I’m an all-day note-taker—my day's or week’s itinerary, messages to give to someone else, story ideas, ramblings, etc. Unfortunately I’m also a bit of a messy ... well, unorganized person, I admit. And as you may guess, those two personality traits usually add up, for me, to lots of unorganized, folded pieces of paper in my pockets or around my house and office, and also a library of notebooks of compiled thoughts and ideas with real order. So needless to say, I’m anticipating Sony’s A4-sized (8.3-inches x 11.7-inches) digital paper slate to be rather beneficial in my life. Unveiled last week,...

A few days ago, Sony announced they they were launching a large format reader aimed at the educational market. E Ink is making the screen, which has been touted as flexible and durable. Here's the relevant section of the press release: E Ink Mobius will be the first flexible display technology that will go into mass production for a large format digital paper product based on flexible Thin Film Transistor (TFT) technology developed by Sony. Mobius uses a TFT technology that will enable the development of much lighter and rugged products. Mobius displays can weigh less than 50% of the weight of...

I won't pretend to be familiar with the European Inventor Award myself, but according to the European Patent Office, "it pays tribute to the men and women whose quest for new ideas drives technological progress and economic growth, shapes society and improves our daily lives." Fifteen inventors are in the running for the award this year, and interestingly enough, one of the non-European inventors in the running is the U.S.-based team of Joseph M. Jacobson (pictured above) and Barrett Comiskey. Never heard of them? Me neither. But apparently they were the actual inventors of E Ink technology. E Ink displays, of course, have...

If you follow TeleRead regularly, you may know that aside from recently developed something of an obsession for the new smart watch trend, we're always fascinated by nearly any product that incorporates the technology of the E Ink Corporation into its design. Well ... remember the Kickstarted e-paper Pebble wrist watch? As promised, the company, Pebble Technology, announced Wednesday that they will begin shipping Pebble watches today, Wednesday, January 23. Although backers should be receiving their Pebbles in the mail shortly, the company has a few cautionary messages to announce. Listed as published on the Pebble blog, they are as follows: Notes: ♦ Pebble iOS App is not...

Most of you met the newest addition to the TeleRead team, the reporter and author Juli Monroe, when we published her introductory post a couple days back. (If you missed it, click here to give it a look.) But last weekend, we republished an article of Juli's about E Ink readers that was originally written for one of our sister sites, GadgeTell. Juli's piece was essentially a defense of dedicated E Ink e-readers; she made it quite clear that she doesn't put much stock into the recent chatter that, due to the rise in popularity of tablet computers, E Ink e-readers...

By Juli Monroe I’ve been reading posts saying that “E-Ink is dead” for, well, years now. The general argument goes something like this: “People really want tablets. They don’t want a single-function device. E-ink is too slow to refresh and isn’t good for anything except reading books. And people don’t read anyway.” All of those things are true (well, except for that last one), but it misses the point. I’m active on Kindleboards, an online forum for Kindle lovers, and discussion, purchasing and love for the E Ink Kindles is alive and well. The Kindle Paperwhite was sold out through most of the holiday season,...

The LCD vs e-ink eyestrain debates have been going on for some time, but one factor in the difference is the refresh rate. E-ink sits still like paper once it’s set. It doesn’t refresh until you turn the page. LCD, on the other hand, refreshes dozens of times per second, whether it’s on a TV, a monitor, or a tablet. But that could be about to change. Nikkei Electronics’s “Tech-On!” reports on a new LCD display panel technology under development that will reduce the necessary refresh rate from 60 per second to 1 per second or less when showing...

If you happen to have already read our last post, in which we referenced a Reuters article about the unfortunate decline in popularity of the e-reader, you might also be interested in checking out a few recent news items about the financial misfortunes of the Taiwan-based E Ink Holdings (formerly the E Ink Corporation). As we mentioned in that last post, E Ink's "monthly revenues dropped 91 percent in two months" at the end of 2011 (emphasis ours). This came after five years of near-constant growth for the company, which manufactures the displays of most Kindle and Nook e-readers. E Ink's massive revenue drop seems to have been largely caused by declining...

Last weekend, Reuters ran an interesting analysis-style think piece titled "E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf." The article revolves around the idea that because tablets have grown so popular, so quickly, the lowly e-reader has essentially becoming a nearly outdated gadget. Tablets, to put it plainly, have finally replaced e-readers, once and for all. From the article's lede: Amidst our growing love affair with the tablet, spare a thought for its increasingly shelfbound sibling: the e-reader. Take Taiwan's E Ink Holdings Inc, which makes most of the monochrome displays for devices such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. After...

E-Reader-info has some information about the forthcoming hyper-cheap “Beagle” e-reader from txtr, which is scheduled to sell for €9.90 (or about USD $13.00). This could very well be the cheapest E Ink reader ever seen, though the reason becomes obvious when you realize that it’s technically only about half of an e-reader, and that it will also be subsidized by cell phone carriers the way that cell phones commonly are. The idea behind the device is that it serves as a viewing device for e-books that are actually rendered into images by an associated smartphone, and uploaded over Bluetooth. This lets...

Those of you who don't happen to be productivity obsessives may have missed this one, but last night, Lifehacker posted a really simple trick that'll give your tablet or smartphone screen an appearance similar to that of an E-Ink screen ... sort of. Here's how it works: I use a matte screen protector and using an app like Cool Reader (since I'm on Android). I change the background to a moderate to light grey and the font to a dark grey about 25% -30% lighter than black. Turn down the screen brightness to about 75% outside and 45% in doors. Then change the font by adding fonts to...

With a $10,000 research prize as well as thousands of periodicals for reading and study, I've very recently found a great resource for librarians, eReaders and classic pulp fiction fans.  With titles ranging from Collier's Weekly to classic works of pulp such as Argosy, Weird Tales, and even Yank magazine, I've been reading for hours. If this sounds interesting to you, then head on over to unz.org, a site I recently stumbled across when doing some research for my history blog.  Brought online by Ron Unz, who has been a huge fan of Wikipedia, there are thousand of resources to look...