Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon’s Kindle reader is spreading to one more device: The BlackBerry. Like the iPhone version, you sign into your Amazon Kindle account and you can read any books you have bought for Kindle. The beta application will also talk to Amazon’s Whispersync service to keep your place across all your devices.

Kindle for BlackBerry (another awesome bit of naming, guys) joins Kindle for PC, iPhone and Kindle for Kindle, and the soon-to-appear Kindle for Mac. We like what Amazon is doing here: you buy a book once and you can read it on pretty much any device you have. And because many of these phones, iPod and computers can be loaded up with several other e-readers, you aren’t locked in to the Kindle store (unless, ironically, you actually bought a Kindle).

But the best thing about Kindle for BlackBerry is that you can now read erotic fiction in business meetings, and all the other suits will assume you’re just checking your email. Email that makes you flushed and flustered, but email nonetheless.

Kindle for BlackBerry [Amazon]

Amazon is today adding BlackBerrys to its stable of Kindle-compatible devices and also taking the opportunity to remind us that it’s working hard on Mac and iPad versions of its software. The app is a freebie download for Americans (sadly it’s not international just yet) and should offer the same functionality as its PC and iPhone brethren — namely automatic syncing via Whispersync and what Amazon hopes will be a seamless reading experience from one device to the next. There’s also an in-app book store, as well as the ability to create bookmarks and view annotations from other portable Kindle readers. Go download it at the Amazon link if you care, or move right along if you don’t.

Kindle for BlackBerry e-reader app now available originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has put the pressure on e-book readers with its forthcoming iPad tablet. But Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony aren’t taking it lying down. Color, touchscreens and improved black-and-white displays are some of the innovations that consumers can expect to see in electronic-reading gadgets this year.

“E-readers today are where the pre-iPod MP3 players were,” says Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition, a design firm that worked on Barnes & Noble’s Nook. “It’s still very early and development is just beginning to ramp up.”

Since the launch of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007, e-readers have become a fast-growing category of consumer electronics products. But with the entry of the iPad, the e-reader market is at a crossroads. With its 9.7-inch color LCD screen, the iPad supports not just movies and web surfing, but also has an e-reading feature. Apple will also begin selling e-books for the iPad through its iTunes store.

But e-reader enthusiasts say that dedicated digital reading devices will continue to thrive despite competition from Apple.

Let’s take a look at five technologies that e-reader makers are betting on to keep their products relevant.

Better touchscreen and multi-touch could improve user interface in e-readers.

Touch

Touchscreens have been pivotal to the recent success of smartphones, so it is no surprise that e-reader manufacturers are looking at ways to bring the technology to their devices.

Unlike phones, e-readers are used primarily to consume content, which makes touch-based interaction a perfect fit. Flipping a page, clicking on a link or highlighting a paragraph is easier using simple touch-based gestures.

But touch on e-readers today is where it was on smartphones before the arrival of the iPhone: It’s primitive, not widely used and full of compromises. For instance, the resistive touchscreen on Sony’s e-reader does not offer the smooth, fast response that the capacitive touchscreen of an iPhone or a Motorola Droid can.

Adding a touch-sensitive upper layer to a screen also dims the display slightly, a real problem with the already low contrast ratio of E Ink screens.

“We are so used to responsive displays that if we touch something and it doesn’t react immediately, it is disappointing,” says Brunner. Nook has added touch into its secondary, 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen, instead of the larger E Ink display. Amazon hopes to take the technology to the next step.

The company recently acquired Touchco, a early-stage technology startup that could allow for a touch-capable layer to be embedded below the screen, instead of adding it on top as current touch technologies do.

E Ink is also working on its own to create touch-sensitive displays that put pressure sensors behind the display. The company hopes to have the first version ready by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, SiPix, another electronic paper display maker, is offering touchscreens that it claims are better than the resistive e-paper displays seen in devices such as the Sony Touch Reader. SiPix’s touchscreen will be available in e-book readers created by French company Bookeen.

