Sunday, March 13, 2005
E-Reading - New Foms for New Functionality
A conversation with a friend about digital books led me into some nostalgic reflections about older technologies and the difficulty of predicting the future based on current paradigms (or the trap of thinking that New Functionality must follow Old Form).
About 8-10 years ago, smart folks believed that “E-Books” would never come into being until we got light weight high resolution reading devices( at the time, some called these e-books, but they really meant e-readers). Today, one can make the case that those devices still don't exist and their absence delays the widespread adoption of e-books. But that is a mis-perception based on expecting New Functionality to follow Old Form.
The better case is that we have E-Books now as well as E-Magazines (in widespread use) being read on inexpensive consumer-priced LCD screens. They just don't look like print books; anymore than a monk's scroll looked like a Gutenburg-printed book. Reading from a laptop is convenient, the font is selectable, the LCD screen eliminates glare common to glossy printed material, and there is an enormous variety of information available. And the E-Book world is an expanding and multi-faceted one: check out this conference Agenda being held in NYC this April; or visit a digital bookstore located at eBooks.com The World's Leading Source of eBooks , where you can pay for and download a book in several different formats to match your preferences and software; or try out NetLibrary , which claims to be the premier provider of electronic books to various libraries, allowing them to expand their collections without expanding their shelf space.
In the mid1990s, Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media lab was excited about the possibilities of e-ink being developed there – it held the promise of high resolution in a form that could be spread like paint or transferred to flexible media ( electronic scrolls or paper). Just carry one of these e-inked books around and you would have a library in your hand. He also thought this technology was critical and that LCD technology could not compete; postulating that an 8”x11” LCD screen with electronics would be several pounds and 8” thick. Today, I'm writing this on a 19” screen that weighs less than that and is a lot thinner. Even with the right vision, forecasting current technology limitations onto future functionality can get the best of us; as can trying to predict the (economic market) path of consumer-scale technology productization.
So we know what LCD's are doing, but what happened to that e-ink technology? Like so many of the Media Lab innovations, it resulted in a company, E Ink, founded in 1997, that is developing very thin film display surfaces and partnering on applications with several large companies. One of their latest products is described in this year old press release about an E Ink Reader developed with and marketed by Sony. It seems to be a large paperback book-sized productization of Negroponte's 1996 vision. I don't know what has or may come of it; but Sony does not seem to have pushed it into the US market.
On the other hand, Sony is pushing its PlayStation Portable (PSP) very hard and the US consumer market is pulling even harder, with some people paying double to get an early model. This device (priced at $250) plays games, movies, and audo files; and some wonder if it will heat up market share competition with the iPod or just become another must have device. The PSP is 6.7"x2.9"x0.9", weighs 0.6 pounds and has a 4.3" (16:9 widescreen format) display. The iPod has a 2"x2" display in a 2.4"x4.1"x0.6" case. The iPod has a lot more memory with 20-40 GB compared to the PSP which is mazimized for fast processing and accepts 1.8GB disks.
These are both very small and very powerful devices that hit the consumer sweet spots of portable access to audio, videos and games at easily affordable prices. Compare them to a standard sized paperback book at 4.5"x7.0"x0.7-1.5" (for about 300-750 pages). They can display text or imagery and have the capacity of many books. Today, people listen to audio books on iPods. If the market were there, both could offer paperback size E-Book reading with lots of software based annotation and sharing capabilities as well as large on-board libraries. Perhaps, Sony will blend the E-Ink's Reader with the PSP if it sees a market for a single portable device that does it all.
I don't think it's the technology that holds this back so much as the perception of consumer market pull and the inexpensive availablity of copyrighted print material. These can change in time and the combining of several functionalities into a common package makes it more likely.
Perhaps, investment is hindered by the existence of the second-hand book market on Amazon.com where one can buy old books for almost nothing, the profit coming from the shipping charge. That's an economic hurdle. On the other side, wouldn't it be nice if children did not have to lug heavy book bags around to school classes; just one small device with lots of books stored along with a variety of educational and information access and manipulation technology onboard. Combined with entertainment access, that's a major convenience market. Of course, teachers might experience problems - "Boys! Stop playing games; this is Study Hall!!" and "Girls! Stop IM'ing those boys!!"
Whatever happens, it's likely that we will see new forms and functionalities emerging together.
