Hot on the heels of the Kindle Color rumor comes this surprise bit of news from Russia. Plastic Logic, the screen tech company I’d written off in 2010, has a color screen in the works. I have full details as well as a video of the new screen.
It was unveiled this weekend at a press event in Russia. Peter Fischer, Plastic Logic’s VP for Process Engineering, is shown in the photo above with the new screen. It’s described as being slightly smaller than an A4 sheet of paper, making it likely the same size as screen PlasticLogic currently has in production (8.5×11).
The color is quite cool, but the flexible detail isn’t quite so amazing as you think. Plastic Logic’s screen tech is based plastic transistors, so all of their screens are flexible – including the screen currently used in the PlasticLogic 100, the academic ereader which is currently being tested in Russian schools. In fact, I recall that PlasticLogic thought their screen was too flexible when they launched their first device at CES 2010.
There’s no word yet on when the new screen might hit the market, but I do know that it can display 4 thousand colors (4,096 to be exact) with a resolution of 75ppi. While that might seem awfully low, there’s a reason for it. PlasticLogic added color to their existing screen in much the same way that E-ink did.
The color is provided by a filter lying on top of the grayscale screen. The screen underneath the filter has a resolution of 150 ppi, and that gets cut in half because you need 3 pixels to do red, green, and blue. There’s also a 4th pixel which is left alone (it shows the white/black of the underlying screen. The RGBW are arranged in a 2 by 2 grid in the layer on top of the PlasticLogic screen.
Wanna know why I find this screen so exciting? It’s not just that it exists; but that’s a start. No, I’m excited because I have some understanding of the work involved. This is a flexible screen, and so is the filter lying on top. PlasticLogic had to design the filter so it flexes at the same rate as the screen so it wouldn’t get bent out of shape. That is an interesting trick, IMO.
If you’re not covering their new tablet then OLPC (the worldwide initiative to provide basic laptop to students in third world countries) doesn’t get the press it used to. That could be why the new pilot that Australia seems to have slid under the radar.
The Australian government has committed $11.7 million AUD out of the new budget to buy 50,000 XO laptops. They’re planning the expansion of One Education, Australia’s OLPC program, throughout the country. The XO laptops will by used as part of a 12 month pilot with the goal of supporting :
learning opportunities of indigenous children, particularly those in remote Australia, by providing primary school aged children with a connected XO laptop as part of a sustainable training and support program. Participating schools will also receive information and communications technology (ICT) coordinator professional development, local repair kits, and access to helpdesk and online support.
The XO-1 laptop first debuted in late 2007, after having missed the price goal and planned release date. It has since gone through several incarnations, including the XO-1.5, a hardware refresh with the same basic design as the original, the XO-1.5HS, which replaced the membrane style keyboard with a more common keyboard which you might see on any laptop, and the XO-1.75, which is a completely new design based on a lower power Marvell CPU. There’s also an XO-3 tablet in the works and if we’re lucky it might ship sometime in 2013.
This isn’t a very large pilot when compared to programs like the one in Peru, which has 850 thousand XO laptops in use. But currently there are around 8 thousand XO laptops in use in Australia right now in various small scale projects so this new pilot is a significant increase.
But when you compare it to the population of Australia, it’s clearly still a pilot. Australia has around 2 million students in primary school out of a population of around 22 million. Even if you knock out the 30% of students in private schools, the pilot mentioned above is just a drop in the bucket.
And it’s also not the only laptop project in Australia. The Australian government has also committed to providing all students in grades 9 through 12 with a computer by the end of 2012. Now _that_ is a major project, given that there are around 1 million students who should qualify (according to the latest publicly available data). Both of these project survived recent cuts to the education budget which saw drops in funding for several activities, including digital education.
I just learned this morning that an important lawsuit was decided Friday afternoon. It has a rather detailed and complicated back story, more so than I can cover on this blog. But this is a case that needs to be covered.
