Nate Hoffelder

Ookbee, a 2-year-old startup, has recently announced that they just hit a major milestone. As of October 2012, this southeast Asian ebookseller was counting over 2,500,000 registered users.

CEO and founder Natavudh Pungcharoenpong spoke to Tech in Asia in Tokyo last Friday where Ookbee won top prize for the startup pitch section. According to Natavudh, "Our first million took 13 months, the second million took six months. We will hit three million in about three to fours months."

This startup is as well-known in Thailand as it is unknown outside of the region. They reportedly control over 85% of the ebook market in Thailand, and sell ebooks via Android and iOS apps. Ookbee also offers local publishers a suite of authoring tools to convert their content into interactive digital magazines which can then be sold via Ookbee.

Ookbee recently secured $2 million in funding from InTouch, a Thailand based venture capitalist firm InTOuch acquired a 25% stake in Ookbee, putting it’s current market value at around $8,000,000. I would say that puts it in an excellent position to be snapped up by Rakuten, but Ookbee’s management aren’t talking about that. Instead they’ve discussed plans to expand into neighboring Vietnam as well Malaysia.

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image by puuikibeach

There are a number of also-ran companies in the ereader industry, but one in particular deserves the label as an "also-walked", and that is Sony.

This ebook competitor has just launched a new ebookstore today.  It’s not exactly clear why they did it or how much money they plan to lose, but local sources are reporting that the store is now live.

German owners of Sony Reader T1, T2, or older models can now buy ebooks from Sony rather than the plethora of ebookstores competing in the German ebook market (Thalia, txtr, to name a couple).

Rude comments aside, there might actually be a reason to buy from Sony. The press release mentions that not all of the Epub ebooks sold by Sony come with the onerous Adobe DE DRM. Some of the ebooks, numbering in the "thousands", use digital watermarks instead.

Apparently several German publishers have decided to go with this low-hassle security, including Bastei Luebbe Verlag, which publishes novels by Ken Follett, Andreas Eschbach, and Dan Brown (it is not clear that any of these authors' novels are DRM free).

Digital watermarks work by burying traceable information inside an ebook, info which can be used to identify the original purchaser. Because this is often times little more than a few extra lines of text hidden in the file, it is a minimal nuisance for the legitimate purchaser while still being as equally effective at preventing piracy as the more painful forms of DRM.

The leading company working to provide digital watermarks for ebooks is Booxtream. They are best well-known for providing this service to Pottermore, the official ebookstore for Harry Potter.

According to Huub van der Pol, the founder of Booxtream’s parent company iContact, the official release of the Harry Potter ebooks saw a decrease in piracy of the series. Once the titles were available legally, and were easy to use, pirates saw little reason to post copies of the ebooks online.

You cannot make that claim about any other ebook, whether digital or paper, except for the ones which are DRM-free.

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As any self-published author can tell you, it’s hard to get the attention of readers when you’re just one author among many. That is why I am glad that booksellers like Target keep an eye out for new talent and take time to make sure their  customers notice the new authors. Towit, Leo Tolstoy.

This author was born in 1828 in the Russian Empire. He was relatively unknown until Target selected him as an emerging author, and had written only a few classic novels and short stories which had only been translated into dozens of languages. Before Target selected him as an emerging author, he had influenced hardly anyone besides Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and other peaceful activists.

I’m glad Target brought him to my attention, otherwise I wouldn’t know that he was one of the great novelists of the 19th century.

P.S. There’s another movie adaptation of Anna Karenina coming out in a few months. Don’t anybody tell me how it ends; I want to be surprised.

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As you could probably guess from E-ink’s quarterly statements, this has not been a banner year for ereaders. The screen tech company has reported a marked drop in income, indicating that fewer ereaders were being made this year than last.

And if iSuppli’s projections prove true, next year’s ereader market is going to look even worse.

This market research firm has released a new set of projections today that predict that there will be a 27% decline next year. They’re projecting that only about 15 million ereaders will be shipped this calendar year, down by over a third from last year’s peak of 23.2 million units. Next year’s shipments are projected to total around 11 million units.

It seems that no one wants to buy ereaders anymore, and given the rise of decent sub-$100 Android tablets I am not surprised. And iSuppli isn’t surprised either. They’re projecting tablet sales to hit 120 million units this year, with shipments continuing to rise until at least 2016, when they project 340 million tablets will be shipped.

