A Tale of Two Balls

There was a moment of ribald hilarity at the first government-sponsored e-book conference in 1998, where the e-book industry was officially launched in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. As one of the few attendees from the traditional publishing sector, I was surrounded by a crowd of techies, engineers, entrepreneurial pioneers, geeks and dreamers who had toiled in the rocky e-book vineyard for years and were at last about to witness the realization of their vision. After a number of presentations had been given, a professorial gentleman took the podium and began a power point presentation. On the auditorium screen was a picture of what looked like tiny white balls.

The presenter explained that we were looking at something he called E Ink. Suspended in a liquid were millions of microcapsules containing particles that were dark on one side and light on the other, and each side had oppositely charged particles. By applying an electronic field, the white surface became black. And by sending a computer message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like a "W", the screen would show the letter W. Or by sending a message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like War and Peace, the screen would show a book-length screen containing Tolstoy's epic.

He touched a key on his keyboard advancing to the next slide. Voila!

"See? Your white balls just turned black," the gentleman explained. He did not crack a smile.

An undercurrent of titters swept the audience as he droned on humorlessly about your white balls turning black and your black balls turning white. Aside from the inadvertent pun, the concept struck me as preposterous. I turned to a colleague and said, "That dog won't hunt!"

Last month the E Ink Corporation was bought by a Taiwanese company for $215 million.

My notes on that 1998 conference are lost, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the presenter was Joe Jacobson, creator of electronic ink, who was awarded a patent for it in 2000.

He who titters last titters best.

Richard Curtis

Press Baron Murdoch Ready to Get E-Ink on His Fingers?

I wouldn't swear to it, but I think those may be Rupert Murdoch's hands examining Plastic Logic's thus-far-nameless e-book reader, a Kindle competitor scheduled for release in 2010.

Why would Murdoch, who presides over a media empire ranging from Fox Broadcasting to HarperCollins Publishers to the world's largest agglomeration of English language newspapers, be caressing an e-ink reading device? Is he contemplating going E with such papers as the Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal? Media reporter Peter Kafka thinks so.

Kafka, covering the cable industry's annual show, heard Murdoch expressing admiration for the Kindle and ruminating that he might be willing to invest in a Kindle rival.

"At a Q&A at the cable industry’s annual show today," Kafka reports, "Murdoch waxed on about the Kindle’s qualities, then made a reference to investing in a machine that could be even more attractive - one that boasted a large, full-color screen." Reconstructing his notes, the reporter recorded Murdoch as saying,

"We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there."

Not trusting his notes, Kafka checked with a spokesperson from Murdoch's News Corp and sure enough, it was confirmed. "News Corp. is indeed in 'exploratory' talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies."

Which device is Murdoch thinking of investing in? Perhaps it's the no-namer being developed by Plastic Logic, about which we wrote last fall. Though its display is currently black and white, color screens are "on our road map," VP for Business Development Daren Benzi told The Observer. The plot thickens when you realize that Benzi spent 14 years at News Corp before moving to Plastic Logic. That said, PL already has substantial - $200 million - backing from investors, so do they need Murdoch's investment too?

Okay, so maybe it's the Flepia which, we announced just the other day, is in fact developing a color screen. But it too is already capitalized - by Fujitsu.

Could it be the iRex Reader 1000, the potentially Kindle-killing device introduced last year? It's not in color yet, but a color iRex Iliad has been long rumored.

Rupert-watchers will have a field day second-guessing his thinking. But it shouldn't be that opaque. Steeped in newsprint though he may be, the shrewd press czar has seen the writing, and it's not on the wall. It's on a screen. His romance with e-ink was foreshadowed in 2006 in a speech he gave at the Annual Livery Lecture at the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

What happens to print journalism in an age where consumers are increasingly being offered on-demand, interactive, news, entertainment, sport and classifieds via broadband on their computer screens, TV screens, mobile phones and handsets?

The answer is that great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

And, crucially, newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites such as Times Online or - and this is important - on any platform that appeals to them, mobile phones, hand-held devices, ipods, whatever.

The possibility of converting paper journalism to electronic must certainly have triggered severe myocardial ischemia among the august members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, but Murdoch can't say he didn't warn them. The cost of producing and distributing newspapers is ghastly. For instance, the newsprint used in one year’s worth of The Montreal Gazette is the equivalent of 186,816 trees. Multiply that by all of Murdoch's newspaper holdings and the number of dead trees is nothing short of astronomical.

Watch this space for updates.

RC

And A Pack of E-Readers Nipping at Kindle's Heels

In case the growing number of entries into the e-reader sweepstakes is making your head spin, Channelweb has done us the favor of providing a roundup of Kindle's competitors. We've covered some of these, like the iRex, the Foxit eSlick Reader, and the Plastic Logic Watchimacallit (they haven't come up with a name yet).

