Electronic paper (e-paper) looks like conventional paper and the bright wash of color it generates uses the ambient light for rendition, just like conventional paint, so no backlight is needed. Which means that the vividness of the color is maintained, even in bright outdoor conditions. Philips' technology allows different colors of ink to be built into one layer with each color controlled separately. This means the layer can be transparent, the same color as any one of the inks or even a mixture of multiple colors. Moreover, the saturation of each individual color can be controlled accurately – so any shade can be produced. Recently, Philips successfully realized a simplified, yet advanced version of its e-paper technology: e-skin. Since it is less complicated and less expensive to realize, it enables new applications. And because e-skin makes use of the ambient light, it is an inherently energy-efficient system, making it particularly suitable for application in portable devices as well.

While portable devices might be the focus in the short-term, this sort of technology could also be used for larger equipment and even wallpaper in your home. In other words, it might not be long before we can change the color and the entire ambiance of a room with the push of a button. [Philips via Pocket-Lint]

While PC Pro praises the use of ePub format (it's not tied so closely to one store like the Kindle), they put its build and display quality below the Kindle. They say it's a lot like the Sony Reader PRS-505...but far more expensive for no justifiable reason. (The Story costs the equivalent of $380, while that Reader is but $300.) Sounds like a price drop will straighten out most of these qualms. [PC Pro via Engadget]

That's half the price of a new Kindle 2 (or $70 less than a refurb Kindle 2), with all of the same core functionality (like Amazon's wireless Whispernet) intact.

So is $150 cheap enough to tempt you? Or is your ebook pricepoint lower, say, $100 or $50 or free with X amount of book purchases? Inquiring minds want to know!

Personally, I'm a big enough tech whore that I'd only buy the latest model of Kindle for that much, partially for the tiny improvements, largely so people ask me, "Is that a new Kindle??" And I say, "Sorry, I don't associate with the type who doesn't know whether or not this is the latest Kindle. Nothing personal. Just a simple code by which I live my life." [Amazon via blog Kindle via mobility site via CrunchGear ]

[YouTube via CrunchGear]

As I said above, color e-paper boasts and chest thumping from the Philips camp is nothing new. However, this current concept (and really, this is still another pipe dream concept for now) uses a completely new technique that preserves screen resolution by literally turning the traditional pixel model on its head.

For some background, existing e-ink tech in devices like Sony's Reader and the Amazon Kindle use electrophoresis. This technique sees white particles suspended in a dark liquid. When an electric field is passed through them, they get happy, more vertically up and down, and you can read Stephen King on your Kindle.

But those crazy Philips folk in Amsterdam vaulted over all that and implemented "in-plane electrophoretics" so that they could move multi-color bits about horizontally, not vertically. The result could very well rival LCD screens someday:

Each pixel is made up of two microcapsule chambers: one containing yellow and cyan particles, the other, below, containing magenta and black particles. Within each microcapsule, one set of colored particles is charged positively while the other is charged negatively.

By carefully controlling the voltages at electrodes positioned on the edges of the pixels, it is possible to spread the colored particles across the pixel or remove them from view altogether by hiding them behind the electrodes, says Lenssen. This means that different shades of color can be achieved by controlling how many of each group of colored particles are visible. To create white, all of the particles are simply shifted to the side to reveal the white substrate beneath the two microcapsules.

There's more all all this in our fine Giz Explains feature about the absence of a "perfect" eReader, which you should check out.

Which leads to the inevitable caveat. This tech is "in its infancy," not ready, and about three years off, if not more. In the meantime, Amazon would like you to save the newspaper industry by giving them a $500 donation (ed. Note - Last line inspired by Mark Wilson's Twitter feed.) [Technology Review - Thanks, Ron]

First, they believe Sony will release a larger format eReader to compete with the Kindle DX by the end of the year. Second, and what's honestly the bigger piece of news, is that PVI's color e-paper will not be ready until 2010 (previously, 2009 was the target).

Clearly, making color e-paper is a tough proposition. But I'm with Rothman on this one—I really expected the electrophoretic display industry to advance faster than it has. Of course, that's easy to say from the cheap seats. [DigiTimes via mobileread via SlashGear]

* The photo is not of a display but of far more awesome rainbow jello.

The iRiver Libre doesn't feature EVDO or a QWERTY, but it is a white-framed eBook that reads PDFs, plays music and features SD-expandable storage. It's also controlled by a single joystick.

And as long as that joystick works well enough, we're interested to see how much the Libre costs whenever iRiver decides to release it. I mean, Amazon isn't the only company in the world, people. [engadget via DVICE]

UPDATE: As our sharp-eyed readership pointed out, this product appears to be a mere reskin of another, the eSlick.

