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E Ink Demos New Displays, Gadgets At IFA 2011
An anonymous reader writes "E Ink turned up at IFA 2011 with its Triton color e-paper, which has exactly the same properties as the monochrome version found in the Kindle (two-month battery life, no power use when viewing a page, as readable as a sheet of paper) while adding 4,096 colors. We also get to see the E Ink watch, signage, cellphone and USB stick displays, and the latest glass-less e-paper inside a credit card. E Ink hopes to use the new plastic substrate in future e-readers, meaning they will be thinner, lighter, and more shatterproof than those that ship today."
Not more than two days ago, my wife (a librarian) saw a color e-reader (using a backlit LCD), and mentioned that it'd be great for children's books. I said that e-ink was probably a better option, because the reader could use less power when a distracted kid leaves it turned on. Now, there's hope for the benefits of both!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not too fussed about colour but would be nice to be able to flick through an ebook as you would a paper one
I can't wait for my color-eink iPod Touch/iPad.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
How big can these e-paper displays be made, and how cheap? I rather like the idea of e-wallpaper. Not only would it allow for instant redecoration of a room, but you could use them as giant wall displays for reading news or showing alerts, and have the option of instantly changing themes for visitors or special occasions. Just need to make e-ink displays better until they are cheaper, bigger, and durable enough to withstand a few pieces of furniture banging into them over the years.
I used to be like you. I have about 1500 books. Then I got a kindle and I'm converted. Just give it a go, it's actually damn good technology done right.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The current E-Ink tech is useless for video because the refresh rate is very slow.
What fascinates me about the summary is the plastic encapsulation. I wonder if eventually we will have objects which resemble paper books, but the individual pages will be easily rewritable?
My guess is that before that happens, mainline culture will change enough that people will think of paper books similar to the way most relate now to phonograph records. OTOH, I don't really believe I have any great ability to predict the future that far out.
My paper book:
(1) Works every time after a relaxing read in the bathroom, even if I occasionally splash it;
(2) Works after a drop or a knock in the train;
(3) Doesn't send any information about my reading or highlighting habits anywhere;
(4) Can actually be annotated and highlighted by writing directly on it with a stylus (though the cool kids call them pencils) - and the annotations can be removed using an eraser;
(5) Is of no interest to thieves;
(6) Has never transformed overnight into several hundred blank pages of paper because of some corporate decision somewhere;
(7) Is three-dimensional and can be held so I can look at multiple pages at once;
(8) Has zero power usage;
(9) Seems to have an average lifespan of at least a decade or two in the cheapest cases, centuries for some - they just don't go wrong when I'm in the middle of nowhere;
(10) Is sized appropriately to the content;
(11) Can be lent and resold and copied;
(12) Smells nice.
The article states that they print ROLLS of this stuff over a meter wide and up to a kilometer long... Why can't I have a color e-ink reader with an 8 1/2" x 11" screen, a touch screen, and full PDF support?
I don't care what it costs, shut up and take my money!
> it's actually damn good technology done right
You do not specify exactly what you are referring to: did you mean "using ebooks and ereaders", or were you talking about the Kindle in particular?
Backlit LCD it is.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I agree, put me down for the same sort of anecdotal evidence. Can't believe how much nicer it is to now have a K3 than lugging books around, or worse, leaving one behind that you wanted to read on a trip :)
It is just e-ink with a coloured filter over the top. To imagine the effect print out a picture in grayscale on a piece of grey cardboard and colour it in with pencils. It will look awful, washed out, faded like some colourized B&W picture.
This falls in line with the Nook Color 2 color e-ink rumors: http://www.bgr.com/2011/09/02/barnes-noble-nook-color-2-to-launch-this-month/
It's hypocritical media buzz really excited about the upcoming color Kindle which is sounding very much an exact clone of the NookColor. Many are calling it "Amazon's tablet" while backhandedly refusing to acknowledge B&N's original effort beyond calling it an "e-reader".
I'm talking about the Kindle in particular, but that's probably because I haven't really used any other ebook readers.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
more anecdotal evidence - my kindle 3 broke down on the first day of holiday (the e-ink screen went haywire); so I was forced to speak to my wife and child and had to endure holiday activities together. it's been a while since I've had a catastrophic failure of a book.
