E-Ink/E-Readers

As I’m sure a lot of you have seen, there is quite a lot of hype in the world today about e-readers. Not the sort of hype surrounding some things where everybody wants one, but the sort of hype that inspires intrigue and investigation. I’ll admit, I have missed out on this investigation for the most part other than actually paying attention when they are talked about on podcasts and such, but yesterday I finally got to play with one of these things in person. I must say I was quite impressed. The whole e-ink thing is amazing.For those that don’t know about it, e-ink is a technology that was developed for just this purpose (at MIT I believe). Anyone who has tried to read a decent sized story on a computer screen knows how straining it can be. The purpose behind e-ink was to develop a screen with the benefits of both a real page and electronic screens. Literally, the screen applies a charge on a pixel by pixel basis and either raises or lowers a tiny droplet of some sort of “ink.” This makes for a screen that looks nothing like a screen. It’s an amazing concept, and just to make it even more amazing, the thing only uses battery power when it is changing pages, no energy is used at all for the image to stay up.

As I said, I finally got to see the Sony E-Reader yesterday. The screen shocked me! Of course I had heard the concept and thought it was cool, but I just thought it wouldn’t be quite as good as it sounded and might suffer from that common greenish tint found on old-style lcd’s. It doesn’t. The thing looked like a piece of paper and I imagine it would be no less pleasurable to read than a piece of paper (I didn’t spend a long time reading on it, just long enough to play with it). It was pretty amazing to be honest. The only real downside to it is that there is a “page-flash” when changing the page, but I imagine that would be fairly easy to get used to, and it’s more of just a problem with the technology than that model, the Kindle does it too. The other, more fixable one is the fact that there is no real model for “borrowing” books from a “library” with this, which is how I really do most of my reading, and the books that you can buy really cost about as much as an actual book. Even so, it was quite an impressive device. I would buy one if it weren’t for the fairly ridiculous price tag.