Back in 2008 a coalition of publishers sued the Georgia State University for copyright infringement. To be more exact, the librarians at GSU had been copying and handing out to students material that was published by these publishers. The complaint covered 99 different incidents where the GSU librarians copied and shared content that had at one point been purchased by GSU (or another library). Note that the librarians weren’t pirates; they were operating under the fair use exception to US copyright laws, namely the one covering academic uses.
I had been following this case ever since it first came across my radar last spring, but it only just now came to fruition.
Judge Orinda Evans’s decision consists of a 350 page brief which you can find here (PDF). It’s far too long for even me to have read already, but the short answer is that Judge Evans found that the vast majority of the 99 examples listed in the original complaint were not in fact copyright infringement. The librarians were correct in believing that their activities were allowed by the fair use exception.
This decision affects far more than just what a few librarians were doing. The fair use exceptions debated in the lawsuit owe their existence more to court decisions and legal theory than they do to the laws which have been passed by Congress. Had this lawsuit gone the way the publishers wanted, it would likely have affected the very concept of fair use. At the least, institutions everywhere would have been forced to reevaluate their activities. This lawsuit was so far ranging that I think it would not have been out of the question for libraries to go so far as to remove photocopiers from public access (out of fear of liability).
Now, I’ve been following the case but I have not posted on it. This case was complex enough that I think it requires a legal scholar to fully explain it, so I will direct you to experts like the blog Scholarly Communications @ Duke.
But this might be new to some, so here is a list of past coverage that I found useful. Note that it is in chronological order.
Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter (New York Times) – 16 April 2008
Amazon has several E-ink ereaders and they have the Kindle Fire on the market, but according to some gossip-mongers that just isn’t enough for the retailer. According to the latest rumor they’re planning to release a color Kindle.
Naturally, I think this rumor is a load of hooey.
Digitimes is reporting this morning that Amazon’s next ereader will have a color screen.It’s due out in the latter half of this year, and according to their usual unnamed sources it won’t be using the Neonode IR touchscreen found on so many ereaders now; instead it will be using a multi-touch capacitive touch panel.
According to the rumor, Amazon’s manufacturing partner is supposed to start getting parts this month, including the Triton color E-ink screen that I dislike to much. This rumor doesn’t mention the partner, though.
Sorry, but I just don’t believe it. The part about the color E-ink screen is the hardest to swallow. You might recall the last time that Digitimes dug up this rumor, when my source at E-ink said that they didn’t have a 6″ color E-ink screen in production. And it seems incredibly unlikely that Amazon might use the 9.7″ screen; I doubt they’d sell enough for it to be economical. It’s also ugly, but then again Amazon might be using an improved version of the screen.
But if you ignore the details about the color E-ink screen then the rest of the rumor is slightly more plausible. Amazon could well be working on a color Kindle using some other screen tech (LCD, Mirasol, Liquavista).
But I don’t see any of those as being a real possibility. Amazon already has an LCD based Kindle; it’s the Kindle Fire. A second smaller device would likely run Android and be more of tablet than an ereader.
And as for the other 2 screen techs, one is still extremely expensive and the other isn’t even in production yet. And while there are other screen techs that Amazon might use, I’m not sure that any of them are economical enough that they could be used in a consumer product.
Still, I’m hoping this rumor comes true. It would be interesting to see what Amazon pulls off.
Summer is rapidly approaching (in the northern hemisphere, at least) so today I thought it would be useful to post this story as a public service announcement.
I’m sure lots of people will be taking their ereader on trips this summer and that includes the beach. But you might want to rethink that; it seems that plastic shells used on ereader and other gadgets don’t exactly get along with some types of sunscreen. One Atlanta native had to learn that the hard way.
She reports that she had applied spray-on sunscreen while on the beach. While she didn’t get any spray on the Nook itself, she did hold it when she was reading. As you can see from the photo above,the sunscreen on her fingers ate away at the shell.
One the one hand, this is an old story. Plastic often reacts poorly to chemicals, as anyone who was a teenage boy could tell you in some detail. And having gadgets destroyed by the chemicals on your hand is again not new.
On the other hand, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this kind of story about an ereader. The Kindle has been out for some 4 years now so I’m slightly surprised that this kind of damage hasn’t made its way around the tech blogs.
