e-Book Echo: Color Coming?
Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. The e-book world has been full of product announcements of late, and this week saw things quiet down. The wait is on for the appearance of all the new e-book readers that have been announced right and left lately. Samsung is an electronic giant with a lot of resources, so when they start talking about color e-book screens we sit up and listen. This week they demonstrated a very early prototype of a color e-paper using E-Ink technology. Samsung believes they will be able to bring the color display to market in a couple of years, adding fuel to the color e-book fire.
PVI is another company that makes reader displays, and they are ramping up to produce color screens for them in the last half of 2010. The company currently produces black and white displays, and may have color screens using AMOLED technology appearing soon.
Netbook creator ASUS is talking up making its own e-book reader, and bringing it to market early next year. The company has been investigating products they can produce to address competition in the netbook segment, and e-book readers is one such product. They are expected to make a reader announcement before the end of the year.
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Colo(u)r could really make the ebook market explode. Those of us who mainly read novels aren’t too fussed about it but I’m thinking of teens and others who enjoy comic books, ahem, sorry, ‘graphic novels’ and color could also resurrect the declining magazine market. Great for newspapers too! I know that we can go to the web for all the news we need but there’s always going to be a market for the newspaper ‘experience’.
Ebook readers will need to speed up a bit though to help replicate that flipping through the pages experience we tend to do with magazines and newspapers.
I’m quite excited!
I agree with Gavin, not much need for color in today’s early generation e-book novels, but color will have a significant impact on magazine and newspaper publishers. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see ads in the middle of new novels when advertisers can have interactive, color “inserts.” Maybe the books will get even less expensive when publishers can sell ads, putting even more pressure on independent book stores.