Tag: e-book technology

PocketBook introducing an ebook reader with a 7.8”colour e-ink display

PocketBook InkPad Color eBook reader press picture courtesy of PocketBookArticles

Pocketbook InkPad Color Has a New Kaleido E-ink Screen, Costs $330 | The Digital Reader (the-digital-reader.com)

German Language / Deutsche Sprache

PocketBook InkPad Color: Großer eReader in Farbe – COMPUTER BILD

Inkpad Color: Neuer E-Reader mit Farbdisplay – PC-WELT

From the horse’s mouth

PocketBook

PocketBook InkPad Color: meet the first 7.8-inch e-reader with color E Ink new Kaleido™ screen (Press Release)

InkPad Color reader (Product Page)

Video – Click or tap to play in YouTube

My Comments

Previously, PocketBook who is a Switzerland-based eBook reader manufacturer, offered the first colour eBook reader which has a very useable colour e-ink display. This unit was with a 6” display.

But they have extended this to an eBook reader with a larger 7.8” display but achieving the same “dot-per-inch” resolution as the 6” model. The frontlight is even designed to work properly with E-Ink Kaleido and yield the best visual performance even if it is turned down to the lowest level.

Most of the features for this PocketBook InkPad Color are the same for both the PocketBook Color eBook readers with things like text-to-speech, Bluetooth connectivity, and support for audio files based on MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC codecs. But it also has Wi-Fi which would come in to its own for downloading eBooks and other “electronic hard copy” material from PocketBook’s own electronic bookstore, Dropbox and ReadRate. It also has a built-in RSS-based Webfeed reader for those of us who follow blogs and other online services using this standard technology.

The large colour display may come in to its own with graphic novels or other illustrated material. I would see this more so in France and Belgium where the “BD” visual novels  and comic albums are an artform unto themselves. Even business and education would value the large colour screen for illustrated materials delivered in electronic hard copy.

The PocketBook InkPad Color will weigh in at 225g even though it has the large screen. It will cost EUR€299 in Europe or US$330 in the USA.

It will be interesting to know how the E-Ink Kaleido technology will be taken further. In the near term, it could be about moving towards larger colour e-ink displays. But it could also lead towards work on photo-quality colour e-ink displays, making for electronic photo frames that use this technology or even towards colour digital signage.

What needs to happen is for more eBook readers to license and implement colour e-ink technology. Here, a colour display can be seen by an e-book reader manufacturer as a product differentiator just as size or network / Internet connectivity is used for that purpose. It can encourage authors and publishers to use colour as a drawcard for their eBook versions of their works.

Delivering purchased content collections to the home network

Apple and others may have us streaming content on a temporary basis in to our homes after we subscribe to them or another content provider but we will still want to download content to our home networks. This is so we can believe that we really have bought and owned the content rather than perpetually renting it. As well, an increasing number of content providers will take advantage of the digital environment to affordably distribute content under a “to-own” philosophy where we can buy that content in a digital form for cheap.

An example of this would be a few of the US’s well-known magazines, especially National Geographic, offering their back-issues as a collection of PDF files on a CD collection or a USB hard disk. Similarly, we would purchase digital albums of our favourite recordings from various online stores including iTunes. As well, when I went to a travel fair on Sunday 19 February, a country provided an optical-disc-based “slide collection” of images of that country at their stall.

The question that many will ask is how can it be made easier to deposit this content so it is available across the home network. Here, we could copy the files to a public “media folder” on a network-attached storage unit that is on the home network. But we would have to know where that “media folder” exists and how we should present the media to the network. As well, we would need to make it easier for a collection of PDF or other “electronic-book” files to be discovered on a mobile computing device such as a tablet.

A secure network installation routine for small networks

There typically are installation routines in place for provisioning software to computers but these look after putting the software in place on the computer from a user-carried, network-hosted or downloaded package and making the software discoverable in the computer’s operating system. The practice is also similar for delivering software updates and add-ons for network-attached storage devices and other similar devices.

Most media that is purchased online for download is typically downloaded to the user’s regular computer or, in some cases, their mobile device and manually copied to the network-attached storage using the operating system if it is to be shared. It also holds true for digital photos that are downloaded from one’s digital camera or content held on a “carry-through” physical media container like an optical disc or USB memory key. This can be a pain for people who don’t have much computer experience or patience.

One way to make this easier would be to provide a secure simple network installation routine for content collections. This could be based on the routine knowing common variables that represent the content collection and where particular content classes should go. It could manifest in a download handler associated with an online music store that knows the location of the download-music folder on the NAS.

Such routines would need to have a high level of security in order to prevent questionable software from being made available to the network. They will also have to properly support and handle permission systems that are part of most network operating systems.

These routines could allow the copying of “new” media files from the source to particular folders or, in some cases, mount the content collection to the NAS’s file system if it was in something like a USB hard disk such as the National Geographic example. Then it would force the media to be annexed to the index created by the NAS for searching and browsing the media. Of course, there will be the desire to install a skinned microsite which allows one to browse or search a media collection and this would work if the NAS uses a Web server.