I suppose it’s too soon to pen another post on digital textbooks in schools after the one I wrote last night, but a fascinating story came across my browser window today.
In the history of education, technology has often been hyped as the solution to all out problems. Right now it’s digital textbooks, but this phenomenon has occurred in the past with whatever technology was new at the time, including TV, computers, the iPad, and what have you.
Today I learned that the technological panacea idea goes even further back than I thought. It was 99 years ago, when tech behind movies were just beginning to be worked out, that Thomas Edison, the man credited with the invention of moving pictures, predicted that movies would replace textbooks by 1923. The following excerpt is from an interview that the inventor gave in 1913 (source):
“What is your estimation of the future educational value of pictures?” I asked.
“Books,” declared the inventor with decision, “will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.
“We have been working for some time on the school pictures. We have been studying and reproducing the life of the fly, mosquito, silk weaving moth, brown moth, gypsy moth, butterflies, scale and various other insects, as well as chemical chrystallization. It proves conclusively the worth of motion pictures in chemistry, physics and other branches of study, making the scientific truths, difficult to understand from text books, plain and clear to children.
We can see in retrospect that he went a little wild in his predictions, but he was also right, to a limited degree. We really should keep both the wild prediction and the core of truth in mind when the topic of digital textbooks is raised.
Right now there’s far more hype to the value of digital textbooks than substance, and there are strong signs that students prefer paper. As I look at the tech available now, it seems that we are in the exact same place that Edison and cinema were in in 1913.
I’m not saying that digital textbooks are useless; we just don’t know yet if they will live up to the hype.
Consider for a moment the current use of education films; I think this might give an idea of how digital textbooks will turn out. While virtually all schools use films to teach some topics, they are at best ancillary to the primary instruction method of the teacher at the front of the classroom.
That could be the future of digital textbooks, but at this point it is too early to tell.
Lots of libraries have been buying ereaders and lending them to patrons, with as many as 28%reporting that they did so in Fall 2010 (the latest data). But it looks like all those libraries may have been wasting their money.
Four visually impaired Philly residents filed suit this week against the Free Library of Philadelphia. They allege that the Free Library’s new Nook lending program, which is about to expand to cover 5 library branches, violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Nook is not accessible to the blind (it has no audio support at all).
The thing is, they’re probably correct.
FYI: When you read the word accessible, I’m sure you’re thinking of text to speech. But the technical meaning of the word accessible as used here extends beyond the support for text to speech, which for example the Kindle can do. The Kindle qualifies as accessible because it also includes a feature called Voice Guide. This helps the visually disabled navigate around the menus that they cannot see, thus enabling them to independently use the Kindle.
The story broke earlier this week when the National Federation of the Blind issued a press release on this lawsuit, which you can find it here. You can also peruse the court filings (here, here), thanks to InfoDocket. The press release is formulaic, but the filings are worth a read.
Caveat: I have not yet heard back from the FLP yet, so all the details mentioned here are from one side and should be taken with a grain of salt.
The first detail that jumped out at me was that the FLP funded their Nook lending program with a $25k federal grant. That leaves me scratching my head as to why the grant didn’t require that the library comply with laws like the ADA. It’s not relevant to today’s story, but it is curious.
The basis for the lawsuit is rather simple. The 4 plaintiffs have each checked out a Nook and tried to use it. They couldn’t because it did not support audio of any kind. Since the ereader program consists of 65 Nooks but not any other devices, the plaintiffs were unable to make use of the equipment bought by the Free Library of Philadelphia.
The National Federation of the Blind then sent a letter to the FLP about this issue. The reply is not included in the court filings, so I do not know how the FLP responded. (I’m planning to post that when I can.) But if you can judge anything by the 5 months delay between that letter and this lawsuit, this did not end well.
On a side note, there’s a corollary here that I don’t think anyone has considered yet (I haven’t heard of it, at least). What about audiobook collections that some libraries are investing in? Those cannot be used by the deaf, given that most are recorded audio and not spoken text (ie, they’re MP3 files, not text files). So wouldn’t that content also qualify as a violation of the ADA?
