ePaper—Now we’re talking
by Pablo Defendini
It’s no secret that the Amazon Kindle has reinvigorated interest in dedicated ePaper-based reading devices (if not necessarily publishing industry profit margins, just yet). It’s also no secret that the Kindle is absolutely atrociously designed, and that its closest competitors, the Sony Reader and the iRex Iliad, are not much better (although aesthetically much more pleasing).
Enter Plastic Logic and their as-yet-unnamed reader. It’s got almost everything that would make me want to buy a dedicated reading device. Let’s do the checklist:
As large as a sheet of paper: Tiny is not always better. I don’t necessarily mind reading books and documents on, say, my iPhone, but it’s nice to have a decently-sized reading area. As long as I can stick this in my bag in place of reams of paper, it’s still a space-saver.
Thin as all hell, and pretty light: This baby is 0.3″ thin. I could see myself slipping this into my bag along with my MacBook Air, no problem.
Touchscreen: My iPhone has spoiled me—I want a touchscreen on everything now. I find myself reaching for the screen on my laptop all the time, especially when I’m using an application that’s also present on the iPhone, such as Google Maps. The fact that you can flip pages, use a soft keyboard, and even mark up documents with fingerstrokes is a big, big win for the Plastic Logic reader.
Full colour, high resolution display: Still lacking, but give it time. Like televisions, personal computers, iPods, and other devices, I can see this reader’s first couple of iterations be black and white, but eventually move to colour, once price and technology make it feasable.
Open platform: Here’s a place where Kindle and Sony particularly fail. They’ve locked their devices to certain formats. The Plastic Logic reader will be document format-agnostic, as it should be. The presentation at DEMOfall shows the reader explicitly handling PDFs and PowerPoint presentations.
Here’s that presentation:
This looks fantastic. Wrap it up in something other than PC beige, price it competitively with the iPod, and I’m pretty sure you’ve got a winner. I’ll be keeping a close eye on these guys as 2009 comes around.
In the future I can see a device with the guts of the iPhone, or even the MacBook Air, adopting this kind of display, and becoming a full-featured input/output device. I can has touchscreen Mac Tablet?
Comments
I especially agree with the size issue. we’re so obsessed with smaller gadgets that we apply that logic to all devices. I’m coming from the perspective of a visual artist as well and I’d want my work to be seen clearly on these devices. I
I can’t help but think this size could be an ideal general interface for all sorts of things, not just books. Like web based and word type programs. there’s a real elegance to this design. I still look at it and think disposable though.I don’t think there’s a way around that. i consider books an ideal form to play with within it’s own boundaries. These devices have no fixed shape and can be constantly made obsolete. Does that make sense?
How does “locked to one format” apply when you can convert many
formats to Mobipocket and read them on the Kindle? The Sony
Reader is much more locked in, in that it can read fewer things and
there’s not a converter provided by Sony (as opposed to Amazon
providing a free email service for this). For instance, I don’t offer
Reader support in my eBook conversions because I simply can’t create
the Reader format.
I’ve converted many things to read on my Kindle, and apart from that
it can read some things with DRM, it’s otherwise not something that
can only read things with DRM.
Arachne, you’re right; I was misinformed when I wrote this. The Kindle does handle DRM-free Mobipocket, and the .azw filetype is nothing more than a .mobi with a custom wrapper.
That being said, the fact that the Kindle won’t read ePub documents (which seems to be on its way to becoming the de-facto open standard) is bothersome, particularly considering that the newer Sony readers (the 505 and the forthcoming 700) do handle ePubs.
My greater point is that, barring format-specific hardware, devices should be format-agnostic, or at the very least offer support for the open standard. Granted, ePub is a relatively new development, so I’m willing to see how it plays out, and give Bezos the benefit of the doubt. In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to the PlasticLogic reader.