Qualcomm's Mirasol technology promises low-power color displays.

Color

If there’s one thing that most e-reader enthusiasts want from the next generation of devices, it is color.

Sure, die-hard readers will scoff at the notion that color could enhance the experience of reading plain text, and they’d be right. But color would be key to enhancing illustrations, photos, covers and maybe even the clarity of the fonts themselves.

Display manufacturers are competing intensely to solve this problem with a variety of technologies. E Ink promises to have a color screen available by the end of the year. Qualcomm is already shopping around its 5.7-inch color display called Mirasol, which could debut in an e-reader by fall. Meanwhile, Pixel Qi, a California-based startup, is showing LCD displays that can do double duty as color screens as well as low-power, black-and-white displays.

Now that Apple iPad has paved the way, e-reader makers could also be re-evaluating the LCD as an alternative to the bistable, low-power but black-and-white E Ink display. Despite its ability to offer full color and touch, LCD screens didn’t set the e-reading market on fire because of their low battery life and the perceived issue of eyestrain.

If the iPad is successful, it won’t take long for Amazon and other ambitious companies to produce LCD-based tabletlike devices that are optimized for digital books and magazines, says Brunner.

Flexible screens will be lightweight and shatterproof.

Flexibility

E Ink is talking about flexible displays for the next generation of its screen technology.

Flexibility doesn’t mean you’ll be able to roll up the screens and stuff them in your backpack, but it is key to making readers with larger screens light enough to hold conveniently in one hand.

Instead of a layer of glass (which is at the foundation of most displays available currently) the next generation of e-readers will have lightweight screens that are based on a metal foil.

“Flexible doesn’t mean the display is floppy,” says Sri Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink. “What flexible does mean is that it is lightweight, shatterproof and rugged.”

E Ink’s flexible displays combine a thin stainless steel foil transistor substrate with electronic-ink display material that is coated on a plastic sheet. That results in a screen that is extremely lightweight and slim, allowing for newer hardware design.

Weight is an area where E Ink can claim advantage over LCD displays. For instance, despite its glass, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX is about 27 percent lighter than the similar sized iPad: The Kindle DX weights 1.1 lbs compared to the iPad’s 1.5 lbs. With a foil-based substrate, the DX could be lighter by another 40 percent, says Peruvemba.

“When you get to a 11-inch screen size, if you put a glass substrate, you need two hands to just hold the device,” he says. “That’s why tablets haven’t taken off for reading. People want a device where they can have a free hand.”

The e-reader interface has much room for improvement.

Better Software

There’s more to a gadget than just good hardware. An elegantly designed user interface can put a gadget head and shoulders above its peers.

That’s where most e-readers have fallen short. E-reader manufacturers’ focus on hardware design means their user interfaces often feel like an afterthought.

Almost all e-readers today lack the interactive experience that could make reading digital books truly interesting, says Brunner. “If you look at the current products out there, they are they are just repurposing content from print and delivering it on a different medium without adding the value generated by that medium,” he says.

Meanwhile, Blio, e-reading software, has shown it is possible to develop an interface that could inject life into e-books. Blio is currently available for PCs, iPhone and iPod Touch. A similar interface for an e-reader could change the game.

Another way to enhance the experience may be through opening up e-readers to third-party apps, as Amazon has done with the Kindle. That could bring additional features to the devices and maybe even alternate readers with more elegant interfaces.

Better contrast in e-reader screens is high on the wish list of consumers and device makers. This photo approximates the difference between E Ink (left) and paper (right)

More Contrast

E Ink’s displays may be the current industry standard. But what they offer in clarity and readability, they lack in contrast: Their look  is decidedly gray, like an Etch A Sketch.

The screens are also slow to change, sometimes taking as much as a second to switch between pages.

Fortunately for readers, the company plans to introduce new screens this year that will come with a faster response times and offer twice the contrast as existing products.

“The fundamental advantage is better contrast,” says Peruvemba. “The blacks will be blacker and the whites whiter. That’s a major request from our customers.”