And that really isn’t such a stretch. Quite a few libraries are investing in Playaway devices like the one pictured at right, or they are buying MP3 players. Both can be checked out to patrons, just like libraries do with ereaders. And neither type of device can convert audio to text, so they clearly cannot support the blind.
In any case, libraries are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they need to support all patrons with their programs. They are covered under the same requirements as the universities who were sued for their ereader pilot programs back in 2009.
I didn’t like the lawsuits when they were resolved in 2010, but they did force everyone to confront the issue. It’s now a settled point of case law that ereader programs have to be ADA compliant. That’s not a bad thing. And it’s long since been a recommendation of the American Library Association, who issued a resolution at their annual conference in July of 2009 (it’s in the court filings).
It’s also not an insurmountable requirement. Libraries do have options, which I plan to cover in more depth in a later post. The NFB posted a video a few days back which showed one of the pricier alternatives to non-compliant ereaders. It’s an iPad equipped with a Braille reading device.
The upside to this lawsuit is that it is going to affect all library ereader programs, not just Nooks. Yes, B&N is making a strong effort to sell to schools and libraries, the Nook isn’t the only ereader which is falling down on the job. The Kobo Touch is equally inaccessible. In fact, of the major US ereaders, only the Kindle qualifies as being usable by the visually disabled.
The transition will likely be painful and expensive, but it still needs to be done.
Amazon is pushing out another update for their Android tablet today, and it’s a good one.
A common complaint among tablet owners is the lack of safety measures to block unauthorized users from buying content. Nevemind thieves; it turns out that kids and meddling coworkers are a bigger issue. There have been any number of stories of kids running up bills for hundred of dollars in in-game content on their parents' account, and the froth in the blogosphere got so loud that even Apple realized that adding password protects was a good idea.
And today Amazon adds a feature that really should have shipped on the KF. This update brings additional parental controls to Kindle Fire, including the ability to password-protect purchases, disable access to specific content libraries, and block access to the Silk web browser.
You can simply wait for the update to be pushed out to your Kindle Fire, but if you want it now you can download it here.
Ectaco rolled out another in their series of monthly updates on Monday (download it here). While the update does add a few minor improvements, the Jetbook Color is still not worth buying.
It’s been just over a month and a half since I last covered the Jetbook Color, which means I missed an update. It was still on loan at the time, and I just got it back a few days ago.
So, the update adds a faster page turns, several new workbook templates, and optional delayed refresh on page turns (3rd or 5th turns). Text to speech is finally working, and it sounds nice. Of course, this is one of Ectaco’s expertise, so I’m not surprised. The Jetbook Color is also supposed to gain speech recognition in this update, but I don’t see a way to enable it. And just to confirm, the page turns are faster, this is true. But they’re still slower than on the Kindle DX.
Those are some nice features, but they don’t amount much when you consider what this device cannot do. For a quick summary you can look at the front of the box. This device cannot do anything pictured there, not the highlighting, attached notes, underlining – nothing. Oh, and the screen image is a lie. The actual screen is far grayer than pictured.
Wifi was enabled a couple months back, but it doesn’t like my network. Also, Ectaco still hasn’t enabled the web browser so even if the Wifi worked I still wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. There’s still no sleep mode, so I consider myself lucky that Ectaco boasts about the battery life.
All in all, the Jetbook Color is not worth getting on 3 May 2012. This may change as more updates are released, but my opinion right now is that the iPad is the better buy.
You probably recall how LG’s new plastic backed E-ink screen is more durable than previous screens, but it wasn’t until today that I got the chance to prove it. One early reviewer in Russia already has the FlexOne and he posted a video where he tried to kill it.
His attempts are only half-hearted, but a couple of the hits taken by this ereader would definitely have killed any other E-ink screen.
In the past I’ve shown you another flexible screen, but I believe that one used a metal foil back, not plastic. So far as I know that screen hasn’t hit the market yet, and I don’t expect it to. It looks like LG went with the plastic backed screen instead.