Of course, little of this comes as a surprise. I predicted way back in January that apps (running on tablets) would eclipse ereaders (in some ways they already had), but I dismissed the possibility that ereader shipments would drop. TBH I just thought that the total number of sales would be eclipsed by tablet sales, not that the latter would rise at the expense of the former.

If you’re looking for proof about how the ebook market has changed in the 5 years since the Kindle Store launched, today’s news concerning Baen Books will give you a clue.

Hints have been circulating for some time now that Baen is about to distribute ebooks outside of their ebookstore (the shrinking Baen Free Library was one clue), and recent changes to one free ebook site were the cluebat I needed to confirm my suspicions.

Baen is finally joining the modern ebook era. Some time in the next few days months I expect that you’ll be able to find their ebooks in the major ebookstores.

Baen Books was one of the pioneers in adopting ebooks. Ever since 1999 they have been selling DRM-free ebooks, in multiple formats, in their own ebookstore. They had their own store so they could go DRM-free, and (like I have written before) it was the only way to provide a decent user experience. This was before the Kindle Store launched, of course.

One of Baen’s other endeavours was to bundle CDs into the first edition hardbacks. These CDs were chock full of free Baen ebooks from a variety of authors and included a wide variety of formats.

Those free CDs bring me to today’s news. Since Baen was using them to promote paper book sales, they were fine with the CDs being passed around online as ZIP files, ISO images, or what have you. They even winked at one site, Fifth Imperium, hosting copies of the CDs which could be browsed and downloaded.

But not anymore. Joe Buckley, the webmaster at Fifth Imperium, announced last night that he would not be hosting the CDs anymore due to a request from Baen. For the near future he will be hosting the CD images (ISO files and ZIP files), but the CDs themselves will not be available to browse from your computer. Here’s how he put it:

Baen is now on the verge of launching a new ebook distribution deal with an 'unnamed third-party'.

This third-party regularly crawls the web looking for ebooks it markets and, if found, matches their price to the new-found lower price.

Finding it free tends to knock the wind out of the ebook’s sales (so to speak).

Obviously the name which everyone is careful not to mention  is Amazon, and it is equally obvious that Baen is finally going to venture beyond their own fiefdom.

That’s great. They’re going where the customers are.

image by RachelH

There’s only so many times that the Canadian government, which is notoriously hostile to foreign investment,  government can "lose" your paperwork and make you resubmit it, and something tells me that Canada has hit that point with Amazon.

Early this morning David Gaughran tipped me to the news that Amazon was now mentioning a Canadian Kindle Store in their correspondence with KDP authors. After doing some digging of my own, I can see that he is correct.

Update: The Kindle Store is live on Amazon.ca.

Have you ever spent some time looking at the report pages at KDP? There’s a lot of different ways to generate sales reports: date, title, and most importantly, by market. Amazon will let you generate a sales report for each of their local Kindle Stores (amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.br, etc).

And as of today, Amazon will let me generate a sales report for Amazon.ca. Given that Amazon does not yet sell Kindles or Kindle ebooks on their Canadian website, this is a rather curious detail.

Update: Amazon has not yet updated the entire Amazon.ca website, but I can now see Kindle ebooks on the site. There’s no mention of the Kindle hardware, though, just the ebook and the apps. I also have not yet gotten a press release announcement from Amazon.

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Amazon has been selling Kindles and Kindle ebooks to Canadians since the Kindle Store went international in 2009, but in spite of the fact that Canada is America’s closest neighbor, Amazon has not opened a local Kindle Store there. Even though Amazon has launched local Kindle Stores in the UK, France, Germany, and even Brazil, there’s never been any sign that Amazon was about to launch a Kindle Store in Canada.

Oh, I’m sure that it was in the works, but I would also put money on the launch being delayed due to the Canadian govt dragging their feet. In fact, I would bet that Amazon started working to launch the Canadian Kindle Store at the same time that they started on the UK Kindle Store.  It just took a while to get government approval.

It’s my guess that the Canadian Kindle Store will launch in the next month. I am guessing a month because the last time Amazon leaked details about a Kindle Store launch was with Brazil, and in that case it was about 26 days between the earliest leak and the launch.

Actually, I am expecting the launch to happen some time in the next week. The Christmas season is upon us, and I’m sure Amazon doesn’t want to pass up any chances to sell Kindles.

Amazon got a lot of attention yesterday for Kindle FreeTime, the new paid service which lets kids access a curated selection of content, but that’s not all they did.

They’ve just rolled out a new update for the 7″ Kindle Fire HD, and it adds a couple useful features:

• Camera app. You can now use the front-facing web camera to take pictures of yourself with an included camera app in the Photos library.
• Swype. Swype is a keyboard feature that provides a fast way to enter text. It lets you create a word by drawing through letters. Swype also provides additional keyboard functions like copy and paste and the ability to change the keyboard language.
• Kindle FreeTime Unlimited. Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is a subscription service you can choose to sign up for within Kindle FreeTime. Parents can subscribe children’s profiles to a wide variety of videos, apps, and games appriate for ages 3-8. For more information, see www.amazon.com/freetimeunlimited.

Swype is a pretty useful feature. Rather than typing in the individual characters, Swype lets you drag your finger across the onscreen keyboard to spell out a word. Each time you pause your finger, a new character is added, and when you pick up your finger the word will shop up on screen.

Speaking of the camera app, I’ve been told that the KFHD 8.9 already had one. Like the new app for the KFHD you could access it from the photo album. Apparently the larger KFHD has had this feature ever since it shipped, which makes sense given that it has a rear facing camera.

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As an inveterate gadget-lover I am used to buying stuff from overseas sellers and paying to have it shipped. This is often the only way to get rare devices like the Kyobo Mirasol eReader, so I really don’t mind the often weeks long shipping delay. China in particular can take up to 3 weeks, so naturally I have had to learn a little patience.

But then there are the services which seem to just sit there with a thumb up their ass, and that is when my patience wears thin. To wit, DHL.

I’m now waiting on a package which was shipped via DHL. It’s an ereader which I bought from Europe, and since I don’t want to embarrass the seller I won’t say who sold it to me.

But I will say this. I’ve been tracking the package, and according to DHL it has spent the past week just sitting in some distribution center somewhere in the US. Why? I don’t know. It’s just sitting there, gathering dust.

On a related note, DHL’s tracking service sucks. I cannot track the shipment I am getting on DHL’s international website, DHL’s US website, or on any site other than DHL.de. Having multiple websites and systems which do not communicate is a design decision on par with DHL’s inability to process a shipment.

What’s more, this is not the first time that DHL ignored a package for a week. Earlier this year I bought a different ereader from that same seller, and with that shipment DHL decided to let the package sit in Germany for a week. There was no explanation for that, either.

Some might choose to defend DHL and claim that a week’s delay (even unexplained) is not bad. That would be true if not for the fact that DHL is slower than the post office. A package shipped USPS Priority Mail will make it to Germany in 9 days. I know this because I just shipped an ereader to Germany a few weeks back.

And speaking of tracking, I can use the USPS website to track shipments sent to me from Korea, China, and Europe (and probably elsewhere).  So not only is the USPS faster, it also has a better website.

Given that DHL costs more than the post office and takes longer to deliver, I have to wonder why people still use it.

Can someone explain that, please?

Here’s a bone-headed maneuver for you.

Remember how Waterstones was going to sell the Kindle and take a sales commission on the hardware and any ebooks bought from that device? Apparently they decided that the subtle but positive relationship of simply making money off the Kindle wasn’t good enough; now they’ve turned the Kindles they sell into billboards.

The Kindles sold by Waterstones got a firmware update in early November. This update wasn’t rolled out to all the Kindles, and for good reason. According to a couple different users (story has also been confirmed by Waterstones) the only change in the update was a new screensaver.

I have not yet seen it myself, but the Kindle owners are reporting that all the screensavers have been replaced by a Waterstones logo. Furthermore, there’s no way to disable or replace that screensaver, so every time these Kindle owners pick up their device they will be reminded where they purchased it.

Apparently Waterstones thinks their customers are stupid.

You would have to think your customers are stupid if you assume they won’t do the math, realize they paid full price, and be pissed about the advertising. And it is advertising. This is just as much an advert as the ones found on the Kindles wSO, only Waterstones' customers didn’t get a discount on the price.

You would have to think your customers are stupid if you think they won’t return the Kindle and then go buy one (without the advertising) direct from Amazon.

Rude comments aside, that is exactly why this was a poor decision. Waterstones takes a commission on ebook sales, so they should be doing everything they can to draw in customers and not be giving them reasons to abandon the chain.

P.S. For those who are interested, here is the email which Waterstones sent out to one customer:

Thank you for your email regarding your Kindle Paperwhite from Waterstones.

I am sorry you are disappointed by the addition of a Waterstones screensaver after the recent software update to Kindle. It is our view that this screensaver does not constitute advertising and differs substantially to the advertising-supported Kindles available to the US market. The Waterstones screensaver is a non-dynamic, static image that will change infrequently and not advertise any specific product, offer or website.

It is not possible to remove the Waterstones screensaver to replace it with the former Amazon screensaver. We apologise that this change was made without consultation, and hope it does not detract from or alter your reading experience. However, if you feel it does, please let us know and we will arrange for the return of the device and a full refund.

I am sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Yours sincerely,

**********
Customer Service Team
Waterstones.com

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Remember 3 months back when HarperCollins and S&S abruptly renegotiated their ebook contracts to allow ebookstores to set their own prices?

It looks like Hachette has followed suit. I’ve just noticed that a number of Hachette titles in the Kindle no longer say that the prices were set by the publisher. Instead they say that the ebooks are sold by Hachette Book Group (example, example).

What’s more, Amazon is discounting the ebooks by $1 to $4 from the list price, and both Barnes & Noble and Apple are making similar discounts. Kobo does not seem to have joined the party just yet.

It’s taken quite a bit longer than I anticipated, but it seems Hachette has finally complied with the settlement agreement. Wow. It only took them 3 months. Judge Cote approved the anti-trust settlement in early September, and the other 2 US publishers who agreed to the settlement HarperCollins negotiated new contracts in under a week.

Hachette took quite a bit longer to adjust to the inevitable, but they are still moving faster than Simon and Schuster,  the third publisher to agree to the settlement. eBooks published by S&S still show that they are covered under the agency contract, even though that contract was supposed to have been canceled in 7 days.

And Hachette is also moving faster than the other 2 publishers and Apple which are still planning to fight the antitrust prosecution filed against them in federal court earlier this year. That case won’t go to trial until June 2013, and that means we’re going to be looking at a bifurcated ebook market for at least the next 12 to 18 months, and that could even stretch out for several years before all the appeals are filed and resolved.

What fun times we live in, no?

When the iPad launched just under 3 years ago many hailed it as the future of journalism, the future of publishing, and the savoir of mankind. It was going to rescue publishers by giving them a new way to sell content to consumers.

Thank goodness that nonsense can now be put to bed.

The icon of the iPad publishing bubble, The Daily, is winding down operations. Newscorp put out a press release this morning with the news. They announced the closure as part of a general reorganization, and buried it as a footnote near the end:

News Corporation also announced that effective immediately, Jesse Angelo, the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Daily and long-time Executive Editor of The New York Post, will assume the role of Publisher of The New York Post. As part of a digital restructuring initiative, the company will cease standalone publication of The Daily iPad app on December 15, 2012, though the brand will live on in other channels. Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.

The Daily launched in early 2011 amidst a lot of fanfare, hype, and a massive advertising campaign. It expanded beyond the iPad in early 2012 with new Android apps, but clearly it was not growing fast enough nor was it currently covering its costs. It was reportedly losing 30 million dollars a year.

So it seems that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has finally learned that you cannot pin your hopes on selling content via a single channel. Apparently all those other potential customers who don’t have iPads really do matter. And even though The Daily did expand to Android in early 2012, changing the name of the single distribution channel from iPad to "tablet" doesn’t change the fact that it was a single narrow channel.

The funny thing is, this is a lesson which should have been learned the last time News Corp tried it.

Back in the 1995, News Corp decided to get into the online news business in a big way. They launched iGuide, a news magazine which was going to only publish content on the then-nascent WWW.

That sounds ambitious, or at least it would if not for the fact that there were only about 16 million people online in 1995 – worldwide.  (Even I wasn’t online in 1995; that’s how small the audience was).

As for The Daily, it should have been pretty obvious at the time it launched that the numbers didn’t really add up. At that point there were only about 15 million iPads in use (according to Apple).

Yes, The Daily had a smaller potential audience than iGuide, and for it to succeed The Daily would have needed to sign up somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of all the iPads owned when it launched.

Update: This post inspired a discussion on Twitter in which i had to explain why i was so down on The Daily. So let me amend this post.

This publication was launched as a result of the iPad app hype. There was a period in 2010 when selling content via iPad apps was supposed to save publishing. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

The Daily launched several months after it was clear that an iPad-only approach would not work, at a time when many publishers were turning instead to bundling digital content with print subscriptions. It was almost certainly doomed from the start.

EDIT: This post combines several articles about Wistron, a company that (for a while) almost made ereaders.

The Readius was one of those impossibly cool gadgets which, in spite of enthusiastic support from tech bloggers such as myself, was never quite able to make the leap from concept to production model. And now thanks to its parent company deciding to turn off the lights at the device developer Polymer Vision, it never will.

The Readius was one of those impossibly cool gadgets which, in spite of enthusiastic support from tech bloggers such as myself, was never quite able to make the leap from concept to production model. And now thanks to its parent company deciding to turn off the lights at the device developer Polymer Vision, it never will.+Plastic Electronics reported last week that Wistron, the Taiwanese manufacturer which bought a bankrupt Polymer Vision in 2009, is shutting it down. This story has been confirmed by the former CTO of Polymer Vision, Edzer Huitema, though he was not able to provide further details.

Polymer Vision was originally launched by Phillips Electronics in 2004, and in 2007 it was spun off from the Philips Technology Incubator. PV received a €21 million capital injection from Luxembourg based Technology Capital Group, and set out to make a smartphone with a 5″ foldable E-ink screen.

This was the pre-Kindle, pre-iPhone era, so you can imagine how novel the idea was. Few smartphones had a screen larger than 3″or so,  so a small device which unfolded to reveal a large screen had an instant appeal to many gadget nuts.

Anyone with a smartphone knows that there is a compromise between a device which is small enough to fit in a pocket while still being large enough to have a decent screen size.

At least, there used to be a compromise. Now that everyone seems comfortable with carrying around phablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note with its 5.5″ screen, there is little reason to develop a foldable E-ink screen.

And what with all the 6″ ereaders which now use a high-resolution flexible E-ink screen on cheap and pocketable devices, PV’s research is both antiquated likely too expensive to manufacture.

Polymer Vision had planned to release the Readius in 2008, and had even gotten to the point of signing up Telecom Italia as a customer and reportedly making an initial production run of 100,000 units. Tanother production run was planned for 2009, but it was canceled when PV was unable to raise another round of financing.

It seems that the 2009 financing failed due to one of the investor’s involvement money laundering or Ponzi scheme. In any case Wistron bought PV out of receivership for €13 million.

Wistron is a major Chinese OEMs (along with quanta and Foxconn), and while their brands aren’t on many products you have likely used a device they made for another company, Kobo, for example, paid Wistron to make the Kobo Touch and Kobo Vox (and probably all their other gadgets).

They had been continuing to fund research for the past 3 years and so far as I know they did intend to release a new Readius-like device.  But the last I heard about that was in May of 2011, when PV teased us with a product render showing the device they wanted to build.

One of my contacts used to have fairly good ties to PV, and I’m told they have not shown off any physical  prototypes, though they have made at least a couple prototypes for each of the concept images they have released.

The Readius eReader Lives!

A novel ereader, long thought dead, has risen from the grave.

Polymer Vision, a Philips spin-off, unveiled the Readius back in 2008 (at right). This was a truly unique  device with a 5″ folding E-ink screen. Unfortunately the company lost their funding in 2009 when one of the main investors got caught up in a Ponzi scheme.

The Readius showed up in a couple places in 2008, including MWC 2008, before the company died.

Polymer Vision was bought out of bankruptcy by Wistron, and they continued to develop the screen. Of course, by the time Wistron bought PV the original design was out of date. So the PV team started working on a new design with a better screen.

I’ve been getting "we’re not dead yet" updates for 18 months now, and I can finally show you the new design.

Below is the artist rendition of the new Polymer Vision Readius. There’s no word yet on when it will be released, but at least we know it’s still under development. Notice that it folds up into a cell phone and then expands into 2 different screen sizes.

Wistron to make e-readers for Hong Kong publisher

Digitimes is reporting:

Wistron is cooperating with a Hong Kong-based publisher to tap China’s e-book market, and plans to launch a 6-inch e-book reader in June 2010, according to industry sources.

The e-book reader will use grey-scale EPD from SiPix – a subsidiary of AU Optronics (AUO) – and run on Android, the sources noted, adding that the product will be sold at 2,980 yuan (US$436.27).

Wistron will provide both hardware and software solutions, while the publisher will provide content, the sources said.

