Apart from the display technology there isn’t much new.

We’ve had e-book readers before. They haven’t taken off without becoming full featured PDAs or notebook PCs in the process. What I find interesting is that the article mentions that books will be available for 25% less than hardcover price. That’s not exactly a bargain. Paperbacks are cheaper than that and they have actual manufacturing costs involved.

At least it will read text files and PDFs. Now that software manuals are rarely printed anymore, I’d like to read them away from my computer from time to time, at least to not block the limited screen space while I’m working on it.

But in terms of e-ink, how fast is the display? Is it only suited to static text and images, or can the pixels be switched fast enough for smooth animation? Are the pixels binary or can they be partially rotated to produce grayscale images? These questions the article does not answer.

Once display devices can hit paper’s resolution, we’ll see huge changes in the technology.

However, now that they are at the resolution of paper, it probably makes our jobs a lot easier.

That said, books will never disappear. ;o)

Cuttlefish...I don’t think ’e-ink’ is meant to emulate anything other than ink. While it likely can do animations and the like, I think it’s main purpose at this point is eventually emulate true in on a reflective surface. One of the benefits is that it doesn’t require a constant power source. Once the ink is ’printed’ it stays that way without a need for more power. While this is certainly a benefit for reading static text, it’s dissappears if we start talking about animations.

I was at the St.Bride contemporary book design conference last week and witnessed Jim Stoddart’s tortuous ’talk’ on the future of the book. He made much reference to e-books. It’s mentioned in the latest Design Week.

more info here
http://www.eink.com/

i love the seiko watch display that is utilizing this. somewhere i had heard microsoft was working on using this technology for one of their xbox360 game packages. and if i’m right, it was a color version of this

I’ve seen the new Sony e-book in person. The resolution on the e-book is still too low - around 100dpi - but that the surface doesn’t emit light and instead reflects light from your surroundings is a treat for your eyes and makes all the difference.

While it leaves a lot to be desired in its current form, in my mind it proves the category and I don’t doubt that I’ll have an e-book reader of some kind in my bag within the next five years.

A company named Plastic Logic is in the news lately as having a viable product by 2008. For example:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2172127/paper-heralds-computing

Some other general links:

http://news.zdnet.com/2110-9584_22-6134401.html

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5903090.html?tag=nl

FWIW, e-books and e-newspapers aren’t the only potential uses. I looked at electronic paper several years ago for a US Navy project to replace paper onboard, umm, certain ships, but the technology wasn’t good enough then. The idea was to put all the technical data on a central server and use a wireless network to send data to tablet-sized pieces of e-paper. The e-paper would also have been enabled to talk to the equipment of interest, the ship, and other shipboard and shore databases to transfer relevant data back and forth. The whole thing would have been a way to deliver just-in-time and “just as needed” data.

There’s also the whole wearable computing thing to think about, too. Imagine a piece of clothing also being a piece of network enabled e-paper... what will social networking be like then?

There’s also the whole wearable computing thing to think about, too. Imagine a piece of clothing also being a piece of network enabled e-paper… what will social networking be like then?

Mr Lozos, we’re waiting for your mock-ups!  :)

[But avoid typographic subtleties, according to the official website it’s only “170 pixels per inch”.]

My 2 cents... absolutely hideous typography is doing the e-ink based readers a huge disservice - I expressed my disappointment in the Sony Reader, but stumbled across this one today... http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=2695 (via http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/29/starebook-stk-101-reviewed/) - until these guys start producing typography that comes close to the cheapest paperback book quality, the e-ink-e-book is going nowhere :-( which is a huge shame because the technology is pretty cool.

Cheers, Si