology.