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E-ink in Color
This is more of a general question to the folks who read this journal at large than an actual blog entry (though it does have to do with today's New York Times article about Amazon acquiring a company that looks like it'll pave the way to Amazon developing something similar to an iPad -- color display, WiFi, etc.). As you all know, I'm really fond of the e-ink display. I think it makes for a superior electronic reading experience. When I was chatting with my coworkers about it, one of them who is also a photographer said that such a display would make photo editing much easier, because you wouldn't be dealing with the back-lit glare of a monitor.
According to that NYT article, it sounds like no one is using e-ink in color -- that the choice is either an e-ink display or a color display. But back in 2005, E*Ink, presumably the company that designed the technology, put out a press release (featuring the Book of Kells, unless I'm mis-identifying the image) that showed that the e-ink display could feature color. An Engaget article from April 09 shows a competition among developers to release color e-ink displays to the masses.
My question is this: why settle for a back-lit screen as the color technology (when what makes e-readers really exciting is their non-back-lit screens) when e-ink and competitors have color in progress? Is this a personal preference issue and I'm just being a dolt about it? Or are folks just tired of waiting? (While working on this, I found a Wired article that addressed my first question -- which was why, if the technology has been around since 2005, hasn't it come to the market yet. Apparently it's harder than I thought.) If you read e-books, what are your feelings about displays?
According to that NYT article, it sounds like no one is using e-ink in color -- that the choice is either an e-ink display or a color display. But back in 2005, E*Ink, presumably the company that designed the technology, put out a press release (featuring the Book of Kells, unless I'm mis-identifying the image) that showed that the e-ink display could feature color. An Engaget article from April 09 shows a competition among developers to release color e-ink displays to the masses.
My question is this: why settle for a back-lit screen as the color technology (when what makes e-readers really exciting is their non-back-lit screens) when e-ink and competitors have color in progress? Is this a personal preference issue and I'm just being a dolt about it? Or are folks just tired of waiting? (While working on this, I found a Wired article that addressed my first question -- which was why, if the technology has been around since 2005, hasn't it come to the market yet. Apparently it's harder than I thought.) If you read e-books, what are your feelings about displays?
no subject
Color e-ink might be great for ebooks as they exist today. But since the technology is great for static content and fails at motion content, it's not going to scale well as ebooks mature. If you look at the Sports Illustrated tablet demo, you'll see how static and video are likely to begin blending into multimedia ebooks.
Ebooks are currently where movies where when the technology first started, which is to say stage productions that just happen to be filmed - a literal porting of the old medium into the new one. The coming decade will likely see a lot of innovation toward figuring out what ebooks can be *without* necessarily sticking to the constraints of a physical book. And, as much as I like the idea of color e-ink, it does have a lot of the same limitations.
To extend the metaphor, netbooks are also a lot like filmed stage plays. They fill the gap between cell phone and laptop by just being a smaller, wimpier version of a laptop. It can still do a lot of what a laptop can, but it's cramped, awkward, and often a terrible user experience (since the people designing the software/sites didn't have that form factor in mind when they made it). Tablets take a different approach, giving you a much better UI to accomplish 80% of what you really want to do on the go anyhow, and having a custom built, form-factor-appropriate UI for each piece of software.
Personally, I think this is the right approach. Not necessarily because I love the tablet format. It has a ways to go before it'll be ubiquitous. But because people will know what they're getting, and will have a much better experience with it. Most of the people buying netbooks just think they're inexpensive laptops, and don't realize how underpowered they are until it's too late. With a tablet, at least they'll know it's a secondary device they're buying, not a primary.