Why is everyone watching Wistron? It’s because they bought Polymer Vision out of bankruptcy, and thus own the flexible screen tech that the Polymer Vision Readius was based on. We’re all hoping that they will release an ereader based on it.

The XO-3 tablet debuted at CES 2012 as the hottest gadget news story. Even though there was no guarantee that it would ever actually be produced, it was the device everyone wanted to see. And now it’s dead.

A couple days ago OLPC officially confirmed the story which had been circulating in some OLPC circles for the last few months. The tablet is not  going to be made. Instead OLPC will turn their attention to working on the next-gen XO-4 laptop.

That device is based on the original XO-1 laptop, and unlike the XO-3 tablet largely uses the same components. It was announced a few months ago, and the early prototypes are circulating through some parts of the OLPC community (I missed seeing one at the Books in Browsers conference). OLPC is working on improving the touchscreen component, which is still rather buggy.

Plans for a tablet were originally announced in 2009, and in 2010 Marvell signed on as a hardware partner. While that partnership may not have led to the wundertablet everyone wanted, it did also result in a couple major hardware updates to the XO-1 laptop which improved battery life and reduced manufacturing cost.

The XO-3 was rumored to have cost $75, or at least that is what OLPC reported. Now that it is dead, I would bet that the actual cost of a production unit was higher than initially hoped.

I must say that today’s news comes as no surprise. I had heard that this tablet was in trouble a couple weeks ago, and the only reason Network World beat me to the story is that I didn’t move fast enough. (Oops.)

Do you know why it died? According to what I was told, no one wanted to buy it. That kinda limits the possibility that it will be manufactured. What’s more, it sounded like no charitable foundation wanted to fund it, either. That kinda limits the possibility that even a minimal demo order could be made.

OLPC would have loved to have gotten this tablet into the hands of students, but without a major injection of capital there was no chance that would happen.

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What with the last month’s launch of iBookstore in Brazil, and last week’s launch of the Livraria Cultura branch of the Kobo eBookstore, Amazon must be feeling the pressure to get the Brazilian Kindle Store up and running soonest.

That could explain a recent goof made behind the scenes at KDP, Amazon’s self-pub program. According to David Gaughran, the confirmation emails which Amazon sends out to newly registered authors and publishers now includes a mention of  amazon.com.br, Amazon’s still unopened Brazilian website.

Amazon was encouraging the new customers to set up author pages (this can hep boost sales), and just to be extra helpful they included links to all 5 websites where you can currently find a Kindle Store. I have not seen the email myself, but David did share a screenshot:

I don’t know about you, but I find it rather curious that there’s no mention of the Kindle Stores in Italy, Spain, or Japan. While the latter could have been left out because of language issues, the other 3 sites should be listed. And even the one for Japan should be listed; for all we know the person reading the email is fluent in Japanese.

Then again, this kind of mistake (including a nonfunctional site while leaving out existing sites) strikes me as quite plausible. For all we know a memo could be circulating behind the scenes at KDP with the news that the new Kindle Store was launching in the next few days. Someone could have gotten ahead of themselves and added the link for the new site before they were supposed to.

Amazon had been rumored to be launching the Brazilian Kindle Store this month, and by my clock they have not quite 20 hours left to make that rumor come true. But today is a Friday, so it seems more likely that the launch will be announced Monday morning.

Do you still have your heart set on that E-ink smartphone from Onyx, or perhaps the dual sided smartphone prototype?

Neither of those gadgets are going to hit the market any time soon, and they might not get made at all, so if you can’t stand the wait then you should check out this new case from PopSlate.

A reader tipped me to a crowdfunding project which launched today on IndieGogo. PopSlate is working to raise $150,000 to finish the design of this case and get it into production.

The case in question is going to be designed for the iPhone 5, and since it uses the Lightning connector it obviously won’t be backwards compatible. But anyone with an iPhone 5 will be able to enjoy having a 4″ E-ink screen as a secondary display.

Now, a screen without buttons is pretty useless, so you might expect the E-ink screen to have some kind of touchscreen. PopSlate came up with a better idea. Instead of a touchscreen, their case uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to detect your finger tapping on the E-ink screen.

As you can see in the video,  the prototype does a pretty good job of figuring out what the users are trying to do. I can only hope the finished product works as well. I don’t have an iPhone 5, but I am almost tempted to get one just to have this case.