Thanks to the Kindle-Nook price war this year (and the recession), you’d expect the smaller ereader companies to cut back on their expenses. That’s why the ereader selection was paltry this year (though I’d say it was the price war and not the recession, myself).

But not Gajah. They’re doing so well that they actually had 2 booths this year; one in South Hall and the other in North Hall. One was in the ereader tech zone had had just ereaders and tablets and the other had their full product line (gadgetry of various kinds). The tablets are pretty nice, too. Both have 7″ screens, and they should be in production shortly. One runs v1.5 and the other runs v2.2. I shot a video of the one running v2.2 (BK 7009) which is at the end of the post.

They will be in production in march.

I’m only going to show you a few of the ereaders, basically just the ones that are actually new. All have either a 5″ or 7″ LCD screen and none have Wifi or a touchscreen. The quality of the screen might differ, though. The pair of 5″ ereaders in the third picture are much the same device with only cosmetic differences separating them from my Elonex 500EB. And the 7″ ereader in the 4th picture has only cosmetic differences from the Elonex 700EB Gajah lent me.

All the following ereaders (except the Kindle clone and the tablets) are currently in production.

Gajah also brought a couple ereaders with 6″ E-ink screens. The Kindle clone is only a mockup, though.

I like all their ereaders, but I just love what they did with the interface on the BK 7009 Android tablet.

Hanlin was at CES again this year, and this time they brought their mainstay V3 (6″ E-ink) and V5 (5″ E-ink), 2 Kindle clones I remeber from last year V60 (6″ E-ink) and V90 (9.7″ E-ink) as well as 4 new ereaders.

The recently announced A6 and A9 ereaders with Sipix screens did make an appearance. I have an A6 and I’ll post a review when I can. Here’s a set of side by side photos of the Sipix and E-ink screens, all of which are available now. If you’d like to buy one you’ll need to find one of Hanlin’s local partners.

They also had the V60C and V90C on hand. These 2 were just announced in the last few days, and they have the new color E-ink screen. These 2 should enter production in the next few months.

I did get a chance to go back to the Hanlin booth and shoot another video. Since I don’t have any experience with their ereaders, I didn’t do anything more than try to show you the refresh rate. If you can’t see the color screen, try watching the video in HD. Apparently the colors get messed up when Youtube dowgrades the resolution.

I was digging through my video library last night when I came across a video that mentioned this ereader. Back in November 2009 someone used their smartphone to record part of a Creative presentation at a trade show. The clip shows a tablet like device with some annotation, video, and media abilities. The video isn’t very good, but it does show some interesting possibilities.

It occurred to me that this particular device is the epitome of the ereader market in 2009. A company decided to go outside their usual market and started developing an ereader. A little info is leaked to the press and everyone gets really excited. Nothing is officially announced, but the media get into a frenzy anyway.

Now that was 2009, you have to admit.

Unfortunately, the Mediabook was never released (or even announced). You can’t really say it was cancelled; it never really  existed. But I think we ever saw it because of either the iPad launch and the Nook/Kindle price war. Either event changed the market enough that the Creative Zii Mediabook never made it out of the lab. Which means the Creative Zii Mediabook is also the epitome of the ereader market in 2010.

Interesting, isn’t it?

TBH, I don’t think the Mediabook died completely. I think the current Zii tablets (7″ and 10″) are probably based on a lot of the same work as the Mediabook. I think they’re too similar to be a coincidence.

This was a surprise and a joy. RockChip had more tablets, ereaders, PMPs, an other gadgets than both Marvell and Freescale combined. I mention those 2 companies by name because they’re Rockchip’s direct competition. Like Marvell, RockChip makes CPUs and can help design the entire gadget.

What they had in their booth at CES was a collection of gadgets (tablets, ereaders, PMPs, a netbook), some that were both available for license and some that were currently being sold by a partner. It was a little difficult to find just one gadget, but I did. They had a Kindle clone that is being sold by Newsy, one of their partners in China. It has a 7″ LCD screen and runs Android v2.2. Oh how I want it.

That’s just a taste. The rest will show up later.

The open source Epub editor Sigil has just been updated. Improvements include:

• added a small "Donate" button to the toolbar and a related entry in the Help menu
• added a .desktop file for the make install target (courtesy of Richard Gibert)
• this time *really* worked around a Tidy bug that added blank lines to the start of <pre> and <style> elements (issue #655)
• updated ZipArchive from 4.0.1 to 4.1.0
• fixed a regression crash bug with loading extremely rare HTML content documents that have an internal DTD subset
• added a workaround for a crash bug caused by invalid epubs that use obfuscated fonts but with incorrect UUID URN key syntax (issue #709)
• integrated the FlightCrew epub validation library; a new toolbar icon triggers epub validation and displays the results (issue #28)
• fixed a rare input truncation problem when the input file contains a unicode nbsp and also specifies standalone="yes" in the XML declaration (issue #677)

This is my favorite Epub editor, and now that it has an integrated Epub validator  it’s even better.