A blogger with Gizmodo is offering a graphic lesson today i why you need to be even more careful with the new Nook Touch with Glowlight screen than the previous model. That little dot of light in the upper part of the screen isn’t an artifact of the photo; it’s where the screen got scratched.
The problem with putting the light in front of the screen is that there’s nothing to protect it. This might not seem such an issue because most screens are sturdy enough to survive basic damage, but in the case of the Nook Glow that’s not true.
I can confirm that based on the many times I’ve dropped one device onto another that screen are fairly sturdy, but it looks like the light layer on new Nook Touch isn’t even as sturdy as the (accident prone) E-ink screen right underneath it.
You see, the mark on the screen above isn’t from dropping the Nook Glow on the floor. It’s not from dropping something sharp onto the Nook Touch, or even keys. No, the weapon in this case was a regular TV remote control which was accidentally dropped from less than a foot above the screen. It left a ding in the light layer which is visible even when the light is turned off. And when the light is on I think it ruins the reading experience.
Now, the blogger at Gizmodo is still saying that the new Nook is worth it, but I disagree.
I can accept that devices break and that you sometimes need to be exceptionally careful, but this is just too much. My devices get more banged up than that just by putting them in my bag. With all the pens, notepads, and other stuff I carry around while on the go I would be lucky not to end up with enough scratches on the screen for an abstract piece of art.
I think we may have celebrated the new Nook Touch a little too soon. That frontlight might be as nearly invisible as glass but it is also much more fragile. The photo above is a good reason not to get the device. Clearly it’s only one minor accident away from being a waste of $40.
Update: A couple readers disputed the accuracy of the photo above so I did a little experimenting. I dropped my keys on my Nook Glow from a height of 4 inches. This is the result:
The screen doesn’t show any sign of damage when the light is off and the the damage cannot be felt, only seen.
Over the weekend I read a rumor that the Chinese ereader developer Onyx was going to upgrade their 6″ ereaders to use the new, high resolution, E-ink screen that LG Display debuted just over a month ago. While I haven’t managed to get solid info on price or ship date, I have gotten confirmation from a source that the rumor is indeed true.
Onyx is joining Wexler (early prototype), Hanvon, and Next Papyrus (and probably other companies) in working with the latest not yet released E-ink screen. This is the screen that generated a lot of buzz about a month ago. It has the same high resolution found on the iriver Story HD (1024×768), and it goes one better.
This screen is going to be more durable than any previously released E-ink screen (proof) because it replaces the glass backplane used in E-ink screens on the Kindle, Nook, and others, with a plastic backplane. That’s going to make the screen much less likely to die from getting hit or twisted, which is the leading cause of unexplained E-ink screen deaths. Click here if you need a more in depth explanation of how the screen is attached to the backplane.
According to my original source, the new Onyx ereaders will have much the same specs as the current models. I’m told that at least one will look like the existing Onyx Boox A62, which runs a custom Linux on an 800MHz Freescale CPU. According to my confirming source, Onyx also plans to use the screen in the new touchscreen equipped Boox i62, which I first showed you last October.
There’s no word on how much these ereaders will cost, but the upgraded A62 is supposed to hit the Russian market this month. I think that might be a little optimistic; there are reports that Wexler bought out the entire first production run for the new screen. If that’s true then I don’t think anyone else will get it, possibly not even LG’s own ereader maker (launched in partnership with iriver).
There’s long been a debate about the best price for ebooks, but very rarely has anyone ever released real market data which would answer the debate.
The major publishers believe that more is better, and there’s a solid group of indies who think that there is no floor to the price of ebooks, but if there is they want to find it.
Who’s right? I don’t know, but some data recently released by Smashwords sheds light on this turbulent topic. Smashwords is the largest self-pub ebook service in the world with over 100 thousand titles from 30 thousand indie authors and publishers.
I’m pointing out that statistic because it’s what makes Smashwords a case study for ebook pricing which cannot be duplicated elsewhere (outside of Amazon). The vast number of independent actors and their offerings gives Smashwords to mimic a pint-sized version of the ebook market as a whole.
