Technology Today

Rise of e-readers

Amazon’s launch of its first dedicated e-reader for newspapers and magazines points to a future when digital and analogue publishing begins to merge.

Nearly double the size of the book giant’s existing e-reader, Amazon’s wireless Kindle DX has adopted a tabloid-like format for ease of reading newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and the Washington Post which have announced they will launch pilots editions on Kindle DX this summer.

Although others, most notably the Japanese and the Dutch, have trials underway that publish tabloid-size digital editions for other handheld e-reader devices, Amazon with its mighty marketing clout represents the first mainstream commercial stab at the market.

Increased graphics resolution and the larger size of the tablet-like, the $489 Kindle DX is also a departure from previous e-readers on the market, although Japan’s Fujitsu has a similar sized colour reader on the market for twice the price.

“Cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks – anything highly formatted -shine on the Kindle DX,” claims Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO underlining the new Kindle’s purported better handling of detail and graphics.

Amazon already has a hit on its hands with the Kindle 2. The same heft as a paperback, weighing about eight ounces, such e-ink readers are basically handheld screens on which you can read words page by page reasonably comfortably.

Amazon says it has already sold more than 500,000 of its $359 Kindle e-readers, which buyers use mostly as a portable library downloading print media via a wireless connection.

The new Kindle DX, like other popular e-readers such as the Sony reader, employs “e-ink” technology that far enhances the reading of digitized print.

The technology used in most e-readers are adaptations of this form of “ePaper” and “e-ink” that create bubbles of e-ink by pushing ink-like particles around under its light-grey plastic skin.

As a leader in the field of e-paper development Japanese researchers at Fujitsu Frontech have attempted to sidestep the mono-chromatic drawbacks by creating colour e-ink and went to market last month with a full colour e-reader.

Dubbed Flepia, the three-quarters of a pound device displays 260,000 colours – good enough to display magazine-like graphics, is slightly smaller than a sheet of A4 and just over a centimetre thick.

“Flepia has a too slow refresh rate (1.8 seconds), users have to use a stylus to turn pages and its user interface is no-frill, no-fun and non-intuitive. In my opinion this does not look like a serious consumer device,” he says.

“An easier-to-use device from outside of the country such as Kindle (or the iPhone), will probably eliminate this somewhat alien product.”

Whatever the outcome of both Fujitsu’s and Amazon’s new formats the rivals have entered an increasingly crowded marketplace for the e- reader.

Sony and a Dutch firm iRex have both experimented with newspaper subscriptions on their paperback sized e-readers.

With smartphones and net books falling in price, such all in one devices – suitable for anything from book reading to watching TV – might prove a more convenient platform for publishing and even present better business models for publishers as Japan has found.

“Expect a slow beginning and a period of rapid evolution before e-reader’s become ubiquitous, ” says Japanese media consultant David Kilburn.

“They will also need to compete successfully with what people can already do using their mobile phones.”