Making “electronic-hard-copy” formats discoverable over the network

With DLNA at its current point, it is now feasible to provide images and audio-visual content to nearly every network-enabled audio and video player, allowing users to search or browse for the content they are after. This can be done using the device’s control surface or a control point hosted on another device and the browsing and searching can be performed against many different attributes such as the artist, title, date, user-assigned keyword or genre or a combination thereof.

But this concept hasn’t been extended to the “electronic hard-copy” document that is used for e-publishing. This will become more relevant as we purchase e-books and similar documents and create our own “e-libraries” and store them on NAS drives on our home networks. This will be of importance as large collections of works are made available in electronic hard-copy format for sell-through download or supply on a physical medium like a USB hard disk or optical-disc collection.

Here, PDF, ePub, XPS and other electronic-hard-copy files could support standardised metadata and the DLNA specification could be extended to permit discovery of content held in these electronic hard-copy formats. This would allow people who use e-readers, tablets and smartphones equipped with the right software to discover and download this material to these devices without having to know the file hierarchy of a NAS or use file managers to “pick up” the content. This software could then be integrated in to these devices in a similar manner to how DLNA media player software is becoming de rigeur for the standards-based tablet or smartphone.

Conclusion

The main issue here is that to be comfortable with newer content-delivery methods, we need to he able to do what we used to do in acquiring and annexing the content to household-common content pools so that all members of the household can gain access to the material. This then has to be made easier to d when it comes to file-delivered content especially for people with limited computer skills and what has been made available for photos, music and video content must extend to e-books and similar content. It also must allow the use of standards-based technology that doesn’t tie the user down to a particular vendor.

Another tablet-PC platform in the works, this time from Microsoft with a Windows-based solution

News Article

BBC News – Microsoft announces Windows tablet PC plans

My comments

Windows has provided for tablet and touch computing abilities ever since the Windows XP operating system where there was a special “Tablet PC” edition delivered only with computers that used stylus-driven “tablet-style” operation. These computers came in the form of a “slate” where the only user interface was the stylus-operated screen or a “convertible” notebook computer that can be operated as a conventional notebook computer or a “tablet-style” computer just by swivelling a stylus-operated screen 180 degrees. Most of these computers weren’t available in price ranges that most people would consider when it comes to buying portable computer equipment.

They didn’t extend the availability of this operating system to other “tablet-style” or “stylus-driven” setups like interactive whiteboards, “digitizer” tablets or display and light-pen / interactive pointer.

But, when Windows Vista came on the scene, Microsoft integrated touchscreen and stylus-driven “tablet” operation as part of the operating system for all of the mainstream versions. This has opened up the floor for more touch-enabled computer setups or the ability to provide such setups in an aftermarket manner. Windows 7 has extended this further with the support for multitouch screens, again baked in as part of the mainstream versions.

Apple has cast their first “punch” in the fight for commodity-priced touchscreen computing devices with the arrival of the iPad. This has been built on “consuming” material that is normally distributed as print material and, in the case of periodical content, uses client-side “apps” delivered through Apple’s iTunes App Store to “draw-down” the material.

Android and, now, Microsoft have started taking action in providing a platform that does what the Apple iPad does but in a more competitive way for both customers and developers. Microsoft has, on their side, an increasing array of “netvertibles” (netbooks with swivel touch-screens) and low-cost convertible notebooks as a hardware starting point and the touch and tablet functionalities in Windows 7 as a software starting point. They also have been known for establishing an affordable and accessible software-development infrastructure ever since the company started with the BASIC interpreter for the Altair microcomputer in the 1970s, by providing the Visual Studio software-development suite which can allow programmers to write touch-enabled software.

Microsoft could then provide extra “shell” functionality with Windows 7 to enable full touch operation but they will need to work this in so it can work with low-cost hardware in order to make their platform affordable for most. This platform would be like the Android platform where many different hardware manufacturers provide different units that run this operating system.

Personally, the “tablet” computer race will become like what has happened during the late 1980s when there were at least five GUI-based operating platforms on the desktop computing scene. What then happened was that some of the platforms “fell off the branch” or serviced particular user classes, as certain platforms became dominant in mainstream computing life.

As I have said before. there has to be standard interactive “electronic hard copy” platform that permits “publish once, read anywhere” content authoring with the full benefits that these tablet computers offer for the new platform to succeed.

The first of the “netvertibles” or convertible netbooks – a possible challenge to the Apple iPad perhaps

News article

Acer launches 11.6-inch Aspire Timeline 1825PT netvertible – Engadget

My comments

This computer is becoming one of the first netbook-class notebook computers to have a multi-touch screen. The main problem with these machines is that consumers will forget about them because they are so entranced by Apple’s iPad.

If you want to make this class of netbook come up very well with consumers, you will have to provide touch-enabled book-reading applications for the main e-book and online-comic platforms to work with Windows and other “freely-programmable” operating systems. As well, machines like this Acer should use a “tilt-sensor” to determine the display orientation in order to provide a “broadsheet” or “tabloid” view.

As well, anyone who provides an “online newspaper” platform will need to make sure that people can subscribe to their papers from any platform as long as the appropriate reading software is in place and the software should be ported to many platforms like Windows, MacOS X and Android.

Then they could effectively challenge the iPad in providing an online reading platform for books or newspapers.