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Amazon Wins First Kindle Patent; Bigger Screen Expected Soon
An anonymous reader writes "One day before Amazon is scheduled to unveil its widescreen Kindle aimed at newspaper readers, the e-commerce giant has been awarded its first US patent for an e-book reader. The new patent, D591,741, is a design patent which protects the look and feel of the Kindle shell, not for fundamental technologies. Those patents are mostly held by E Ink Corp., which makes the 'liquidless paper' display. Sony, IBM, and the Discovery cable TV network also have e-book patents. Amazon, though the leading e-book seller, has none, but the patent award indicates they've applied for at least four recently." Also in Kindle news, PC World has a brief article up on the larger-screen Kindle DX (expected to launch Wednesday), including pictures first spotted on Engadget.
They protect the ornamental apperance of the device, and basically are a little bit more formal than trademark/trade dress. They are specifically precluded from protecting any functional or inventive aspect. Basically there's no story here.
But the whole point was to be like a standard paperback book. If it gets much bigger, might as well get a tablet PC and call it a day.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Did you read your own link? That's copyright, not patent. Also, design patents protect fairly specific aesthetic aspects of the overall design, not the very general "look and feel" Apple was trying to protect.
Bobb9000 - raised by the wolves,
Oxford education as phrased by the wolves.
PDFs are awesome and all, but they REALLY want to be 8.5x11. The whole point storing a document in the PDF format is to retain formatting regardless of viewing platform. The Kindle 1 and 2 depend on the ability to freely reflow text at need. The point of a PDF is to disallow the adjustment of text flow. These things are fundamentally incompatible, and what you get are halfass workarounds like the Sony Reader's tedious zooming in and out, or the Kindle's demand to convert to a more friendly format. (If you send a document of scanned pages through the Kindle conversion system, you get those page on your kindle... at 600x800, and a 6" diagonal. Not big enough to be readable. They've recently changed it so that it chops each page in half, so it's readable but on documents with columns you're flipping back and forth between two pages.)
What you will see is good PDF support on this new student Kindle, since it can just display the damn PDF and doesn't have to worry about the resizing things to make them readable.
Setting: The older boys are playing outside with a ball and the younger boy, Amazon, approaches them ... ... ... ... probably even sued.
Microsoft: Well well well, if it isn't Amazon. Heard you finally got an e-book patent.
Sony: Oh god, that is so 1998. Did your mommy get you that patent or did your dead beat dad finally do something for you?
Amazon: Leave me alone guys, my Kindle is really popular.
IBM: *snort* Yeah, don't remind us. You're the only one stupid enough to manufacture a million little lawsuits without a freaking patent to back it up. You probably don't even have a patent warchest. Hell, even the loser companies like Discovery cable TV network have e-book patents.
Discovery cable TV network: Ha! Yeah, you're even more of a loser than me! More loser than sharkweek, more loser than sharkweek, more loser than
Amazon: Cut it out, guys, maybe you haven't heard but I own the one click patent
Microsoft: Aw Christ, here we go again. The one trick pony decides it's time to lord about and hang that piece of contested trash over our heads. I'm sick of it. Probably wouldn't even hold up in court.
Amazon: Try it, tough guy.
*MySpace pulls up in a brand new NewsCorp convertible*
MySpace: Hey, guys, got my dad's mustang for the weekend, wanna go hawk eggs at Facebook's house?
*everyone starts to pile into the vehicle*
MySpace: Oh, not you, Amazon, I'm not interested in being seen with such a patentless loser. I mean, that kinda shit gets you defriended pretty fast these days
*the gang hi fives MySpace as they drive off leaving Amazon alone*
My work here is dung.
Thank you for that, really missed it in the summary.
The problem with PDFs isn't so much the size of the screen, but the speed at which it updates.
You can view PDFs fine on a computer screen, even if you have to scroll a bit to get around it. The Kindle's eInk screen takes about two seconds to fully refresh, so you can't just scroll around.
It's a problem with reference and textbooks too. You can't just flick around or scan through pages because every page change takes two seconds. Publishers have to redo the layout of books for the Kindle screen too, which isn't too bad on a novel but is a lot of work for a textbook with diagrams and footnotes. Magazines have the same problem.
If they could fix that, I'd buy one tomorrow. I've fancied one for reading novels for ages, but was waiting for price and performance to improve and being able to view PDF datasheets or textbooks. HTML would be nice too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I wish they'd standardize on about 3 sizes for these things:
1. Paperback (good for text-only books where formatting doesn't need to be preserved, highly portable)
2. Trade/Hardback (less portable, OK for pages with some pictures, good for poetry and other things where precise formatting matters, allows larger type while still keeping quite a bit of text on the page, maybe just a tiny bit larger than most current readers)
3. Oversize (good for 8.5x11 pages, comic book pages, works that are heavily reliant on diagrams and other images, etc.)
Then publishers could just design to whichever size was appropriate, with the smaller sizes working fine on the large devices and the smaller devices being able to display things meant for larger ones but possibly with formatting errors or hard-to-see images.
I'd buy the two larger sizes, personally.