Librie

This is a potentially interesting product; Sony is coming out with an ebook reader that sports a new type of screen which supposedly gives out a resolution and brightness that is as easy to read as actual paper.

The result is a 6in screen with a resolution of 600×800 dots at 170dpi, considerably sharper than the 70-90dpi of a regular computer display. This allows for increasing the text size up to 200% with no degradation. One much-repeated fallacy about the Librie is that power is used only for turning pages. While it is true that the “ink” particles stay in position without consuming power, the electronic innards do drain the juice, hence the inclusion of a standby mode. Nevertheless, the three AAA batteries used to power the Librie should stretch to an impressive 10,000 pages, enough for about 40 novels.

The whole package seems decent and we’ll see how it catches on in Japan, a couple of things I don’t like though, they are using their Memory stick format, bleh. The only way I think it could really catch on is with something more of an industry standard, not their barely licensed format. And secondly, they’ve put in a DRM and are selling the books through their own service, looks like it’s very similar to iTunes and the iStore but even though I like Sony product design for some reason I’m not expecting much from that service. Also not sure how open it will be to people putting on their own content in some unprotected format.

3 Comments

karl April 28, 2004

time to create a standard for it???

karl April 28, 2004

hmmm Have you seen the new itunes and trailers module. I don’t like it at all, I preferred when it was on the Web page.

Patrick April 29, 2004

1. Probably a good idea but it would need to be an open one of course.
2. Not yet, I’ll possibly download it tonight.

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