Another bunch is described in Channelweb's survey. Going into the clubhouse turn Kindle is ahead of Sony by several lengths, then there's the rest of the pack, which includes such notables as the Jinke HanLin eReader, the Bookeen Cybook, the Netronix EB-100, the Fujitsu Frontech FLEPia, the Foxit eSlick, and the Polymer Vision Readius. Don't smirk. Today's tongue-twister could be tomorrow's household name.

The Readius, depicted here, fits into your pocket and sports a screen that unrolls/unfolds. "It offers 30 hours' worth of battery life (about 7,500 page refreshes)," says Channelweb's summary, "a five-inch display and 16 levels of grayscale." The display refreshes in half a second. As civilized humans haven't read from scrolls in about three millennia, the Readius has our vote for most thought-provoking. Any bozo can reinvent the wheel, but it takes a special mentality to reinvent the scroll.

Despite the large field, it's entirely possible that the winner hasn't even stepped into the starting gate. Somewhere in a garage or basement of college dorm, a geek is working on something that might, just might, change the game completely...

RC

Jeff Bezos and Stephen King announce the new Kindle 2

The Morgan Library is the most museum-like library in New York City, and so it was fitting that Amazon's Jeff Bezos (pictured above) took the stage there this morning to announce the latest version of his book antiquifier known as the Kindle. His grand vision, often repeated throughout the hour long presentation, is that Amazon wants to see nothing less than every book ever published available to all Kindle owners in less than 60 seconds. Is the Kindle 2 going to be the device with enough popularity to create such a seismic shift in readers' habits that the world of publishing bends its back to make this happen? Well, maybe. Just maybe. Apparently e-book sales have jumped to 10% of all Amazon book sales in just one year thanks to the first device, after years of staying well below the radar, and now Amazon wants us all to see the writing on the, err, Kindle. I expect word of mouth and adoption to be stronger this time around because the product deserves it.

The new Kindle 2 ($357 and shipping Feb. 24th) offers enough improvement from the original that I can now recommend it strongly to friends and family:

• It has 3G wireless for faster download speed (especially for browsing the Kindle store).
• It uses Amazon's latest 'Whispersync' service to keep your Kindle's books and notes backed up on the internet cloud and synchronized to other Kindle devices you may own.
• Its shape is now thinner than an iPhone (less than half an inch thick) and perfectly symmetrical, with rounded corners and softer buttons.
• The latest e-ink screen redraws slightly faster (20% over the original) and now does 16 shades of gray instead of just 4.
• 2GB of built-in storage.
• Charging via USB mini-port (everyone has these cables by now).
  
• It has longer battery life (now up to two weeks between recharges).
• It has implemented a pleasant text-to-speech computer voice reader for any text (it's better than Stephen Hawking).
• It has a new 5-way button navigation instead of the old up-and-down wheel.

Now, none of these things represent bleeding edge technology and are probably a little more anemic than what most of us dream about in a best possible e-book device. For example, any page-turning lag is still annoying (especially in the age when Google has taught us that people can't bother to wait even 0.5 seconds more than they have to for a page to load). 3G service isn't going to make a huge difference in speed for most people downloading new books that are typically 900K. And grayscale screens? Don't even get me started. But what Amazon is offering that makes the Kindle 2 so appealing is their dedication to the book delivery service. Jeff Bezos wants the device to disappear in your hands while you read it, because no one pays attention to the paper or binding of a book when they get wrapped up in the story. They don't want distractions. So, the device itself is really just something meant to be unpretentious, transient, and replaceable. What they are selling is access to published books in the most convenient manner yet possible. Amazon is dedicated to helping readers find and download books quickly, and the Kindle 2 serves that purpose better than anything else. And for that I think they have a winner.

What makes the Kindle 2 experience more likely to win people over is that Amazon still seems to be letting the Kindle ride its tide of popularity instead of hard selling customers. More and more e-book content is being converted and added to the Kindle online store every month. The incremental technical improvements in the Kindle 2 are the type that give consumers confidence that the company has a long term investment in their satisfaction, and that more improvements will surely come downstream. Original Kindle owners are even being given a two day opportunity to jump to the head of the queue for pre-ordering the Kindle 2, and what better way to spread the word than allow the converted the first opportunity to evangelize. Instead of a discount or trade-ins, this means hand-me-down first-generation Kindles are going to be circulating amongst friends and families.

