David Tanaka

Among the press releases from the Computex trade show held in Taipei in early June was an item entitled “e-Book Showing Strong Growth in 2008.” The headline turned out to be somewhat misleading compared to what was in the actual release: interesting enough, but depending on what segment of the e-book sector you focus on, there is room for optimism but also disappointment.

As a concept, the e-book and its e-paper building block are easy to grasp and something we’d like to like — books, newspapers and magazines brought into the electronic age in digital form. But how do they stack up to paper?

Paper products are successful content delivery systems for a few reasons. Relatively low entry cost means that most people can afford to buy books and magazines ($150 textbooks notwithstanding). An established distribution system means they are available virtually anywhere.

The prerequisite for consumer participation is relatively simple: basic literacy will get you into a relationship with a book. The user interface is uncomplicated and doesn’t demand steep learning — if you can flip pages, you can get through the content. On top of that, many book lovers find the book itself to be an esthetically pleasing form — the weight, cover design, paper texture, the artistry of the typography and illustration, even the smell — quite apart from the book’s actual content.

The e-book ecology is a different environment altogether. One key difference is the separation of content and content holder. It’s hard to think of a book as being separate from the paper it’s printed on, but that’s one feature that differentiates e-books from paper ones — empty buckets of memory that can be filled and refilled with diverse content. But that’s also creating a couple of related obstacles — those dealing with the physical devices that people would use to view e-books, and those dealing with the content.

Devices to present e-book content span a range from personal computers to specialized e-book readers styled like books. This is where e-paper comes into play — think of paper-thin high-resolution displays that are flexible enough to roll up or fold. There are a few technologies being used to make e-paper displays, but they share some properties. They are reflective (in contrast to LCD panels, which have to be backlit), and can hold whatever is on the screen (image or text) without having to refresh the pixels. Both of those keep energy requirements for e-paper extremely low compared to something like a notebook computer display. Book readers don’t have to be flexible or foldable to mimic the properties of books, but nevertheless the screens used in the current crop of readers, such as Sony’s PRS-500 or Amazon.com’s Kindle product use monochrome e-paper displays.

Giving a peek at the near future of e-paper is LG Philips LCD (a joint venture between LG and Philips). At a trade show earlier this year it showcased its colour e-paper display, a flexible (TFT on flexible foil) A4 size (14-inch diagonal) high resolution (1280 x 890 pixel) panel that’s paper-thin (0.012 inch). This is probably what’s in your mind’s eye when you think of an electronic newspaper. The hardware hurdles are being picked away at, but content and content delivery face the challenges other media forms face when going digital: where to get quality content, and how to prevent it from being repeatedly copied with no dues going to copyright holders.

One of the interesting statistics noted in the Computex press release — which was a high point in terms of the market — was from a research firm in Japan, which found that between March 2006 and March 2007 the e-book content download market in Japan grew by close to 200 per cent to around 18.2 billion yen or around $175 million, with about 60 per cent of downloads being made to mobile phones. “Mobile phones,” you say?

Interesting, that, since one of the early e-book platform candidates was the PDA, which offered portability, a decent screen and storage capacity. PDAs have largely morphed into smartphones and maybe it’s here that e-books will finally gain some legs. Consider the trajectory of advanced smartphone products like the iPhone or Blackberry. The new iPhone is a true 3G device, which offers far better bandwidth than EDGE. RIM’s upcoming 9000 series will also be 3G. iPhone already has a browser well optimized for the small screen. It is also an iPod, with all of the iTunes Store infrastructure behind it. If you can buy tunes and movies for your iPhone, why not reading material?

There are interesting parallels as well as contrasts here to Amazon.com’s Kindle device, which was launched in the U.S. in the fall of 2007. This e-book reader communicates with the Kindle Store over Amazon Whispernet, which is a cellular-based (Sprint) datacomm network. You can buy books, newspapers etc. over the network.

Amazon says Kindle will hold around 200 books (with no pictorial content) in its onboard memory, but the unit’s memory can be expanded via SD cards. The main difference between Kindle and a smartphone is that Amazon has built the cost of data communication into its business model, so that for the customer, there is no separate cellular fee or subscription requirement to use Kindle. Hmm. Doesn’t Amazon sell movies and music too?