I was fairly horrified at the story early this week that the colour Kindle is LCD. I've got an iPad and a Kindle for precisely the reason that I just don't enjoy the Kindle as a book replacement the way I do the Kindle. Hopefully the timing here isn't a coincidence and Amazon are sticking with e-ink.
Only big ligs use sigs.
They come in all measures of quality. I've got a Kindle, too, but I've played with some others. Many you'd rather forget; basically, anything cheaper than a Kindle is destined for tragedy, excepting perhaps the Kobo. The fancier Nooks, however, tend to get a lot of love.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I'm reading a book on my Kindle that has notes at the end of each chapter. By the time I get to them I want to look back and reread the passage they refer to - easy in a real book, but very laborious in an e-book. ... Along with its indifference to book design of course...
You reckon? I always hated the end-notes in a book, even a real one.
I can understand that layout-ing a book for press-printing is much cheaper if relying on end-notes instead of footnotes, but with now the ubiquitous use of the computer in "desktop publishing" this should not be an excuse (at most, I can accept the idea of relying on endnotes if the notes themselves have a large extent).
But end-notes in an ebook without back-referencing? Good God, the publisher of such books must be to lowest type $crooges, with the only motivation of staying in business being to punish everyone that need or love to read a(n e) book.
My point: don't blame the eBook reader, but the publisher of such monstrous mutilation of the ebook.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
From the video it sounds like that what comes off the roll is just the eInk layer (pigment capsules etc) which then needs to be laminated to a TFT panel that actually controls the pixels, so you cant just plug that roll in and have a 1km long working screen unfortunately.
Hint: the population of the EU considerably outnumbers the population of the US, and most of the world's commercial printers are now designed around ISO sizes, whether sheet or web. As for the printer makers, you could regard it as a subtle insult: Europeans are intelligent enough to change the default setting to A4, Americans are considered insufficiently intelligent to change from A4 to USL. (The real reason is that a change to a default of A4 would reduce the reported print speed and cartridge life.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Really? Then you aren't trying hard enough. Expose one to enough water and it is ruined, or close enough to warrant a replacement.
Water being left in the rain, or dropped in the ocean/lake/river or even flushed down the toilet by a curious 3-year old child. Spilled drinks can be devastating, depending on the liquid volume.
I've also gotten a few that were part of a bad press run. Ten minutes out of the store, even though brand new, the binding was falling apart. Going back to the store to return it, all of the other ones of that title in stock had the same problem.
Then there is the rare missing page. I think they did an entire episode of M*A*S*H on that once.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Hmm, I remember a holiday being similarly affected, when I returned to our villa to find the wind had torn about 100 pages of Northern Lights out of the book, and strewn them around the garden.
The interviewer apparently knows nothing about technology. Asks a lot of questions, but not so good questions geek-wise. "Are those like plus and minus?" "Micro-ants?" etc..
Then I got a kindle and I'm converted.
I'm curious what sorts of books you're reading on it. It seems perfect for 'pulp fiction' that will only be read once. Reference books you might want to keep around for 30 years, books with detailed illustrations, books of photography, out of print books - it still seems like the technology isn't yet ready for these.
Being 'converted' seems to be tied to use cases.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hrm, if only there were some way to join two pieces of text in an ebook. Some sort of instantaneous "link".
Parent is absolutely correct. I have several ebooks from O'Rielly that have footnotes throughout that link to notes at the end of the chapter. They all have forward and back references. The Kindle handles them perfectly. Select it from text, and it goes to the note; select the note, and it goes to the text. Easy to bounce back and forth (easier than manually page flipping a real book to find the end of chapter).
The kindle also gained page number support (on supporting books). If the ebook was designed with page numbers in it, you can easily jump to a page number (and/or character offset). So if the note only references a page number, use the "menu->go to->page number" option. I'll admit, that *may* be a little slower than thumbing through a book, but not significantly. Again, the fault of the ebook publisher if they don't include the page number support.