Stephen King, at Jeff's invitation and previewing his new Kindle exclusive short story "Ur," read a passage where students confront a teacher who has never seen a Kindle before. The teacher likes to think of himself as "old school" and defends the tactile properties of the trusty paper book, such as the musty smell acquired with age. The Kindle-familiar students counter that the words are still the same, no matter what old school or new school device is being used to read them. And that's the epiphany that many readers are similarly experiencing thanks to e-books. We want ideas and stories foremost, and the digital experience is helping us get the access to texts that generations before us never had unless they lived with a very deep library. Jeff and Stephen have understood this for years. They've both been trying to get more people interested in the digital distribution of books for as long as the e-book industry has been around and they can feel rightfully proud that the Kindle phenomenon is really taking off.

- Michael Gaudet

Kindle, Sony on Notice: Here Come Your Rivals

While Sony has been upgrading its Reader, and Amazon may be upgrading its Kindle (we may know in a week or two), rival firms have not been sitting on their hands. We've reported on several contenders like the iRex Reader 1000, described as a "Kindle Killer." Now Foxit has climbed into the ring with a bantamweight called the eSlick Reader.

One thing it has going for it is price - $230. That's about one-third less than that of its prestigious competitors. And, according to Jose Fermoso of Wired, "It might be the first large hardware eInk device to play eReader files." Translation: it uses the Palm format, meaning it can run on iPhones and a number of other mobile phone platforms. It would also presumably enable those who carry eReader books on their Palm Pilots to transfer the files to a larger and more navigable display unit. Down the road, if the gadget takes off, it might carry other, non-eReader platforms as well.

Wired's Fermoso calls the device ugly, and the name "eSlick Reader" scarcely dances trippingly o'er the tongue. But if it gets the job done, and brings us closer to the tipping point of a $99.00 e-book reader, we'll forgive its homeliness.

RC

Galley Slaves Still Opt for Paper Bondage

We recently reported on a recent conference introducing trade book editors to XML, the markup language that promises to facilitate so many costly, time-consuming and tedious functions performed by traditional book publishers. Among the most significant improvements stressed by Hachette Book Group David Young was that XML could eliminate printed galleys, which Young described as a "major money pit."

It appears as if we're going to be wallowing in the pit longer than XML drum-beaters would like. Craig Morgan Teicher writes in Publishers Weekly that "most people would like to put off using e-galleys as long as they can."

Bound proofs, some plain-covered and others handsomely jacketed, are early uncorrected versions of forthcoming books, submitted by publishers to reviewers. Because of the long lead time it takes for reviewers to read and write up books, it is unfeasible for publishers to submit finished copies. But, as Hachette's Young points out, it is a big expense. It's also about as far from green as it gets: reviewers receive hundreds of galleys a week and are only able to review a handful. The rest they toss. Now that publishing is doing digital, proofs submitted via email would seem to be a perfect solution.

Not so fast.

Ron Charles, senior editor for the Washington Post Book World, says, "As a reviewer, I need to have a physical book to read at home and on the subway - the last thing I want in my life is more screen time!” And Teicher reports Lev Grossman, book critic for Time magazine, saying,

“I've been offered them before, but only tried to read one once, on an early-generation Sony Reader. I hated the experience. That low-contrast screen, the poky refresh rate! It was like a horrible, crippled imitation of a book. But having said that, I think e-galleys are inevitable. They just make too much sense—financially for publishers, environmentally for everybody. Maybe by the time I'm forced to read them, e-readers will have turned into something less insulting to the eye.”

Despite the resistance, book trade observers think it's only a matter of time before paper gives way to e-ink, especially because improvements to the production and submission process are on the way.

Read The E-Galley Cometh? and judge for yourself.

RC

An LCD Challenger to ePaper?

Slashgear reports a different approach to ePaper, this one produced by Sharp. It's an eight-color liquid crystal display that can freezes static images after the juice is switched off. Sharp foresees a variety of markets for it such as grocery displays: by hooking the screen up to a Wi-Fi, store managers can readily adjust prices displayed to customers. It could also be competitive with emerging e-book applications once the cost comes down and some other issues, such as temperature distortion and power consumption, are resolved. The technology doesn't sound competitive yet with eInk but given Sharp minds, that could change fast. Read about it.

RC

Military Developing Ultralight E-Ink Flex Displays

It's been said that the first applications of every scientific innovation are invariably sex and warfare. This one is about warfare.

The US Army is investing tens of millions of dollars developing light, electrically charged plastic display screens that can be carried in a soldier's pocket, replacing bulky, heavy and unreliable systems that compromise mobility, communications and rapid response.

"These flexible displays have been the dream of science fiction authors, wearable-computing enthusiasts and the display industry for nearly a decade," blogs Priya Ginapati in Wired. "LG Philips, Fujitsu and Sony have shown off prototypes of flexible-display systems, while startups such as Plastic Logic and E-Ink have talked about the possibility of putting their digital ink displays onto bendable backings. But so far the idea has remained more in the realm of Minority Report than the real world."

