Photo: brandon shigeta / Flickr

e-Books have taken a step into the future with a new line of e-paper design, released by LG and E-Ink, who showed off colour screens for e-book readers at a trade show in Japan recently. The ability for these electronic displays to show colour is a first of its kind and allows electronic book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader to deliver it’s products in colour.

Outdoor e-reading

E-Ink is the biggest distributor of e-paper, while LG dominates the electronic display markers, and both companies’ displays are similar, with slight differences in features. Both displays are 9.7 inches in size, while the E-Ink Triton features the ability to display more than four thousand colours. LG Display has two versions coming out, one of which displays colour while the other is divided between a 1,200×1,200-pixel monochrome and a 200×600-pixel colour bit.

E-book readers will be delighted with the E-Ink as it doesn’t seem to hurt the eyes after a long period of reading, and the device’s screens also fall down when subjected to bright lights, reducing the reflection and making the text easier to read in sunlight. Power consumption is a lot lower on the E-Ink, however image is not as clear as it would be on an LCD or OLED display, and it also features a much slower refresh rate.

Great colours

The colours on e-paper are, of course, not as bright and vivid as they are on a computer, mobile phone or television, but these new displays do allow the user to view comics, charts and maps while outdoors in the sunshine. The addition that makes the difference is the colour filter, as the standard E-Ink display comes with a colour filter over it.

The first E-Ink colour display has been produced by Hanvon and will go on sale in China next year.

Photo: Sony

First there was Kindle, then came B&N and iBooks, and now Google has thrown its hat into the eBook retailing market.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the search giant is launching Google Editions, a web-based eBook marketplace sometime in late June or early July.

Open platform

Google says they plan to deploy the service such that it is accessible from an array of sites and with content available for an array of e-readers and devices.  The company will allow independent retailers to sell Google editions from their own websites, allowing these retailers to keep the lion’s share of the revenue. And, finally, the WSJ reports Google has yet to decide whether it will set the price of  the eBooks, or leave that to the publishers.

In this regard Google is taking the ‘open’ approach to eBook retailing, as opposed to the proprietary approach seen on the iBook, and the Kindle, too, somewhat.

Book-search Trojan horse

Photo: Google

As Google has a propensity for doing, the company will use its search, more specifically its book search, to push sales of the eBooks. The thinking is to sell eBooks against the content users search for online.

eBook marketplace set a light

Not only have various eBook marketplaces popped up in the last few years, various solid e-readers have appeared on the market to compete with the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle. In addition to the format gaining acceptance among consumers and among publishers, too, big deal authors like John Grisham have also thrown their weight behind the platform.

What makes the eBook marketplace so interesting, from a competitive perspective, is how everybody is jockeying for position. Publishers find themselves at the mercy of whoever owns the store, making it imperative that they pit these digital retailers against each other. In this respect, the imminent arrival of Google on the scene bodes well for publishing houses and fringe e-readers, too.

With everything going digital and on the move, the eBook readers are also being manufactured on the same track. The latest tend which is to be seen is of Portable eBook Reader which will be an ideal travelling partner for all those who love reading books. This king of eBook reader allows you to enjoy your journey and spend some leisure time reading books electronically.

The Portable eBook Reader is being manufactured by leading brands and is widely available in markets with great variety to offer. It offers great way of relaxation combined with excitement and craze to all the eBook readers. Some of the most sought after Portable eBook Reader include the Sony PRS-505S with 6.0 inch display. Compatible with formats like TXT, RTF, PDF, DOC, MPS and JPG, this reader offers hard drive space of 20MB and internal memory of 128MB.

The Endless Ideas BeBook is another Portable eBook Reader offering a resolution of 600 x 800 pixels. This stylish reader is compatible with JPF, GIF, RAR, ZIP and MP3 formats. It also allows you to save data up to 512 MB and is actually a rather cheap eBook reader. If you are looking for more expensive models with bigger displays, then you can choose from the iRex Digital Reader 1000s featuring 10.2 inch display with an excellent resolution of 1024 x 1280 pixels and supports formats including PDF, TXT, HTML, PNG, GIF and TIF. Another great product in this range is iRex iLiad Book Edition.

You can make your choice from the wide range of Portable eBook Reader available and add more excitement and relaxation to your journey. Other choices can be Interead Cool-ER 2009, Bookeen CyBook OPUS,
Sony Reader PRS-300 and many more. The leading brands manufacturing portable readers are Sony, Interead, Bookeen, Endless Idea and iRex.

The e-book reader from Sony uses an electronic paper display that has 166 dpi resolution, eight levels of greyscale and is viewable in direct sunlight. It allows the user to connect to an e-book store and displays Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, RSS news feeds, JPEGs, and Sony’s proprietary BBeB (“BroadBand eBook”) format. The e-book Reader can also play unencrypted MP3 and AAC audio files. The Sony PRS-505S E-Book Reader has a protective cover and has a sleek, muted metallic finish that is pleasing to the eye. Weighing as much as a DVD case-sized unit, it is durability and value for money. The PRS-505 has a standard USB 2.0 connector that can be used for both data transfer as well as charging.

The e-book Reader from Sony also accepts pictures in JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats and it can play back MP3s and unencrypted AAC files, thus you can listen to music as you read. However playing music drains the battery quite a bit. However, the Reader doesn’t have a speaker, but it has a headphone jack and two types of memory card slots. The Sony PRS-505S has 200MB of internal storage space that shows as an externally manageable device in Windows. When a song is popped into the drive, it shows up on the Reader in a single long list. When the user begins to play the song, it plays through the list completely and then over again until the battery has been drained completely. As an e-book reader, reading text on the Reader is pleasant experience. The background is not white like in real books but a light shade of grey. There is a choice of three font sizes that allow the user to scale the text to the most comfortable level. It also has bookmark feature that helps the user continue reading from where he had left off without having to remember the page number.