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."
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Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cheaper ebooks, please (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm not Kindle's biggest proponent -- I actually had one but returned it -- but Amazon has gotten enough right with the Kindle to make it the first VIABLE e-book reader out there. Its early success is what will make a Kindle 2.0 commercially poss
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Sales of the Kindle, in terms of absolute numbers, may still be fairly modest, but it is hands down the most successful e-book device that's ever come to market. It's a far cry from being the "Zune of ebook readers."
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.
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Good luck with that.
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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.
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profit. Manufacturing cost has absolutely nothing to do with the market price of something.
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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 unreaso
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I don't think the author ought to be "entitled" to anything. However, I think the royalties ought to be structured so that if it sold a "reasonable" number of copies* and thus was not total crap to begin with, that the author could at least make the equivalent of minimum wage. And as far as writing "part-time" goes, the book would take the same amount of time either way; what's the difference between writing full-tim
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There are very few books which get marketed like a TV show or movie or even an album... so you don't need the publisher/distributor's marketing machine. Sure you'll need to buy off a few reviewers to give you space in their list of good reads (for a couple years, until reader reviews take over - if they haven't already).
With online resellers it doesn't take a team of distribution lawyers to write up reselling contracts for all the physical bookstores out there, so you
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While some authors are authors as an aside -- for example, an engineer t
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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.
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With ebooks, an author could get its part directly, and for us would be cents (or the author get a better share, for some books i would not mind). Just is needed a comfortable way to
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Printing is very inexpensive and realitivly efficent if your publisher is smart enough to choose a realtivly newer and high tech print shop. Even without the latest technology there are hundreds or even thousands of small print shops that operate soley for small run products.
Runs of 5,000 or less can be acheived with very little waste (read less than 100 impressions) and maintain the very high quality that the publisher demands, especially if you run large format (40" or wider width) and most
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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 LinuxJou
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There are the writers and contributors to the book, there are the editors and the production staff for a book. There is prepress / digital publishing aspect to creating any printed material and there are associated marketing and other costs.
Then there is markup on the book when it gets to the distributor and there is a markup on the book when it
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Do you think that the cost of these books will go down? There will still be all of the costs including money made off of the final resale of the product. The manufacturing cost of a book is such a minor expense in the overall production of printed material that it most certaintly wont effect end r
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The prof is held hostage. We are all held hostage. We aren't even told we have one option because it doesn't even occur to us to ask.
The comments about DRM, university/publisher deals, I agree that's how it happens. But I see the potential, and see this system is very broken.
Education is very important to governments. It directly effects economy, mental and physical health issues, and crime. But it's strange... they won't allow a "monopoly" with a large software company that competes with a few oth
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There are many people between the people that print the book and you that make money off of the book.
You also have to realize that the end seller of the book is easily adding anywhere from 30 to 50% or more to the price of the book
linky (Score:1, Informative)
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080521/152071/
nice resolution! (Score:2)
And hookers. And blackjack.
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The future.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Something that's meant for nothing but reading should be as cheap as actual paper, otherwise what's the point.
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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 sh
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Re:The future.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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books only have the one distribution network to support.
and you are right, at some point in the future, ebooks could become more environmentally friendly than paper books. The problem is 3 fold 1. the battery. http://www.govtech.com/gt/146829 [govtech.com] if the 'hype' about thin film batteries is real, then we're already o
Re:The future.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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price, not technology is the issue (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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it's pretty cool, and if you're not in a hick town like me, there are probably hundreds of e-books to be read all for free. I guess i just have to make due with project Gutenberg.
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And most of them suck so badly you'd think someone was out to sabotage the technology.
Take the San Francisco public library. You can check out an ebook for 24 hours. No renewal. Forget about portable readers. And my guess is their vendor has locked them into this crappy system so they won't ever be able to change it. Well, at least til they discontinue it for lack of interest.
Is it really 13.4-in diagonal? (Score:3, Funny)
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Yesterday, if possible
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Take whatever resolution you currently have on a full-color LCD, and triple it for each axis. There's your mono rez.
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Tripple the total number...
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Not quite. Typically the dots on a LCD screen are arranged as a 2x2 grid (blue, green, red, with doubled up of one of the colors... green?).
So if you were only doing greyscale pixels, you could get approximately double today's LCD resolution (so around 250-260ppi).
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sqrt(210^2+297^2)/25.4 = 14.32
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]
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olpc was using a e-paper screen iirc.