"For instance," continues Ginapati, "a soldier in the field could get information about the surroundings, the position of enemies or the blueprint of a building he or she may be planning to enter. Other applications could include the use of the flexible displays as maps."

E-Ink was developed by MIT scientists for use in e-books, and we're hopeful that it will prevail as much in peace as in war.

RC

E-Books Coming on Buckypaper?

Scientists are exploring a multitude of applications for "buckypaper," a tissue-thin and steel-strong fabric made up of carbon nanotubes. Because of its strength and vast surface area - a gram of it could theoretically blanket about 3000 square yards - it may one day provide the vehicle for the e-ink that is the basis for electronic newspapers, magazines, and books.

For a fascinating article and video on buckypaper, click here.

- RC

Kindle 2 Rumors Persist, Now With Pictures

A few weeks ago, Amazon was telling the rumor mills to stop buzzing about the next generation of Kindle and that if a Kindle 2.0 was coming at all it wouldn't be until next year. But now that Sony has announced their new PRS-700 Reader and it's getting all sorts of press, Lo! What should appear the very same weekend? Leaked spy shots of the next Kindle. Coincidence? Nah.

Granted, these are the sneaky tactics you expect in an election year, when it seems everyone is doing their best to play a game of one-up-manship. Presidents, banks, and reality TV contestants are all queuing up to see who can fail the most spectacularly in their efforts to win the hearts of all the Joe Sixpacks and hockey moms. However, we at E-Reads don't want to see either the Kindle or Sony Reader products fail. We love them both. They both deserve the limelight.

But the possibly fake/likely real Kindle 2.0 spy shots by "Boy Genius Report" make me think the device isn't yet up to par with the latest Sony Reader, and I'm sure Amazon isn't entirely pleased with seeing these pictures getting blogged at heavily trafficked Gizmodo.com. The revised Kindle in the spy shots has cleaner lines, but it looks more like a Star Trek medical tablet than ever before, and I assume all those buttons mean that it won't be a touch screen, like the new Sony. But it is reported to be sturdier and recharge via USB cable. Maybe Amazon is still playing catch-up, maybe they're simply refining a low cost alternative to the Sony Reader. Who knows what's really going on. All I know is that when your product has rumors and buzz, it's going to take on a life of its own in the public's mind. And anything that puts ebooks in the public's mind is good by us.

- Michael Gaudet

Plastic Logic Brings E-Newspaper Closer to Your Doorstep

Driven by the same E-Ink technology that powers Sony's eReader and Amazon's Kindle, Mountain View California's Plastic Logic will soon release a large-screen reader designed to carry your daily newspaper, according to Eric A. Taub in the New York Times. The screen will be twice the size of the eReader and Kindle and just about the same weight but two thirds thinner.

You'll be able to buy it in summer of 2009, but the economics of newspaper subscription haven't been worked out. It could be far more expensive than subscription to the paper version, not even counting the cost of the device itself. In time we may see the newspaper equivalent of Gillette's "Give away the razor and sell the blades," but too much remains to be settled about technology, economics, psychology and customs before the next generation is as comfortable with downloading newspapers as today's aging populace is with ink on newsprint. But with magazines and newspapers dying, the lure of huge savings on downloads may prove overwhelmingly tempting. Though European culture may not be an accurate guide, the iRex'a iLiad newspaper and magazine reader may show us how an Old World society can adapt to a completely new way of reading the daily news.

The Plastic Logic reader (it doesn't have a name yet - you got any suggestions?) also brings us a little closer to the tablet-sized device that will inevitably revolutionize the classroom.

- Richard Curtis

Esquire Cover a Real Turn-on

To celebrate its 75th year of publication, Esquire magazine will put an "electronic" cover on its September 2008 issue. About 100,000 newsstand copies out of the total circulation of 700,000 will carry it. The image itself is a closely guarded secret, except perhaps for the nations of China and Mexico, the states of Texas and Kentucky, Esquire's staff and executives of the Ford Motor company

Actually, "electronic" doesn't really describe the venture very accurately. "Electric" is the more appropriate term. The cover will be produced with E-Ink technology. A mini-battery, developed in China, is the power source and will be hand-sewn into the cover by Mexicans, then the lot will be shipped to the magazine's distribution depot in Lexington, Ky. The carbon footprint for this exercise in digital modernity is about sixty thousand square miles.

It would be hard to make this up, but if you are skeptical read Tim Arango's article about the
Esquire cover in the New York Times.

When the battery runs out, readers may wrap their fish in the magazine's paper.

- Richard Curtis