FWIW, here's an example of a book with page number support: http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1315318756&sr=1-1
In the product details:
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0380788624
I love that they list the ISBN the page numbers come from, so you have a physical version to compare with.
I've found that they're not much good for:
1) reference books, as you say
2) relatedly, anything with lots of diagrams, images, etc. (so, just about any decent non-fiction book)
3) anything with many footnotes (again, most non-fiction, plus loads of older fiction)
and I've discovered that
4) the benefits of an extensive library of free public-domain works is overrated when a huge percentage of them are far better with good, modern (so, still protected by copyright) meta-text like introductions, figures of various sorts, and footnotes, or are translations that are old enough that they'll likely turn off modern readers, with recent (still protected by copyright) translations being far more accessible and, often, simply better
IMO they're great for a small subset of public domain material, short non-fiction works, and recent popular fiction, and shit for just about everything else. Then there are the economic factors like not being able to re-sell your purchased ebooks despite their being nearly the same price as a physical copy and, on the flip side, not being able to pick up used books at 1/2 or (often far, far) less of the new price, which makes them a bit crappy for... well, just about anything.
The good bit is being able to carry a library with you everywhere--but that library may well be of significantly poorer quality and/or more expensive than a similar physical library.
Being dropped in the ocean would be even more ruinous for a kindle I suspect...
anything with many footnotes (again, most non-fiction, plus loads of older fiction)
I agree that Kindle's handling of footnotes is far from perfect, but it's mostly a software deficiency. There's no reason why it couldn't render footnotes as, well, footnotes - on the bottom of the page - same as many paper books do.
Literature. Seriously, pressing a button on the side is just like turning a page and the flicker takes much less time than physically turning the page on a book. I honestly don't know what the expectations of people who get annoyed by that flicker are. I've read tens of thousands of pages on my kindle and it's a damn nice experience... I honestly think you're grasping for an argument here. Ebook readers are made for one kind of book, and only one, and they absolutely excel at doing that. For anything else, dead tree is the way to go. I mean if "books" for you means reference books then no, ebook readers are not for you.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
You don't really need to be a geek to at least know the term micron. The interviewer shows himself to be a bit of an idiot with that one, and was all around annoying in that video.
This has more to do with unimaginative user interfaces. How hard would it be to "pin" one page and have a button to flick back and forth between the page you're currently reading and the pinned one?
But you could slip one into a ziplock bag as a precaution and still be able to flip pages, whereas that would prove more difficult with a paper book.
I have found my Nook to be just fine for reference books, and illustrations (if you don't mind grey scale). Problem is, it is mediocre at best with rendering PDF's. Unless the PDF was designed for the small screen, it is either too small to read easily or does not display well with pages split up on another screen.
Right now there are very few reference books that are not PDF. That is the limitation.
Pricing is indeed a problem, though a few publishers like Baen do pretty good on pricing their Ebooks.
I have found that I prefer reading on the Nook instead of paperbacks novels. The Nook is easier to hold in one hand.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Literature
Good use case. It wasn't clear that your 1500 books were all literature. That's actually pretty unusual - most people have a variety of books.
I mean if "books" for you means reference books then no, ebook readers are not for you.
'Books' to me means all kinds of books. But most of the people I know with Kindles primarily use them to read popular fiction, which is appropriate. I'll be thrilled when a quarto sized device of adequate color reproduction and sufficient resolution is invented to make the rest of the books useful in the digital domain.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Several times he asked the same damn question and still didn't understand that the small sample was an actual unit.
I couldn't watch the full video because of his idiotic questions It's obvious he's not a technically minded individual, and seemed to have a hard time grasping how eink technology works.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
You had to have seen this video before then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
Warning: Do not drink near keyboard while watching
Because it could only be sold to 5% of the world population. The rest of the world want an A4 (210mm×297mm) sized reader.
And it does not matter if you don't care what it cost. A proper business plan will look at what the majority of potential customers what and can afford.
Just in case you don't know: The US is the *ONLY* country left in the world which still uses inches and letter sized paper. The rest of the world — including GB — uses metric measurements and A4 paper.