Tag: e-book

Colour e-ink displays now appear as an e-reader product

simonmackay 18/08/2020 Current and Future Trends, Mobile Computing No Comments

Article

Pocketbook Color eReader Hands on Review | Good EReader

Pocketbook Color: eBook-Reader bekennt Farbe (Pocketbook Color: eBook reader shows its colours) | Computer Bild (German Language / Deutsche Sprache)

From the horse’s mouth

PocketBook

PocketBook Color – the Swiss brand will release a new e-reader with color screen (Press Release)

PocketBook Color (Product Page)

Video – Click or tap to play on YouTube

My Comments

An e-book reader available on the European market is existing as a commercially-available example of a colour e-ink display.

E-ink is a display technology that works in a similar manner to ink on paper and uses existing light. It only consumes power every time the display is refreshed thus making it more power-efficient. It also works well in bright sunlight due to it not being dependent on a light source that can be easily “washed out” by the sun. Its main application has been handheld e-book readers but it has been limited to black-and-white display.

There has been work taking place to have e-ink displays capable of displaying in colour. It has come through in the form of the E-Ink Kaleido colour display which uses the same e-ink technology.

This has manifested in the Pocketbook Color which is an e-reader that has a colour e-ink display.

This EUR€199 device uses a 6” e-ink touch screen capable of displaying 4096 colours, with a resolution of 1072×1448. There is also LED lighting so you can use this device in darker settings. For audio, it can handle AAC, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files, which can be played through earphones or a Bluetooth-connected audio device.

It has 16Gb of internal storage and can use SDHC memory cards, not sure what size, with a maximum capacity of 32Gb. This handheld device weighs in at 160 grams, something that would be acceptable for that class of device.

For e-book readers, the colour display may be seen as legitimate for visual novels or books that have colour photos or illustrations. Businesses may see it appealing for distributing brochures and catalogues in an electronic format for offline reading. As well, where colour is used to differentiate or highlight text in a book the colour e-reader will come in to its own here. A classic example of this is are the “red-letter” Bibles where the words of Jesus Christ are written in red.

But I also see the idea of a colour e-ink display appealing to other applications like colour digital signage in use cases where battery power is preferred. Examples of these would include outdoors use or freestanding signs. Or it could be about working towards making e-ink as a viable display alternative for laptops, tablets and smartphones where power efficiency is desired.

Barnes & Noble beats Amazon to the punch with lighted e-ink Nook (hands-on) | E-book readers – CNET Reviews

simonmackay 16/04/2012 Current and Future Trends, Mobile Computing No Comments

Barnes & Noble beats Amazon to the punch with lighted e-ink Nook (hands-on) | E-book readers – CNET Reviews

My comments

Illuminating non-self-lighting displays

The new e-ink display technology is showing up a few issues here, especially with use in darker environments. The typical solution for dark-environment ebook reading was to use an accessory cover that had an integrated light of some sort. But it will follow the same path as the liquid-crystal display as I outline below.

Initially, if an application required any form of useability in a dark environment such as a watch, the manufacturer installed a filament bulb in the side of the display and this was lit up by the user pressing a button. Later on, in the mid-80s, device manufacturers used a LED array installed behind the display to backlight small displays like number displays. This typically provided a relatively-consistent illumination effect across the display area and allowed for such practices as changeable illumination colours, which was asked for with car radios.

This became the norm through the mid-90s until some watch manufacturers worked on the use of “electroluminescent” illumination technology which provided an illuminated display on their watch with very little battery consumption and an even display lighting.

Large LCD screens for video / data display applications do use cold-cathode fluorescent backlighting but have moved to white-LED backlighting as a way to be power-efficient.

Research that has been done

The current problem with the e-ink display is that it isn’t self-illuminating. This is although there is research by Pixel QI in to establishing a display technology that can combine what the LCD offers with the e-ink technology. This is to counteract the problem of LCD and OLED display applications being “washed out” in bright sunlight.

But there could be the use of a white electroluminescent panel behind an e-ink display, especially a colour fast-refreshing type to allow for a highly-flexible “use-anywhere” display that can conserve power.

Conclusion

Once we see further work on the e-ink display taking place, it could then allow for this technology to move beyond the Nook or Kindle e-reader.

“Electronic hard copy” publishing – should this only be for the iPad platform?

simonmackay 07/06/2010 Current and Future Trends, Industry Comments No Comments

Since the start of this year, there has been some interest shown by traditional hard-copy media publishers and book publishers in the idea of e-books and similar technologies. This has mainly been brought about by the arrival of devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad. This concept has interested the newspaper and magazine publishers who have fund the value of their hard-copy titles dwindling as readers place more value on Web-hosted online news sources.

“Electronic hard copy” becoming only for the Apple iPad

This has intensified with the arrival of the Apple iPad where nearly every mainstream newspaper publisher is offering a subscription-based app for this platform and moving towards placing their online content behind a subscription-driven paywall, The biggest fear that I have about the current “electronic hard copy” situation is that all of the publishers will simply develop their “electronic hard copy” projects so that they only work with the Apple iPad.

Other platforms that exist

There are touch-based Internet-tablet platforms other than the iPad that can do the job of being an endpoint for “electronic hard copy” reading. The ones that come to mind are the Google Android platform which will be evolved into a touch-based Internet-tablet form factor as well as touch-enabled computers that run Microsoft’s Windows Vista or 7 operating systems. Infact I have viewed this site through a Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart “all-in-one” desktop PC at HP’s stand during the PMA Digital Life Expo yesterday in order to show a review of one of their products that was on the stand. This unit had the ability to “click on to” links at the touch of a finger or you could stroke your finger upwards to scroll through the site.

Similarly,there could be other touch-enabled Internet tablet platforms written for other embedded operating systems like Symbian, Bada or Maemo. As well, Microsoft can also provide a “scaled-down” distributions= of their Windows 7 codebase as the basis of a touch-enabled Internet-tablet device.

A common “electronic hard copy” distribution platform

What needs to happen is for the creation of a common “electronic hard copy” distribution that allows for the support of periodical content that is provided for free, “by the unit” or on a subscription basis in a similar manner to regular hard-copy periodicals. It should allow for authenticated distribution, rich-media content such as animation or video, search and interactivity amongst other things. It should also allow the publishers to “brand” their content and see a layout in a similar manner to how the hard-copy form has been presented.

For periodical content, technologies like the RSS Web-feed platform could be used as a basis for “pushing” newer issues to the device through the life of a subscription while there could be support for content-specific paradigms. In the case of comic-strip content, there could be the ability to scroll through each frame which would be variably-sized and perhaps may be accented with multimedia. Some material could allow for searching, filtered browsing and / or dynamic typesetting, such as a “full” dictionary that can be filtered down to provide words considered “legal” for Scrabble or a dictionary that emphasises in another colour “Scrabble-legal” words.

As well, you should be able to buy content for the device from anywhere other than the device’s “app store” like the way a Nokia phone user can get an app for their phone from the developer’s Web site, the Handango app store as well as the Nokia Ovi app store. This avoids the situations that have been occurring with Apple and the way they have been approving or disapproving apps for their iTunes App Store.

Conclusion

Once a common distribution platform exists for “electronic hard copy” content that works in a manner that breeds competitiveness, then more people would be able to benefit from this new way of distributing books, newspapers and magazines.