The Future of Documents

Sony announced a deal with Google to bring over 600,000 classic books to the Sony Digital Book. These books come from the Google Books project, and only cover those books whose copyrights have expired (published before 1923).

Google has scanned around seven million books over the last few years, creating one of the largest digital libraries in the world. These books are, for most of them, searchable, and includes cool features like Google Maps hyperlinking to locations mentioned in the document, or automatic summarization.

These books could previously be downloaded as PDF and viewed on good e-Readers with PDF support; but this partnership is a major step forward for ePub, an open, XML-based standard for e-Books.

 Lots of good content available for free – makes the 250,000 books from the Kindle library look small.

Fujitsu’s FLEPia, the first color ePaper device, is now on sale. Only available in Japan, it sells for a bit over $ 1000, which is quite high. However, the specs are quite impressive: 8 inch screen, 260K colors, Wifi, Bluetooth, SD card and miniUSB support – not to mention a touch-screen. It can go for 40 hours without a recharge (estimated to be around 2400 page turns, as it only requires power for page re-draw). Just like the Kindle, it connects very nicely into the Number 1 Japanese e-book server.

As Wired points out, this device sounds like more of a convergence between e-books and PDAs, since it is powered by Windows CE 5. You will therefore be able to run many applications on this device like email, simple electronic document editing, web browsing etc… this makes the price tag a bit more acceptable.

Anyway, a device that should go a long way into making e-Paper an integral part of the Future of Documents. 2009 might very well be the year for ePaper after all.

My biggest question is, does color (at least the kind of color it can render) really make a difference for e-Readers? I am not sure about the contrast and quality, which has improved by a factor 1.5 from these pictures. Still, I am pretty sure it will be far from its paper competitor- the glossy and shiny magazine. The gap between paper and electronic will be much more noticeable than for Black and White documents.

Maybe the most anticipated announcement in e-Paper and e-Readers this year, the new Kindle 2 was announced yesterday, to be in stores on February 24th. With 16-level e-Ink display, thinner and better than the previous version, much more storage and longer battery life, the only “revolutionary” feature is its “Read-to-Me” Text-to-Speech feature. It will still sale for a solid $359.

Engadget has a first hands-on, including video tests. A wealth of articles cover the launch, although many seem a bit disappointed.

Well, maybe not quite 2009, but things are moving.

On the one hand, A few more details on Plastic Logic’s much anticipated e-Reader can be found in this video. It will support most office documents, subscription content, and advertising, with a form factor and a price which should make competitive against current players and “ready for mass adoption”. Unfortunately, its launch is now delayed to early 2010.

On the other hand though, Prime View International (PVI) announced that it would start mass production of flexible electrophotoretic displays (EPDs) in the second quarter of this year, and color EPDs by the end of the year. To be confirmed…

One of the major barriers to the adoption of e-Paper is its weight and “clunkiness” – current e-Readers are rigid, flat, and quite heavy, because they require heavy electronics to address the individual “pixels” on the e-Paper surface. But that might change soon.

Hewlett-Packard and the Flexible Display Centre in Arizona demonstrated recently a new type of “soft”, unbreakable flexible display that could make e-paper displays much more affordable and drive mass adoption.

This new production process called SAIL (Self-Aligned Inprint Lithography) is a low cost process which is very similar to printing on plastic. SAIL allows the low-cost, environmentally-friendly (up to 90% reduction of materials required compared to traditional displays) roll-to-roll printing of Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) arrays on a substrate. The prototype used E-Ink’s e-Paper technology for the actual display.

First applications of this technology might appear in around 3 years, but should be targeted at military or mobile phone applications initially, not e-Readers. Too bad!

A very extensive report for those of you who are interested in e-reader technologies and its market: “E-reader technology and markets 2008-2020″ takes you from the basics of “what is an e-reader?” to the various subtypes and potential market shares: rollable / bendable e-readers, E-book readers, A4-sized bendable e-readers, paper replacement readers, Magazine e-readers, newspaper e-readers, and A4 bendable “convergence” e-Readers. Along the way, interesting findings, like the fact that e-readers actually appeal to older generations because the font sizes can be increased.

It details the technologies, the existing devices, as well as some market projections – 578 million units produced in 2020. It also lists the top applications an e-reader will have to fulfill – Annotation, Clipping, Gathering, Sharing, Notebook and Personal Library management, before discussing the actual content formats which will be key to e-reader publishing.

The most comprehensive guide to e-reader technologies I have seen to date – definitely worth reading if you are interested in the topic. To order it contact AFAICS Research.