“Novel” displays could help push e-books to the masses
Walk into any music store at any mall, and what you’ll find is a relatively sparse crowd, mostly poring over racks of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs of their favorite movies and TV series. The CD section is relegated to a corner where one backward holdout actually has the nerve to buy and store on a shelf physical media containing 2 songs he likes and 10 songs he doesn’t. Yes, music has successfully made the leap to digital distribution through a unified content format, ubiquitous affordable hardware, and a rights management and pricing model that consumers actually think is fair, if you look at Apple’s $1.9B in 2007 revenue from the iTunes store, for instance.
Books haven’t gotten there yet, suffice it to say. Reasons for this include the myriad competing e-book formats (the so-called “tower of e-Babel”), the still-suboptimal user experience of e-book readers, and perhaps most of all a labyrinth of DRM issues. Other issues aside, the extremely-low-power display (“electronic paper”) is the enabling and differentiating technology of the e-book reader, so let’s take a look at the current state of the art.
First some basics: to be called “electronic paper” a display technology must in general have bistable pixels, which can maintain their states when power is removed. It must also be a reflective display that doesn’t use any backlight. Children of the ‘80s such as I can think of it as an electronically addressable Etch A Sketch® that only requires energy input to change the image but not to maintain it. That’s actually not a bad metaphor, as current electrophoretic display technology is grey scale with very slow display refresh time (over one second – I can shake an Etch A Sketch® clear in a similar time given enough coffee). However, EPD delivers on the promise of low power consumption. Typical e-readers can operate for a week continuously on a single charge.
E-Ink Corp. displays hold the majority market position today, as they are included in the Amazon Kindle 2.0, Sony Reader Digital Book, Plastic Logic QUE, Bookeen Cybook, and others. (This technology was also featured in the Esquire Magazine 75th Anniversary E-Ink cover, on which UBM TechInsights offers a teardown report) E-Ink holds around 100 patents (particularly USP 6,262,833) on electrophoretic display technology in which bubbles contain both black and white ink. Applied charge brings either the black or white ink to the display surface. Grey scale is modulated by varying the physical distribution of charge on the bubble. SiPix displays, contained in Jinke HanLin readers, are also electrophoretic but refer to a “microcup” instead of a bubble.
But alas, the people want video-rate color displays. The call for color and speed is being answered by several technologies vying to unseat greyscale E-Ink as the display of choice. Two notable contenders are LiquaVista and PixelQi.
LiquaVista’s electrowetting display has the property of quasi-stability, which means pixels can be set and left alone for several seconds before being refreshed due to the low leakage current and stability of the voltage residing on the pixel. However, the switching time is only 3ms on and 9ms off, enabling >30fps video. An animation can even play on one part of the page while text remains static on another part, and only the animation will consume power to speak of. LiquaVista quotes quasi-stable power consumption comparable to bistable displays (E-Ink) and full video rate power consumption about 1/3 of a backlit LCD. The electrowetting display is in prototype now and devices (such as the BeBook) are expected to arrive late 2010 or early 2011. Real ones, not fake ones.
PixelQi’s offering interleaves in a single LCD display a backlit transmissive RGB display with a reflective monochrome display. The user is able to switch from backlit color (laptop) mode to reflective monochrome (reader) mode at the touch of a button for instant power savings. It is not a true e-paper, as it is not bistable and must consume power continuously to maintain the image. Color is also impossible in low-power mode. This ‘one device does everything’ approach is going after the reader and the laptop market. It is featured in the Adam tablet PC from Notion Ink (available June 2010) and XO systems from One Laptop Per Child.
Either of these displays could represent the future of color displays in general, to say nothing of replacing E-Ink. This begs the question – will the same bistable, video-rate, low-power color e-paper displays which are supposed to save the e-book reader end up killing it? If a tablet PC or netbook has a screen that allows 12 hours of battery life to read Shogun during the entire flight to Tokyo, will there be a need for a separate e-reader gadget? Don’t worry, e-book reader fans. History tells us that users will invariably use hardware that suits their desired experience rather than alter their usage habits to conform to the hardware. In plain English, just because a device can do a thing doesn’t mean it’s the best place to do that thing. After all, camera smartphones with email haven’t killed the digital still camera or the laptop.
Hey wait, what’s this?… you’ll have to excuse me; my GPS-enabled wristwatch phone just notified me I’m too far away from my baby’s crib and initiated a streaming video feed from her monitor while simultaneously downloading a copy of Parenting for Dummies. And my wife is on line 2. Gotta go!