The OLPC isn't using e-paper, but a special display based around normal LCD screen, it is able to do 200dpi in black&white and has a sunlight readable screen, so its quite similar to e-paper in that regard. The OLPC screen is however, with backlight off, a lot darker then normal paper, so in-door it has some limitations in comparison to e-paper. The area where the OLPC however just flat out kills e-paper is refresh time, the OLPC works just like a normal monitor, so you can watch video, browse webpages
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But ask yourself this: do you really need scrolling? Do you really need to move app window? In current UIs - of course! But why would you use such GUI for e-ink device?...
Ultimatelly though, I doubt such device would suceed...consumers _want_ colors and high refresh rates...
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technology of the future (Score:1)
The author also calls EPD the acronym for Electronic Paper Display. Everyone in the industry uses EPD to mean Electrophoretic Display.
The author also do
Hey, with all this e-paper, why not an e-library? (Score:2)
We all know how people like Amazon can charge you money for digitally downloading a (copy protected) e-book, but shouldn't we be as a society be looking for ways to provide a way for library patrons to "borrow" books using this technology? For free?
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http://www.overdrive.com/ [overdrive.com] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ [gutenberg.org]
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 th
The future of e-paper is: (Score:1, Interesting)
Just say NO to ebook DRM! (Score:2, Informative)
A better alternative is the iLiad Book Edition [irextechnologies.com] 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.
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Until e-books are easier to read than paper... (Score:2)
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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.
I still like regular books (Score:2, Funny)
The death of paper - it's a good thing (Score:3, Informative)
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Producing paper is extreamly efficient when it comes to the amount of polution generated (nearly none). And then you go off and say that producing a product made of plastic, silicon and other such materials is more environmental friendly? You think that there will be only 1 of these things made? there will be hundreds of millions of tons of products created to create the kindle or whatever the hell your talking abou
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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
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Why bother with royalties (Score:1)
Still needs color.... (Score:2)
It's great that the resolution hurdle has been overcome. Now the only real remaining technological issues are color and screen update time. And even the latter isn't an issue when it comes to material intended strictly for reading.
By the way... does anybody know? Is Seiko Epson's display prototype persistent, like conventional epaper, requiring no power to retain an image and only requiring power to change the display?
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Even the current 175dpi screens (greyscale) have overcome the resolution hurdle. I've had a Sony PRS-505 for about 6 months now, and it is excellent for reading fiction. A 300+ dpi screen would simply be icing on the cake.
I think readers will get more and more popular as they get the price farther below $280 and boost the resolution. And frankly, I think the price is the bigger issue that will determine how fast they get adopted.
(Goes back to
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Now, double that would be good enough for me, and 500 would probably be good enough for almost everyone from what I've read. But the device you're talking about just doesn't cut it. For me, at least.
I would pay up to $300 for one if it was 300+ dpi and had a decent-sized screen. And it would be economical for me. Gutenberg has a tremendous number of historical texts, I'm pretty sure I
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I really wonder when was the last time you looked at one of the modern e-book readers? I'm not talking the first or second generation screens with either black/white or 2-bit greyscale.
I'm speaking of the 3rd generation screens which have 16(?) greyscale levels. Where, unless you break out a magnifying glass, you're not going to be able to identify individual pixels. The only way t
As usual, Microsoft doesn't get it. (Score:4, Informative)
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If you don't want to bother going to the trouble of reading an art
hogwash (Score:2)
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I'd rather see something along the lines of a player that could handle TXT & RTF & PDF files and put them on the screen (as well as play movies). I could burn my stuff to a CD or DVD, drop it in the unit, and carry all the books I wanted. Give it a USB port for a thumb-ball or mouse for nav
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solitas wrote:
A possible reason for the higher cost of e-book readers is due to the newer technology involved. Electronic ink much newer than portable video screens like used the type used in portable DVD players.
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Is eyestrain from looking at your lit Palm screen due to size, contrast, or quality? I have to read a LOT of plaintext documentation on screens at work and one of the best things I have in the Mac OS is c
E-Ink electronic picture frame (Score:2)
I love my e-book (Score:1)
Forget about a friggin e-books (Score:2)
For that matter, forget about flexible displays, fabrics, printed circuitry and persistent display state too. Sure, nice to have, but no more.
What I want is a normal notebook with a high-contrast reflective display,
that actually becomes better to use in good light, like paper does.
I want it so much I'd even buy a separate clip-on monochrome screen to plug into
the external display port, if only you could buy such a thing. Being