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• Roundup: E-Reader Gift Guide
• Slim, Large Screen E-Reader Skiff to Debut on Sprint
• Why E-Books Look So Ugly

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

E-book readers with black-and-white screens look like they’re stuck in a time warp, now that Apple’s full-color iPad is on its way.

But not for long. A new generation of displays are waiting to bring full color and video to low-power displays, while maintaining readability in different environments. That’s something that Apple’s LCD-based “Moses tablet” — and E Ink’s low-power, monochrome screens — can’t do.

One of the e-reader hopefuls is Qualcomm, whose latest technology, named Mirasol, promises to combine color, speedy refresh rates and low power consumption in a single display. Qualcomm hopes to have the first color screens available in e-readers by fall this year.

“For e-readers users coming from a black-and-white world, this is going to be like ‘Oh, my prayers have been answered’,” says Cheryl Goodman, director of marketing for Qualcomm.

With an estimated 5 million sold last year, e-readers have become one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics categories. And while screen sizes and functionality may be different, they all have one thing in common: Almost all of them use a black-and-white display from E Ink, the company that pioneered the low-power technology. The reason that e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader and the Barnes & Noble Nook can go days or even weeks without a recharge is that they use power only when the screen changes. In between, while you’re reading the page, the screen draws no power because its pixels are “bistable” — they have two stable states, dark and light, and can remain in either state without drawing power.

But the iPad’s debut and its focus on e-reading has raised the stakes for Amazon and other entrants. Amazon has reportedly acquired Touchco, a company that could provide it with the technology to add a touchscreen to the Kindle. A push for a color display would likely come with any new product that would use the Touchco tech.

Qualcomm’s Mirasol could be one of the contenders. Mirasol displays work by modulating an optical cavity to reflect the desired wavelength of light. The reflected wavelength is proportional to the cavity’s depth.

And if you are wondering what a color low-power Mirasol screen looks like, think a glossy scientific textbook rather than an LCD screen. It’s subdued, somewhat low-contrast, but crystal clear. Its reflective surface means that it doesn’t have (or need) a backlight. Its pixels, like E Ink’s, are bistable, so it will draw power only when refreshing the screen. And it can play video.

“It’s a very good display for what it does, which is an extremely low-power color screen,” says Vinita Jakhanwal, an analyst with research firm iSuppli.

Color screens for e-readers are more than a question of aesthetics. Many genres of books, including textbooks, cookbooks and comics, require color illustrations to make them come alive. Magazines and even newspapers are rendered almost unrecognizable without color.

Low-power color displays could change that. They could also help convince reluctant consumers to get a gadget designed for reading, without giving up gains in battery life.

A 5.7-inch Mirasol screen, not much bigger than an index card, with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, can offer at least five times the battery life of a 6-inch Kindle black-and-white Kindle display, says Goodman. The 5.7-inch screen is the size that Qualcomm is planning to debut its color displays in, though it says it can do larger screen sizes based on demand.

Mirasol displays are built on glass substrates. Thin films deposited on the substrate form one wall of the cavity, while the other wall is a highly reflective flexible membrane. An electric force applied across the cavity causes the membrane to collapse against the thin films. The cavity then becomes very thin, and the wavelength that is reflected moves into the ultraviolet spectrum.

For the viewer, this element, which is one pixel, is seen as black. Varying the depth of the cavity results in changes in the wavelengths reflected, which yields different colors.

“Because you use the lighting around to generate the image and color, it makes the display extremely low power,” says Jim Cathey, vice president of business development for Qualcomm.

And like the E Ink display, it is visible even in bright sunlight.

“Mirasol does color well but it has difficulty in reproducing gray scales,” says Jakhanwal. “When it comes to black-and-white, it is not as high contrast as an E Ink screen, but the advantage Qualcomm has is that it can offer color now.”

The 5.7-inch color Mirasol screen is bigger than the iPhone's, but not by much.

