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Sony e-Paper Reader
by Andrew McCaskey
Slashdot Review Podcast
Sponsored in part by : WickedLasers.com the
world’s most powerful consumer laser.
Getting ready for the big trip tomorrow to the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, in Ontario, CA. It’s going to be a series of connections across the country and so things may be delayed in posting. Mobile podcasting is always a challenge – posted at odd hours – or one of those gravelly 3:00AM productions where my brain is insisting that it’s time to be up and doing a podcast.
At least I am not expecting the 22 hour workdays that were featured at the Consumer Electronic Show. However, from those shows you might remember some discussion of the Sony Reader.
This device is at least the third attempt at a publishing system that will supplant the library of reference books or popular titles for throw away airline entertainment. It looks to me like this one has a chance of becoming something that is genuinely useful. The reader itself is slightly over half a pound, and roughly a half inch thick. Daylight visibility is said to be excellent, and the battery life is rated at 7,500 page turns before a four hour recharge cycle is needed.
You may have seen the demo of e-Paper on the Slashdot Review You Tube group. ePaper is made by Phillips, Siemens, and Toshiba, and probably others, and is a substantial improvement over LCD displays from both a battery life and readability perspective. What Sony apparently has done is add the capability to display not only e-books but also PDF files and RSS feeds on a six inch screen in a 64MB package that also takes SD card storage. If you think about it, 64MB is a lot of text – and with the cost of SD memory even hundreds of large PDF files can be carried in a small group of cards.
Today’s Video in the SDR Group at YouTube is an informal demo of the Sony Reader – which is supposed to be shipping in October at a price point around $350. There is also the mandatory official tour at the Sony demo linked in the show notes.
After you have a chance to check out the video, you might think of opportunities surrounding the ecosystem that might easily emerge around this device – for business and recreational use.
It will be very interesting to see if/how publishers such as O’Reilly jump on this for technical documentation. Or how industrial distributors might be able to adapt this to quasi-realtime catalog and inventory displays that form one side of the traditional site manager’s aluminum clipboard – that updates from a WiFi node RSS yet is as accessible as the paper version.
e-Paper, as you know, is a technology that draws current only where there is a change of state – a re-write of the pixels. Otherwise, the static current to hold the image is negligible. But the real feature, for us Baby Boomers – is the ability to zoom and overscan as needed on the display, to magnify the image. If you are not yet at that age, I may remind you of the 18th Century Tombstone “As I am, Ye One Day Shall Be” .
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