Sneakily tacked on a post about Amazon's e-ink display manufacturer Prime View International, the publication states:

Amazon plans to launch a new generation of Kindle by the end of this year, which will be larger in size and equipped with touch functions, the sources said.

Frankly, as much as people like the Kindle 2, I've been surprised that Amazon hasn't released system with these purported specs yet. As nice as the Kindles may be to use, they look like something straight out of 1980, minus the tape heads. [DigiTimes via Engadget and image]

The Current State of Suck
Amazon will sell a lot of Kindle 2s. If they can keep up with demand this time, they'll sell more than the original Kindle, supposedly now in the hands of 500,000 people. But it's still not the breakthrough reader, the one that will dramatically overturn and recreate the literary market.

People call it the "iPod of books," and in some senses that's true. The first iPods didn't overturn any market. They were just marginally better than their competitors, but they were limited to Mac users only, had mechanical scroll wheels and were easily damaged.

Desire for the original iPod is like desire for the Kindles—it reveals that there is a very real mass of people who do want this kind of device. But getting from the original iPod to the hottest new models may prove to be an easier journey than going from these original Kindles (and Sony Readers) to the perfect reading device, primarily because of display technology—readers are, after all, designed for the singular purpose of displaying content that's easy on the eyes. As of now, there are two display camps—electronic paper and LCD—and both have far too many compromises at the moment to be adequate for a reading revolution.

E-Ink vs LCD
Most readers, including Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, use a type of electronic paper called E-Ink. These displays are known scientifically as electrophoretic, and involve the arrangement of pixels on a screen like you would draw on an Etch-a-Sketch. That is, energy is used to sketch, but once the pixels are in place, they stay in place without demanding power.

E-Ink differs from the LCD screen you're likely reading this on (unless you subscribe to Giz's new Kindle feed) in that it's not backlit. Like legitimate paper, it must be held under a light source, but proponents say that's easier on the eyes. You're not staring at any rapidly flickering light bulb, just calm black pixels on a grayish background.

And because E-Ink only uses power to change pages or images, but not to display a given page, E-Ink-based electronics can run for days without recharging. The problem with that E-Ink is expensive, slow (you can't have moving cursors or any kind of video) and boring. No color, crummy contrast, crappy resolution. Though reading actual text in good light is pleasant, the limitations of E-Ink are painfully obvious to even the least-techie of users.

Standard LCDs on your computer or an ebook-friendly smartphone aren't any better. They could be too small, and if they're not too small, they require too much power to run for any prolonged length of time. (E-Ink can go for days—getting a single day out of any LCD device would be a coup.) Above all, it's just not a comfortable display to read on—sure you might stare at a monitor eight hours a day, but no one wants to read a novel on a glowing, constantly refreshing screen when they're lying in bed, trying to relax. It's doable, sure, but make no mistake, it's a harsher experience.

The Dimly Lit Future
So what's next? Plastic Logic presents the rosiest picture of the future of electronic paper displays, a perfectly-sized flexible plastic touchscreen that's basically all E-Ink display, plus Wi-Fi.

I talked to Time Magazine's Josh Quittner, who's been intently researching readers, and he loves the device. The problem, he says, is that it's both too innovative and too slow—it's made entirely of plastic, even the transistors, requiring brand new fabs to produce it. So not only will the initial version will be expensive as hell, with a 10.7" screen, but it'll be standard black on gray. Color, which E-Ink has developed in the lab, won't be coming out until 2011—possibly too late. Not even God knows what the market will be like in 2011—try to imagine what you thought cellphones would be like in 2008 from back in 2006.

Mary Lou Jepsen—who designed the XO Laptop's breakthrough reflective LCD screen and her new company, Pixel Qi, are reinventing the LCD again, and their display, if it lives up to its promises, could be the other way forward. In fact, she told me that she predicts that "in 2010, LCDs designed for reading will overtake the electrophoretic display technology in the ereader market."

She says that Pixel Qi's displays are actually more readable than e-paper, with "excellent reflectance, high resolution for text, sunlight readability"—just as easy on the eyes when the backlighting is turned off, but with the key advantages of full color and fast refresh, for pages that update as fast as video. Jepsen says it's even possible to get a week of battery life from LCD tech, of course depending on the device the screens are embedded in. Infrastructurally and perhaps historically speaking, the odds are in LCD's favor. Even new versions will be incredibly cheap and quick to manufacture because they can be made entirely in existing factories without requiring new, specialized equipment.

What's Really Gonna Happen?
Which display tech will win out is may prove to be more economic than aesthetic, but ebook readers are here to stay. The presumption that everyone will eventually read books on an electronic display of some sort in the future is so fundamental I haven't bothered to question it, mostly because nobody else does either. (Even if you love books, ebook reading makes sense.)

