The Future of e-Readers
Guest article by Kelly M. Kelly is a reading enthusiast, whose recently shifted from a real bookshelf to a digital one and has used the space that cleared up for a cool lava lamp. Kelly has thrown herself into the eReader world and tested and read about all the major eReaders.
At best-ereader.net you can find up to date information, reviews and the best eReaders
Remember what everyone's first cellphone looked like? Not the huge Zack Morris beige special, I don't know many people who had one of those, but your first on? It was probably bulky, had a cheap plastic case, pretty poor reception, the screen was no more sophisticated then the face of your Timex, like 7 ringtones, and the ones you could buy that were supposed to be of songs usually didn't even really sound much like the songs.
Remember that one? I do, I remember it fondly, but what does that have to do with ereaders? It's because that's the stage we are at for ereaders, we're at the point where they have reached a level of useability and affordable to where most people who have an interest in reading are considering one. They are becoming widely adopted.
In 10 years we're going to look back at the current crop of ereaders like we now can at the early cellphones, they seem so rudimentary that it's funny. The shift certainly won't be as dramatic, since a lot of cellphone technology improvement was because computers were constantly getting smaller, faster and cheaper and that isn't really a bottleneck now. However, there's no doubt the ereader of the future will be very different than what we is on the market now.
At best-ereader.net you can find up to date information, reviews and the best eReaders
Remember what everyone's first cellphone looked like? Not the huge Zack Morris beige special, I don't know many people who had one of those, but your first on? It was probably bulky, had a cheap plastic case, pretty poor reception, the screen was no more sophisticated then the face of your Timex, like 7 ringtones, and the ones you could buy that were supposed to be of songs usually didn't even really sound much like the songs.
Remember that one? I do, I remember it fondly, but what does that have to do with ereaders? It's because that's the stage we are at for ereaders, we're at the point where they have reached a level of useability and affordable to where most people who have an interest in reading are considering one. They are becoming widely adopted.
In 10 years we're going to look back at the current crop of ereaders like we now can at the early cellphones, they seem so rudimentary that it's funny. The shift certainly won't be as dramatic, since a lot of cellphone technology improvement was because computers were constantly getting smaller, faster and cheaper and that isn't really a bottleneck now. However, there's no doubt the ereader of the future will be very different than what we is on the market now.
So, what can we expect?
Here are the big weaknesses of the current ereaders, and therefore probably the places we can look forward to the most innovation.
The biggest issue by far for ereaders is the screen refresh rate - a screen can only update about once a second, this isn't a big deal for reading books, as you only notice it when changing pages, and it's an acceptable delay, but when you are trying to scroll menus, it's a real hassle. Apple, with its iphone and Ipod, is the most popular electronic gadget maker in the world and a big reason is the intuitive, response interfaces their devices have. There's no doubt that all ereader companies would love to give their users the same experience that users of iPods and iPhones love, whoever could do that best would likely dominate the market.
But as it stands, the technology is limited to a slow refresh rate, but there have been some good workarounds - Sony has touchscreens, so as long as you're on the right page you can pick what you want without the scrolling delay. The Nook has a separate, traditional LCD that tries to do most of the menu interactions. These are nice and do provide some added ease of use, but having an additional LCD added to the size and price of a unit, and the touchscreens do little more then cut the delay of scrolling.
Text to speech is a current feature designed to allow your text to be read to you, but since it sounds like a robot talking, it's a poor substitute for an audiobook, it's too unnatural to listen to easily. Currently that is about the best we can expect because natural speech is a difficult field of artificial intelligence, and is probably not likely to get much better in the near future.
The file organization, particularly on the Kindle, is terrible, all the files just sit in a folder called documents and you can sort by author, title or most recently accessed. Compare that to iTunes where you can control artists, albums, genres and can use rankings, check marks, genres and compilations to make my music easy to access. Ereaders give me nowhere close to that level of control, though it's not necessary as most ereader users won't demand nearly access to different documents nearly as much as an iPod user requests different songs. But still, additional sorting options, particularly an option to only show unread, currently reading or read books would be very helpful.
It's comical to have a state of the art reading device, only to have it defeated by the almighty light switch. Having a $10 led light clipped onto the ereader to make it work just strikes me as wrong, and it's something that will no doubt be corrected moving forward. Sony has introduced an initial solution by simply fixing some led lights to the sides of the screen. More innovative lighting solutions will continue to evolve.
