Well, I am writing this blog after a long break. It’s the Christmas holidays and there is no particular plan, so thought it worthwhile to update my blog, though this update will be a deviation from my usual blog of IT infrastructure. I am fond of books and always carry my favorite books where ever I travel, my house is piling up with stocks of books . I do read whenever I find time, in the tube, train, bus . Recently, I started to digitalize my library and would prefer to buy an e-book rather than the paper editions, it's cheaper and easy to carry and can also be used on my laptop. I thought it’s time to invest in an eBook reader. I did a bit of research on the two popular models in UK, the Amazon Kindle and the sony e-book reader. E-readers are becoming increasingly popular, some 5m e-readers were sold worldwide in 2009 . Almost all the e-readers use similar display technology E Ink. It’s based on tiny capsules filled with positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particle, suspended in a clear liquid. Transparent electrodes placed above and below the layer of microcapsules create electric fields, and based on the polarity pushes either the white or black to the surface and provide the display. It has many advantages , as it does not have a back light , so can be read in the bright sun light and battery is only used at the time of a page turn , and hence has a very extended battery life . Finally, on Boxing Day I went to the Sony center and bought the Sony touch screen edition, costing me £ 249. Amazon Kindle is similar, except it's always getting connected to Amazon whisper net, through where books can be bought from Amazon online, and delivered to the kindle in 60 seconds. On reaching home, with much enthusiasm I loaded one of the books from my digital library into the e-reader. This particular book was in the pdf format with charts and diagrams. However, in the e-reader the font came out too small to read, so I tried increasing the font from small to medium, though the font became now readable but all the images and tables were gone. I tried changing the orientation to landscape mode, but still in the original font it was not quite readable. Did some more research on the net and found out that both Sony e-reader and Amazon Kindle has problems with pdf formats, though both included in their latest editions of e reader. Sony scored a point over kindle in the pdf reader. However, both have major disadvantages. Sony e-reader pdf fonts can be increased but images and tables will get distorted. In case of Kindle this feature is not there at all, though in the landscape mode it's quite efficient in reducing the border white spaces, but still fonts will not be comfortable to the eyes. The books in the Sony proprietary format lrf and the open format epub is quite okay. However, somehow I did not feel it’s worthwhile to have it at the present state of maturity and retuned it the next day. I will like to see the following maturity in this technology before I invest it again.
Fast display in the page turn , it took couple of seconds before the next page appeared .
Color display like in LCD , however, LCD is battery hungry and not easy on eyes , another option is to use organic light emitting diodes , but still quite expensive . Eink and some of the rivals are currently developing color electrophorectic display by adding a layer of coloured filter above the black and white capsules. There are challenges in this technology in making the filters and control system small enough. Current projection is in 2010, companies will overcome this problem and will be able to produce the color display. It will be some variant of current LCD technology to provide the color display in the e-reader.
Good support for PDF and ePub formats.
I will wait until end of 2010, before I buy an e-reader, until that time good old paper books and my laptop for the e-books.