If you believe there's a future for a dedicated device that exists solely to display books and newspapers and whatever other forms of the printed word you want to read, then E-Ink and similar tech makes sense, as long as it eventually can cost less and refresh faster. The battery-life advantage is huge. But if you think that a reader will be just one function of, say, a multitouch tablet that's also your netbook, PDA and video display—and it's a device you charge every night—it's pretty clear that a multi-talented LCD display is the future.

As Quittner told us, someone's going to figure this out. It's just a question of who and when.

Old book image: ēst smiltis no ausīm/Flickr

Apparently, the exclusive may be a limited time offer before the piece is available to everyone down the line. But how great would it be if, somehow, the non-Kindle-owning public got a different copy of the story that's missing the Kindle? Maybe an absurd doppelganger could go in the e-reader's place, like a banana or giant foam finger.

That'd show 'em, Jeff Bezos. That'd show 'em. [WSJ via Engadget]

Spotted at a Taiwanese book show, these two Delta Electronics displays, though formally spec-less, are clearly astounding in quality. Coming in monochrome and color configurations, apparently the black and white version has better contrast, but both feature very sharp visuals. Indeed, even when shrunken and compressed in our lead image, you can still make out some of the headlines along with the specific anatomy of Obama's impressive earlobes.

So while the world will probably buzz next about the new Kindle, keep in mind what we could be seeing in e-paper technology, even if a 24-inch display is a little too large to fit in most briefcases. [Engadget China via Engadget]

The multi-part displays, measuring at 1m x 3.2m and supporting a 240x768 resolution have been placed alongside a few main thoroughfares in the city, and are intended to give pedestrians disaster response instructions. E-paper is perfect for application like this, for a few reasons. A dynamic display is incredibly valuable in a disaster, as it can change its contents to suit the details of a specific situation. A traditional LCD panel would be the most obvious choice for such a thing, but it suffers from excessive power requirements and a lack a durability, which are crucial limitation for the earthquake-prone region.

Power consumption for the whole unit, which can pull data from servers via Wi-Fi, is a mere 24W, and E-paper can keep displaying data after power has been cut, though it can't change it. A smaller unit, installed at bus stops, consumes just 9W. This test is just to explore the possibilities of low-power digital signage, but the advantages seem obvious—deployments like this are being help up by price more than anything else. [Tech-on]

E-Ink watches have made it onto the market in one form or another, but they're still not as good looking as this render from 2006. You get a digital representation of an analog face (neat) as well as a digital representation of a digital face. If this ever made it to market, we'd buy this for upwards of $200. [Julien Bergignat via Fubiz via Dvice]

So The Algonquin offers a complimentary Kindle "loaded with your favorite book" during the duration of your stay at the hotel. Just as I've found iPod alarm clocks to be, somewhat surprisingly, pretty handy when I travel, a Kindle preloaded with something decent for me to read sounds pretty great, too.

I stayed at a place recently with an Xbox 360 hooked up to an HDTV over an SD cord. It had no games and couldn't connect to the internet. What a tease! I had to leave the room to do stuff and everything. [The Algonquin via Engadget and Image]

We thoroughly enjoy that his hands are in each shot. That's what the fancy Kindle has been missing all this time! [Richard Shed via Unplggd]

The 14.1, 6.1, 2.4 and 1.7-inch displays are believe to use a cholesteric LCD material to freeze the images. Power specifications were not provided, but freezing data into the display apparently takes a "relatively large" amount of energy.

And while Sharp hasn't pitched the tech for displaying the newspaper, they do see a lot of potential in the commercial market. One Osaka grocery is already testing several smaller displays that are hooked up to Wi-Fi and can change prices easily. The same principle would work well for nightly restaurant specials and the ever-fluctuating pricepoints at children's lemonade stands everywhere. [Tech-On via Slashgear]

Samsung couldn't accomplish this with a normal glass substrate for obvious reasons, so they pioneered a new "sputtering" technique to coat the panel with a flexible membrane. Here's how it goes: a block of the coating material is blasted with an ion gun, causing it to eject bits of itself into an thermodynamically unbalanced cloud of atoms, which then cling to and form a film on anything else in the vacuum chamber — namely, this floppety panel.

This looks like it is just a one-off, unpriced expo unit, but at least we know it's possible. This tech come interesting close in capability to Samsung's other recently demonstrated ultra-thin color display, so we might have the beginning of an confusing display tech overlap. Cool, Samsung. Please sort that out, and wake me up when my shirt is a TV. [TechOn via OLED Display]