The Development of E-Paper Technology

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."

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[ndogg]

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.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[Nyeerrmm]

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.

The future..

[Mystery00]

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.

price, not technology is the issue

[peter303]

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.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about hardback pricing? Only twats try and use that as a price point against digital media. We're talking about a tiny text file, they should be no more that $1 a "book".

Re:The future..

[JohnSearle]

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

Re:The future..

[kesuki]

e-paper isn't environmentally friendly. consider. the cost of servers for people to download e-books, the cost of the end users computer downloading the e-book, the cost of the network infrastructure so people can download e-books.. then the manufacturing of e-books, the cost to distribute them, the cost of charging that e-book reader once a week, the cost of that li-ion battery that is powerful enough to run a cell phone... in comparison, paper is environmentally friendly, sure theres the cost of distributing, it and cutting down trees, but most major paper mills own their own managed forests, which perennially supply the trees for paper production, and the whole paper mill runs on burning the bark of the tree, so they don't use electricity at all. they do use toxic chlorine in the bleaching process, but toxic chemicals are used in battery production as well as e-paper not to mention the computer that runs the whole e-book reader.

although a really environmentally concerned person, would be growing kenaf and using environmentally safe hydrogen peroxide to bleach the kenaf for use in paper...

e-paper does have promise, though, the 'olpc' original design used a fancy, e-paper screen, but they've dropped the spendy screen for commodity dvd-screens. e-paper displays could work really nicely with a sub-notebook design, if the display shut off while you're reading content, it could improve battery life.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[brainnolo]

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.

Re:The future..

[samkass]

You can't grep paper.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[Tychon]

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.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[Anonymous Coward]

You still need something to take the place of the publishing house - both for the authors (who need editors) and for the reader (who needs a crap filter).

One could imagine a ranking system could eventually take the place of the latter, but it would need to freeload on bored people reading trash.

You might kill off the distributor, but the publisher will still need to be paid.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The death of paper - it's a good thing

[sweede]

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.

Re:The future..

[Anonymous Coward]

But I can grab paper.

Re:Cheaper ebooks, please

[uniquegeek]

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.