The Development of E-Paper Technology 117
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."
Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple vids (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AOp8oYZwTk [youtube.com]
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 [youtube.com]
Free conversion of already bought books is key (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
The future of e-paper is: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Until e-books are easier to read than paper... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've developed Interbook [thinkpress.com], which gives paper books some of the benefits of being electronic, which ironically enough, most e-books don't even have yet.
Re:The future.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cheaper ebooks, please (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.