Sigil

I finally made it to the Marvell booth Saturday night to get a look at the green and white wonder boy.

The XO-1.75, with its 8.9-inch touchscreen, will start shipping in the second quarter of this year to countries around the world trying to bring schoolchildren into the computer age. It looks the same as the existing 1.5 and 1.0 machines; it has the same Pixel Qi display, Flash storage, and keyboard (actually, there are 2 keyboard options) The only difference is that it replaced the x86 CPU with a Marvell Armada running at 1GHZ.

Actually, that’s not completely true. Replacing the CPU means they had to redesign the entire motherboard; it’s not as simple as swapping just the CPU. But you won’t be able to tell that without cracking the unit open.

OLPC had the hand crank generator on hand; you can use it to recharge the 1.75 in about a couple hours. BTW, I asked about why it wasn’t included with the XO-1. Apparently the demo unit kept getting broken, and it took too much time to charge the XO-1 (because of the x86 CPU).

I don’t cover it copyright, piracy, and related issues much because I have something of a radical view. But this time I’m making an exception. An idea has jelled in my mind that is so out in left field that I want to share it. I was reading a piece in The Observer today and it inspired me it write this post about copyright.

Everyone says that copyright law exists to protect and reward creators, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just an excuse. If you look at the way it exists now (and how it gets expanded), you can see that it protects the middle men, not creators. I also think that’s why copyright was originally invented. Here are 3 questions that I’ve been pondering for some time.

• How does a creator benefit from a copyright 70 years after his death? (He doesn’t, but corporations do.)
• If the Big Media who bribed Congress into extending copyright last time around really wanted creators to benefit, then why not just give creators a bigger cut? (This one’s obvious; there’s nothing in it for Big Media.)
• If copyright is needed to protect creators, then why is the fashion industry thriving without it? (They are.)

So let’s take this a step further. If copyright now doesn’t exist to protect creators, what makes you think that is the real reason why it was created? We all know that the first copyright statutes was written as a reaction to the printing press, a mechanical form of reproduction. But content was being created for millennia before the printing press. If protecting and rewarding creators were the reason for its existence, then what took so long?

I think copyright was really invented because someone saw a business opportunity in making copies of a work. And what better way to make a profit than to get the government to grant you a monopoly?

I don’t think it was ever about the creators, in spite of the platitudes. I think it was about the middle men all along. What do you think?

Yesterday I mentioned that Netronix and Pocketbook were both here at CES. I was a little surprised because one of the important stories from last CES was that the 2 companies had merged. As I understood it, Pocketbook & Netronix were going to contribute their ereader divisions (they do other things, too) to a new company and share ownership. I don’t know how they were planning to split it, but I do know that all the ereader stuff was going to be carried on under the name Pocketbook Global.

I now have confirmation from a contact with Pocketbook. The companies did indeed split up. They’re still partners in that Pocketbook currently license several Netronix designs, but they’re not one company anymore.

I was told that the reason for the split was quality control issues. I don’t think this had to do with production , but design. I believe Foxconn do the actual mass production – once the bugs are worked out of the design. So I would guess that Netronix were having trouble working the bugs out.

TBH, we really should have figured this out a while ago.Do you recall when Pocketbook announced the 60x and 90x ereaders? Those ereaders were designed by Foxconn, not Netronix. The fact that Pocketbook went outside the company for the new designs probably should have been a tip off.

Then again, maybe not. Companies change their minds all the time.

`Charbax shot this video at the Freescale suite the other day. (It’s off site, so I haven’t had a chance to make iy over there with my camera).

This demo unit is using a Pearl screen and is running on an i.MX508 CPU which was designed specifically for ereaders and incorporates a Cortex A8 800MHz processor and E Ink display controller.

Just don’t ask them what the power requirements are. This unit probably draws more power than a comparable LCD.

I stopped by the Qualcomm booth earlier and I think there’s something funny going on. They have a new demo unit for the Mirasol, which is reason enough to go. They also changed the video running on it. Do you know the demo video I found a few days ago? It was running on the floor model.

I’m sure you’re amused by the recursive promotion, but that video wasn’t supposed to run on that hardware.You have to see it in person to notice, but the video looked very grainy. The previous demo video running on the Mirasol demo unit looked a lot better.

I believe they started using the new video in order to confuse the issue after the Pocketbook Mirasol was delayed. The other reason I believe this is that the same demo video was running on the 30″ LCD TV next to the Mirasol demo unit.

This is a post that you probably think isn’t worth reading. I bet you already read about the ereader that Aluratek announced. Well, that press release was incomplete. Aluratek have a tablet and 2 new ereaders (one was released a few weeks ago).

First, Aluratek are going to be a hardware partner for Marvell. They are adopting Marvell’s 10″ (1024×600) reference design as the Cinepad. It’s going to have the great specs that Marvell promised as well as a capacitive touchscreen.