A Nascar race on the Mirasol display may not be pleasant, but the screen’s refresh rate of up to 24 frames per second is good enough for almost every other kind of video. In a demo at Wired.com, the screen showed a decent, sub-second refresh rate that was noticeably slower than 24 fps, but fast enough to show slow-motion moving images of butterflies.

Mirasol’s response time is also better than E Ink — in microseconds, compared to E Ink’s 200 or so milliseconds.

Still, many customers could find the videos on a Mirasol display unappealing, says Jakhanwal.

“Videos look much better in Mirasol than they do in E Ink,” she says. “But when you are watching video you want full color saturation and a washed-out picture is not that attractive,” she says.

Convincing e-reader manufacturers to bet on Mirasol won’t be easy. Qualcomm will have to compete against Pixel Qi, a scrappy California-based startup whose displays combine a full color LCD screen with a low-power black-and-white display. And then there’s E Ink, the current market leader that promises to come out with color displays by the end of the year.

Mirasol’s success will also depend on Qualcomm’s ability to prove that it can manufacture millions of displays that its customers will need. After all, Qualcomm is a chip company that’s known for creating processors that power smartphones, not displays. The Mirasol technology comes to the company through its acquisition of Iridigm Display five years ago.

Qualcomm says it’s serious about creating a place for itself in the display business. The company has set up a fabrication plant in Taiwan dedicated to producing Mirasol displays.

“Taking it from the lab to the fab is the tough part,” says Goodman. “But we have launched Mirasol on a few phones.” In 2008, one of the first handsets, the HiSense C108, featuring a black-and-white Mirasol display, debuted in China.

For the color screens, though, Qualcomm is betting on e-readers.

“The challenge in the e-reader market is that there are a lot of substitutes — the iPhone, laptop or the iPad,” says Qualcomm’s Cathey. “But we think consumers want color content and long usage between charges in a variety of environments.”

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• Roundup: E-Reader Gift Guide
• Why E-Books Are Stuck in a Black-and-White World
• Why E-Books Look So Ugly

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Macmillan’s US CEO, John Sargent just confirmed that Amazon pulled its inventory of Macmillan books in a powerful response to Macmillan’s new pricing demands. Macmillan offered the new pricing on Thursday, just a day after Apple announced Macmillan as a major publishing partner in its new iBookstore — a revelation that certainly factored into the discussions along with Skiff and other emerging e-book distribution and publishing models. During the meeting with Amazon in Seattle, Sargent outlined what he calls an “agency model” that will go into effect in early March. Under the terms offered, if Amazon chose to stay with its existing terms of sale then it would suffer “extensive and deep windowing of titles.” Amazon’s hardball response was to pull all of Macmillan’s titles from its Kindle site and Amazon.com by the time Sargent arrived back in New York.

Macmillan claims that its new model is meant to keep retailers, publishers, and authors profitable in the emerging electronic frontier while encouraging competition amongst new devices and new stores. It gives retailers a 30% commission and sets the price for each book individually: digital editions of most adult trade books will be priced from $5.99 to $14.99 while first releases will “almost always” hit the electronic shelves day on date with the physical hardcover release and be priced between $12.99 and $14.99 — pricing that will be dynamic over time. So when Steve Jobs said that Apple’s and Amazon’s prices would be the same, he was almost certainly referring to the $12.99 to $14.99 e-book pricing originally rumored by the New York Times — not the $9.99 price that Amazon customers have been enjoying so far. Funny how Jobs, the man who once refused to grant the music labels’ request for variable pricing on digital music so that Apple could maintain a low fixed $0.99 price per track, is suddenly the best friend of a new breed of content owners. Guess the old dog just learned a new trick, eh?

Update: Amazon has conceded, but not willfully. It has decided to give the consumer the option of paying too much for a bestseller, and frankly, that’s the right thing to do. Let ’em vote with their wallets, we say. The full response is after the break.

Continue reading Amazon pulled Macmillan titles due to price conflict — confirmed (update: they’re back!)

Amazon pulled Macmillan titles due to price conflict — confirmed (update: they’re back!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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