Nikkei Electronics Asia --May 2010
Analysis
Peeking Inside the Newest E-book Readers:
Standing Out from the Crowd with Unique Reading Experiences

The battle lines are forming now. The electronic book (e-book) industry in 2010 will see intense competition between many companies, including a host of newcomers. And as the battle heats up, e-book readers will evolve from merely allowing people to read books to systems providing enjoyable, innovative reading experiences. We joined engineers to take two of the latest e-book readers apart, evaluating their operability and user interfaces (UI). A new reading experience is being provided through both hardware and software.

The e-book market is finally leaving infancy and entering a time of significant development (Fig.1). While Amazon.com, Inc. of the US and Sony Corp. of Japan helped to get market established, today a host of new players are jumping in, utilizing diverse terminals to offer equally diverse services. One especially exciting development is distribution of a wide range of content in addition to conventional e-books, such as newspapers and magazines. And to handle this expanded variety of content, new types of readers are appearing.

For example, Apple Inc. of the US released the tablet-type iPad reader in April 2010. While it stresses support for e-books, it is certainly not designed for only that. It comes with a color LCD panel capable of handling a range of applications. For companies hoping to distribute content requiring color, such as magazines or comics, the iPad may turn out to be very exciting terminal.

There has also been a rush in readers for newspapers, using electronic paper (e-paper) to display content in monochrome on 10-inch screens. Two such devices are the QUE, to ship summer 2010 from Plastic Logic Ltd. of the US, and the Skiff Reader to ship before the end of 2010 from Skiff LLC of the US, a subsidiary of media giant Hearst Corp. of the US.

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