The biggest issue by far for ereaders is the screen refresh rate - a screen can only update about once a second, this isn't a big deal for reading books, as you only notice it when changing pages, and it's an acceptable delay, but when you are trying to scroll menus, it's a real hassle. Apple, with its iphone and Ipod, is the most popular electronic gadget maker in the world and a big reason is the intuitive, response interfaces their devices have. There's no doubt that all ereader companies would love to give their users the same experience that users of iPods and iPhones love, whoever could do that best would likely dominate the market.
But as it stands, the technology is limited to a slow refresh rate, but there have been some good workarounds - Sony has touchscreens, so as long as you're on the right page you can pick what you want without the scrolling delay. The Nook has a separate, traditional LCD that tries to do most of the menu interactions. These are nice and do provide some added ease of use, but having an additional LCD added to the size and price of a unit, and the touchscreens do little more then cut the delay of scrolling.
Text to speech is a current feature designed to allow your text to be read to you, but since it sounds like a robot talking, it's a poor substitute for an audiobook, it's too unnatural to listen to easily. Currently that is about the best we can expect because natural speech is a difficult field of artificial intelligence, and is probably not likely to get much better in the near future.
The file organization, particularly on the Kindle, is terrible, all the files just sit in a folder called documents and you can sort by author, title or most recently accessed. Compare that to iTunes where you can control artists, albums, genres and can use rankings, check marks, genres and compilations to make my music easy to access. Ereaders give me nowhere close to that level of control, though it's not necessary as most ereader users won't demand nearly access to different documents nearly as much as an iPod user requests different songs. But still, additional sorting options, particularly an option to only show unread, currently reading or read books would be very helpful.
It's comical to have a state of the art reading device, only to have it defeated by the almighty light switch. Having a $10 led light clipped onto the ereader to make it work just strikes me as wrong, and it's something that will no doubt be corrected moving forward. Sony has introduced an initial solution by simply fixing some led lights to the sides of the screen. More innovative lighting solutions will continue to evolve.
Will portable computers make e-Readers obsolete?
Perhaps the holy grail of personal devices is the same as that of psychology or physics, a unified theory, or in this case a unified device. For a long time companies have tried to put all these devices into one, starting with the cellphone/pager combo (it's that ridiculous?) and now we have cellphone/music player/video player/pda/internet browser/email/video game system/text messaging combos that actually do all that pretty well, it's actually pretty amazing, but wouldn't it be nice to somehow have an ereader screen on it as well? I think it would.
So, what will we see moving forward?
Right now the Kindle only really does ereading and can browse text heavy internet sites well, with the potential to do any other text based activity, such as email or text messaging, along with mp3 playing pretty much immediately, there's nothing but some software coding standing in the way. On the other hand, games, video, anything that requires color or quick response time are things that can't imagined with how the current ereaders are manufactured.
So, what will we see moving forward?
Right now the Kindle only really does ereading and can browse text heavy internet sites well, with the potential to do any other text based activity, such as email or text messaging, along with mp3 playing pretty much immediately, there's nothing but some software coding standing in the way. On the other hand, games, video, anything that requires color or quick response time are things that can't imagined with how the current ereaders are manufactured.
How long will e-Ink last?
So, will we see other a change in the way ereaders are designed? Digital ink is the current technology used for ereader screens, but since it's such a bottleneck for the performance of the device, either that issue needs to be solved, or a different screen technology would be used.
An interesting third option is to combine two different screen technologies in one device. Like the Pixel Qi – http://jkontherun.com/2010/01/08/pixel-qi-displays-the-future-of-e-readers-and-netbooks/
Since the ereaders are a competitive market, and already you see companies adding 3G web browsing, mp3 playing, it's safe to assume that ereaders are going to become more multi featured in the future, trying to solve as much consumer needs as possible. I think that while it seems like Kindles are moving closer to cellphones in their features, it's probably more likely that given that most prefer ereader screensizes above what you can put in your pocket, that ereaders will move more towards netbook replacements, since netbooks have exploded in popularity over the past few years. A netbook's appeal is to have a small laptop that can be taken anywhere easily to be used for basic computing activities like office, internet, and email. Ereaders seem very well suited to do that.
Will we see an iphone type cellphone and ereader/netbook in everyone's pocket a few years down the road? Maybe, I know I'm intrigued to see what how ereaders evolve.
Special thanks to Kelly M who has given us a fantastic insight into the future of e-Readers.