Series II – E-Ink
E-Ink has always appealed to me for being a low-power, non-straining medium for reading. Opponents of the technology always bring up the fact that a person like me spends most of their day looking at an LCD screen without much trouble–thus negating a need for a dedicated device or display. To an extent that is true, but the rapid fire, haphazard path your eye takes when consuming content on a PC is much different than the linear, methodical path it takes when one reads. Having read for extensive periods of time on CRT and LCD displays, I can say that there is definitely a risk of fatigue (especially in late night study sessions).
So I was insanely pleased to see the rise of Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 in 2008 and 2009 respectively: E-Ink was finally hitting the masses in a (relatively) affordable form. When this started spurring excitement in the market, and E-Ink devices were becoming a given announcement at every trade show, I became even more excited. Kindle was a tremendous start but I never bit on the first two models because they lacked two key features: size and PDF support.
Listen: integration with online services is nice and all, and I’m glad the Kindle offers that. However, the majority of my reading material: academic papers, school assignments, and text books I’ve scanned myself (hey, I know it’s not right, but I’ve tried paying large publishers big bucks for quality PDF versions of their text books to no avail, so I gave up and did my own) are in PDF format. PDF is a great, non-editable document standard which I love for rendering documents faithfully across platforms. If the electronic document reader can’t support it, it is useless to me.
And PDF support requires size. Kindle and Kindle 2 are great to replace the paperback book–and in that sense, the whole feature set makes sense. Browse the shop, get a novel, read. The experience is pristine and wonderful. Academic papers, news papers, blogs and magazines, however, don’t really render that well on such a small screen–they are formulated to be consumed in (at least) an 8.5×11″ world.
Plastic Logic‘s eReader filled that void. The eReader was announced sometime in early 2009 (probably CES if I had to guess), and captured my attention. Plastic Logic’s technology (which used a plastic backing instead of E-Ink’s traditional glass) enabled them to make a full 8.5×11″ display while keeping the reader robust and light. Atop of that, the file format support was unparalleled: Microsoft Office, PDF, ebook standards, HTML, TXT, RTF–almost everything I could ever want.
This was aimed at the business professional. A touch display allowed for graphical annotations in documents and a multi-document handler allowed users to switch between files on the fly–all things the Kindle could not (and still cannot) do in any of its iterations.
There’s no way to really quantify how much time I spent on the Internet looking at photos and videos of the eReader from its industry trade-show displays, meticulously reviewing the software upgrades Plastic Logic presented each time. It is safe to say, however, that it was probably more than was healthy, but my heart was entirely set on this.
Unfortunately it was taking Plastic Logic a long time to get this device out of the door. Not in any excruciating way, mind you–they stayed fairly on track with their release forecasts. I felt a crunch from this, however, because summer was drawing to a close. This meant that if I was going to head into my Senior year of college with an electronic book, I needed one immediately.
I have to give credit to my friend John for convincing me to get the Kindle DX. He received one as a gift around the summer of 2009, and brought it in to work. I was hooked, and ordered mine almost immediately. First and foremost I have to say: E-Ink, in terms of clarity and ease of read, was everything I had dreamed it to be. In ambient light, especially sunlight, the Kindle DX’s display was (and is) gorgeous. Really. There’s no other way to describe it.
Store access, content delivery, file support all worked as promised. It completely eliminated the need for carrying cumbersome text books and twenty to one hundred page academic publications in my backpack. It was liberating.
However after a few months of use, E-Ink and the Kindle DX’s flaws were becoming apparent. I found the device only usable in landscape mode (which in essence offered me about one third of a 8.5×11″ sheet of paper at one time)–asserting my previous speculations on display size. Even the DX, with its larger screen was too small to be usable (for my needs, at least). Additionally the device’s speed on content that had not originated from Amazon or was the product of scanning or large file size (in terms of PDFs) was horrendously slow, and difficult to navigate. This was not helped by the Kindle DX’s inherent complete lack of intuitive document traversal.
I appreciated the Kindle DX for what it was, but it had drawn me to the conclusion I mentioned earlier in this post: Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX and most electronic document readers are suited for one thing, and one thing only: reading novels. To expect more out of these devices is not worth while.
The large-format outliers like the Plastic Logic eReader (later named the Plastic Logic QUE proReader – MSRP 649.99-799.99USD) and the recently announced Skiff Reader from the Hearst Corporation (http://www.hearst.com/) are still in their infancy. It remains to be seen whether or not document readers of this size (and price point) can make it in a market where people have been burned from expecting too much from smaller e-Ink devices.
Conclusion?
E-Ink/Document Readers – MAYBE
In reality, E-ink devices aren’t that bad. What it comes down to is whether or not you are the type of consumer who will read novels–and I emphasize that as the target audience pretty strongly. For those that need a device to display and annotate documents which depend on larger formats: forget it. We’re not there yet.
If you are the type to read novels, however, this is something that’s a pleasure to use and with an array of options (Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Copia’s eReaders, and the newly released and inexpensive Kobo eReader), the market is working in your favor to give you a simple experience at a low price. You pretty much can’t go wrong. Just make sure your device has good support behind it.
In my next post, Series I & II Conclusion, I will present the top technologies I think will replace or supplement electronic ink, and how devices similar to Apple’s iPad may replace both the UMPC and the E-Ink device for a certain class of people such as myself.