It’s been quite some time since Smashwords last released data on how prices drive sales (2010, I think), but it was well worth the wait. Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, gave a talk at a romance conference a few weeks back this specific issue. The slides are available online, and I’ve been taking looking them over this afternoon.
There’s an awful lot of useful info in the slides, but here is the money shot. The following chart shows the average number of sales per title based on the price point. Example: An ebook priced below a buck will sell 5.9 times as many copies as one price at $10 or above.
Note the second spike at the $2.99 price point. Interesting, no?
Consider what happens if you take one of those $10 ebooks that the major publishers fear so much and mark it down to $2.99. It will sell more than 6 times as many copies and make 86% more per title.
But there’s a lot more to the slides. For example, Mark also plotted the average length of ebooks vs the number of copies sold. Smashwords' bestsellers (the top 50) generally averaged a length that was over 100, 000 words.
What’s even more interesting was that the top 40 bestsellers in the romance category averaged less than 65 thousand words. Clearly romance readers like their ebooks short and sweet.
I’d like to share one last detail with you before kicking off. A later slide had data which showed was that the $5.99 price point might generate the most income. The following chart shows the relative yield per title for each price point. Not where the spike is.
While I would still prefer to see a $3 ebook, clearly there’s another sweet spot higher up the price chart.
The media law firm Wiggin released the results of their annual tech survey this week and it revealed stats both surprising and not.
The 2012 Digital Entertainment Survey is based on a poll of some 2,500 15 to 64-year-olds in the UK. While I don’t have the full report in front of me, a number of details have been posted in news articles and together they describe a pretty picture.
A full third of respondents own an ereader, and that is up some 21% from last year’s survey. The survey also found that 43% of respondents still read paper books and that a solid 38% (of the 66% that don’t own ereaders) don’t plan to get one.
Perhaps the most important detail was that 31% (of the 33% who own ereaders) had admitted to downloading pirated ebooks. The reason I’m focusing on that is because I want to point out the difference between this statistic and the figures I reported on yesterday.
Here we have an admission that some people have committed piracy at least once, while yesterday the El Pais journalist claimed that half of all ebooks downloaded in Spain were pirated. Do you see how one can actually be measured while the other cannot? That’s part of what bothered me about that story yesterday.
But getting back to the Wiggins report, I want you to take another look at the 33%. Did you know that it’s higher than the rate of ereader adoption here in the US? According to Pew, only about 19% of Americans own ereaders.
The UK has surged ahead in adopting digital reading, even though they got off to a later start. Interesting, no?
There are rumors that Amazon plans to launch the Kindle in Japan, Brazil, Poland, and elsewhere, and today you can move China to the top of the pile. Keen eyed bloggers at the Chinese tech blog Technode have stumbled across something Amazon doesn’t want you to see. They haven’t found Chinese language product listings for the Kindle, but they found something almost as good.
They found, on Amazon’s Chinese website Amazon.cn, the templates for Kindle help pages. The pages are down now, but if you like you can look at the ones that are in the Google Cache.
The pages are empty of content, but they are on an official site and they do look legit (especially after you feed them through Google Translate). So this clearly suggests that Amazon is going to launch the Kindle in China. Well, I’ve heard before that they were planning to launch the Kindle there, so this doesn’t come as a complete surprise.
But there also haven’t been any rumors about a Kindle launch in China nor have there been any hints that Amazon is signing Chinese publishers nor have they admitted to stockpiling Chinese language ebooks. So while the long term plan was known, the immediacy of the help pages shows that events might be moving faster than anyone expected.
But when Amazon moves in they are going to find an ereader market that would best be described as tepid. Even though the population is well over a billion and a half, China’s ereader market is tiny. Current best estimates put it at somewhere under 2 million ereaders sold in China in 2011. In comparison, B&N alone probably sold that many Nooks in 2010 – just in the US.
The latest official figures puts the ereader market split in China at Hanvon (60%), Shanda (20%), with the remaining 20% being taken up by the small fry. Of course, the "official figures" don’t include gray-market ereaders. There’s an ongoing effort to import Kindles and sell them in China. I don’t know how many have been sold but I have heard that 3G coverage does work in some Chinese cities.