I was going to get a picture of the pre-production model but when I stopped by all they had was the Marvell prototype. Needless to say it will look a  lot different. It should be out soon with a retail of $299.

Aluratek also have a new based on a 7″ (480×800) LCD screen. I haven’t seen this ereader before but I recognize it as being designed by Gajah. It’s even using the exact same menu system as the others I have. It has support for Adobe DE DRM and it probably will also be a decent PMP. I want to double check that first, though.

It’s available now for about $140.

The other new ereader is the Libre Aire. It’s based on the same 5″ screen as the Libre Pro, and it has basically the same feature set . But it also comes with Wifi and swipe pad (which replaced the arrow keys). It should be available in March and cost less than the Libre Color.

Editor’s Note: I thought that I published this post in January 2011, but it was listed as a draft when I found it today. It is over  year old but I am posting it anyway.

Hanvon had a bunch of ereaders at CES, but the 2 that you’re dying to see are the new 9.7″ color ereader and the new 9.7″ high resolution ereader. I got my hands on both.

They were both engineering samples and there isn’t a definite release date for either. I know some sites are reporting that the e920 (grayscale) would be out in June but that’s not what I was told.

Also, since they were engineering samples I didn’t try to play with the features much; they’re going to change as the design matures.

I’m not impressed with the color screen and I’m really beginning to wonder if color is worth it. E-ink will always be at a disadvantage; LCDs can do it so much better and faster.

Next we have the new high resolution screen that Hanvon announced a few days ago. I really couldn’t tell the difference between the 6″ (at 167 ppi) and the 9.7″ (at 200 ppi). But, the previous 9.7″ screen had a resolution of 1200×864, which meant it had about 150ppi. The new screen is a 33% increase.

I couldn’t get them to let me move it so I could shoot a video, unfortunately.

When it comes to ereader industry, Ectaco are something of an outsider. They have a lot of experience with electronic dictionaries and digital translation, but it was only recently that they started integrating their core expertise into their ereader development.

Ectaco brought a pair of new ereaders to CES. The first is the most interesting; you’ve probably seen the press release for the Jetbook K-12. When Ectaco first started selling the jetbook 2 years ago, this is what they were working towards.

The jetbook K-12 has the same 5″ screen as the original Jetbook, but that’s the only similarity. This ereader – well, first it’s not an ereader. It’s an educational tool that can function but also do a lot more. It will ship with a built in graphing calculator app and an interactive Periodic table. It has both a speaker and a microphone, so you can both play and record audio notes. The wand on the right can work with the Jetbook to do OCR which you can then play back as TTS.

And that’s just a small measure of what it can do. It’s due out this quarter and the retail is projected to be $249.

Ectaco had another ereader in their booth, the Jetbook+. This is a significantly improved redesign of the existing Jetbook.  It has the same 5″ screen but Ectaco replaced the arrow keys with a swipe pad. It also has Wifi and an accelerometer.

BTW, this is the same hardware as the new Aluratek Libre. The Jetbook+ is due out in a couple months but the retail and exact date has not been set.

One of the things I was looking forward to at CES was getting a chance to look at Bridgestone’s QR-LPD screens. This is a type of color epaper technology that’s been under development for quite a few years and is only just beginning to hit the market.

Vivitek is the distribution partner for the ereaders with the Bridgestone screen, and they were at CES this year.They brought both devices I’d heard about before: an 8.2″ eReader and a 13.1″ (e-Pad as they called it).

There was a third example of Bridgestone’s screen in the booth; it measured 4.1″ and was designed to be shelf tags in a super market.

I only have a video of the 8″ ereader because the larger device just didn’t do enough to justify shooting a video. It’s targeted at the professional market and the demo software running on it was designed for real estate agents and couldn’t actually do much.

The colors on the Bridgestone screen would best be described as washed out. Screen refresh was slow, and the ereader couldn’t actually do much besides turn the page. (If you can’t see the color in the photo or video, try watching again in HD.)

As you can see from the video, the screen refresh rate was slow. But I’m told that the software is still under development, so hopefully that will improve.

The 8.2″ eReader is expected to be available soon in Taiwan and they don’t know when the e-Pad will be released.

NEC had a pair of new tablet devices at CES this year. There was one with a single screen and another with 2 screens. Really the only difference was that dual screen unit had a second screen attached; all the ports, slots, and buttons were the same on both devices.

There’s no word yet on price or release date, but they did say that it would appear in Japan first. NEC are looking for partners and developers and there’s an SDK for developing apps that use both screens.

This tablet is based on a Cortex A8 CPU (they couldn’t tell me the speed) and it has Wifi, Bluetooth, a SD card slot, speaker, camera, GPS, accelerometer, a stylus, and USB Host. It has a resistive touchscreen and the screen resolution is 800×600.

The really cool part about this tablet is that you can have 2 apps open at once, one on each screen. You can also move some apps between the screen or have the app use both.

I liked it. If they get the price low enough and get developers to support it then this could be a really great device.