Peter Lewis explores the Sony Librié EBR-100EP electronic book reader for Fortune. (Sorry, paid subscription required to read the archived article.) What is really interesting, however, is not that this is the first electronic book reader to hit the market (currently Japan only), but the technology behind it.
posted on September 14, 2004 11:31 AMSony’s e-reader is the first consumer device to use a screen technology developed by E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., and Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. Unlike earlier e-books that used bulky, battery-draining LCDs, the E Ink-Philips high-resolution screen is thin, energy efficient, and highly readable at any angle. Essentially it’s electronic paper, and it’s not hard to imagine all sorts of applications for it beyond future e-books. The screen in the Librié is rigid, but rollable and even foldable sheets of E Ink “paper” are already being developed. Imagine having the controls for your iPod or cellphone woven into the sleeve of your jacket, a wristwatch that’s almost paper-thin, a map that constantly updates itself, or a desktop-sized display for your wireless PDA that, when it’s no longer needed, folds up to fit in a shirt pocket.
Pardon me, I’m hyperventilating.
Technically, the electronic-ink screen is called a microencapsulated electrophoretic display. Millions of tiny capsules, some white, some black, are suspended in a thin layer of liquid. Applying a small electric charge to the white capsules (positive) and black capsules (negative) rearranges them to form readable text that has a higher contrast ratio than even newspaper print. Once the capsules are arranged, they stay in place until signaled to dance once again. That means the screen draws minimal power except for brief moments when “pages” are turned, and thus the book operates for days or weeks on just a quartet of standard AAA batteries. (However, the Librié requires a clumsy, external AC power brick when downloading books from its host PC.) The screen doesn’t generate any light of its own and can’t be read in the dark, but that’s a knock that applies to old-fashioned paper too.