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Potential Kindle rival gets $2.9M from French government
December 6, 2007 | 1:45 pm
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By David Rothman
Could Nemoptic display technology be the tortoise in the race with E Ink, which, for now, is up against production limits? Who knows. But whatever the reasons, someone is showing confidence in Nemoptic—the French government, which has awarded the company US$2.9 million.
The money will go toward the Sylen e-reader project, according to EE Times Europe. Nemoptic, says ETE, aims to develop a “more user-friendly multiformat e-paper reading device for mobile applications such as e-newspapers and electronic textbooks. The ultimate goal is to build a new French industry for digital publishing and content distribution on mobile e-reader devices.” Notice? Multiformat. Hint, hint, Amazon. Care to get serious about .epub, Jeff—not just your proprietary Kindle format (the eBabeler that some fear might displace Amazon’s existing Mobipocket, at great cost and inconvenience to readers, e-tailers and the rest of the e-book industry)?
Bookeen also to benefit from Nemoptic displays
Oh, and guess who else could benefit from Nemoptic efforts? Bookeen, home of the Cybook Gen3. My French friends at Bookeen and Feedbooks are excited about .epub and standards in general, while Amazon, the largest bookstore in the online world, pursues a proprietary approach, the equivalent of George’s Bush’s vision of a U.S.-bossed planet. While the DRM-infested Kindle is currently for the U.S. only, you can bet that Amazon will eventually try to globalize it—all while keeping its censor-friendly features, which despots could love.
Like the Chinese, who are trying to export their e-library technology, the French government is probably well aware of the connection between tech infrastructure and the ease of spreading a nation’s culture. Right now the Internet itself is U.S.-centric, and so are the major content providers for the e-book world. But that doesn’t mean things won’t change. Except for the Amazon Kindle, actually made in China, all the major e-paper-based hardware comes from outside the U.S. The good news is that the French and many others outside the U.S. are into standards. Here’s to a level playing field for all!
Under the TeleRead plan, first proposed in the early 1990s, the U.S. could have had a coherent information policy, with a decentralized national digital library system and systematic efforts to develop and popularize the right hardware from the States and elsewhere to spread literacy. Instead, mass interest in books keeps slipping in America, and Amazon and Google would be delighted to be the new public library systems. Not that the U.S. government couldn’t eventually take the wrong kind of interest in e-books. For that reason, we need a strong private publishing industry, too, and ideally heavy participation from nonprofits.
If TeleRead equivalents can develop elsewhere, so much the better! The inspiration for TeleRead itself comes from the French Minitel plan, which, though flawed (didn’t play well with the Internet!) was a start.
Detail: Laurent Picard at Bookeen is upbeat about Mobi’s prospects despite the Kindle. I hope he’s right!
(Nemoptic news link via MobileRead.)
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Comments:
No, sorry. The French do not inspire any confidence in me. Back in the early 80s, they schemed to do Minitel. Everyone was in awe of the boldness and vision of the French. My God, *they* would be the first 21st Century nation! Baloney!
The Internet — from anarchic no-central-planning America — sent it packing.
Minitel:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,951821,00.html
The same will happen with this ebook scheme of theirs.
Oops. I see you actually did mention Minitel. Still, there’s the French for you.
The technology itself looks very interesting. I had heard distally of it before but had assumed it to be just a variation of LCD, which in fact it is, but I was unaware it had so many of the features of eink (including slow refresh rates, though another variety does not seem to have this problem).
Stable reflective displays, low, low, power consumption (page turn based just like eink), very high dpi (200).
The use for shelf-tags (and as tiny windows on credit cards) all the way up to A4 (bigger displays promised) is exciting. Claims of flexible page versions. And colour already developed. These things look very promising.
Please not that some of the pictures of the prototype products are faked, but this is true on many of the eink producers sites.
The critical bit has nothing directly to do with the technology itself, but the investment of the French Government and an emphasis on “textbooks”.
“Textbooks” and Government involvement spells potential success. It could mean school education as a huge buyer, hence an enormous kick-start to manufacturing and price leveling.
That would mean success in a big way. It means cheap devices coming onto the market in a big way. And it is a matter of national culture, that is the French edge hanging above everyone else.
The French nation takes culture seriously, not as a money making venture, but as a social responsibility. That may turn out to be THE most important element in the transition from paper to digital. It has to be culture first, underwriting commercial publishing, that is a firm foundation and it is a characteristic of the French nation, a bias that is extremely healthy and should not be dismissed.
It may not bear fruit, but if it does it will be delicious. The Anglo shopkeeper mentality does not have the qualities that make for such a big cultural change as is promised by this technology.
I do not dislike the French. I simply note that all such grand schemes of theirs invariably fail.
Minitel was a huge success, AT THE TIME. Back when a handful of people were using Compuserve and BBs the French had millions of people logging into Minitel terminals. At the time I was a UK Prestel user and could only dream of the services the French offered. As Mike noted, however, as with most of these French schemes the gubment tries to keep too tight a control of it so the Minitel terminals (originally to replace the phone book – how green was that?) became dinosaurs compared to ubiquitous computers. OTOH I’m pretty sure millions of those terminals are STILL in use.
Mike I was not suggested that you did dislike the French, but rather that there is a French national characteristic of cultural promotion, pride and developed expertise, that fits such a project neatly.
Other involved, aside from Nemoptic and Cybook, are:
Le Monde
Bibliothèque Publique d’Information du Centre Pompidou
Plus four research Labs:
Lutin User lab, Cognition & Usage lab, the Laboratory of Computer Sciences, and the Lyon Research Center for Images and Intelligent Information Systems.
Followed by several tech firms, Ie not a bad mix of content providers, researchers and tech companies.
This runs counters to the whole approach so far in readers:
“Rich media content: larger e-paper displays that will be more compatible for news content and images”
While eink has gone for the pocket size, here is an attempt to ensure the bigger displays as well. I believe this is important (especially if things are cheap and people end up owning a number of devices).
I found this reference useful:
http://www.globalsmt.net/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=3225
If they pull it off quickly, do not waste away the billions, but invest the most of it into production, then they will have an edge that I cannot see anyone else matching.
Earlier I explored what lessons the OLPC project could learn from Minitel (both “grand projects”). Among the usual talk about hair pieces there was one commenter who said that Minitel was sent packing by the Internet, to use your phrasing, because the latter was a far more open system. In other words, its openness allowed the Internet to be more than a grand project.
That does not mean though that Minitel failed, because as all grand projects it had a specific purpose (replace the phone book), and in that purpose it apparently succeeded.
Anyway, Mike, writing off an entire culture based on the fact that one of its grand projects ultimately failed other people’s unwarranted expectations seems to be stretching things a bit.
I do not write off French culture at all. I write off their idiotic We The Govmint Knows All attitude that is simply wrong wrong wrong. Japan thought they would rule the world through MITI. They now outsource to China and have mimicked America with homeless shantytowns. So much for Rule By Brainiacs.
And do you *really* want to trust the French with something as important as *books* when they cave in to the RIAA with music and the MPAA with movies?
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/12/meanwhile-as-th.html
And while Minitel might have succeeded AT THAT TIME, it was indeed a brief time and was justifiably obsoleted as all Command And Control schemes deserve to be.
I favor the American anarchic way of doing things. I do not argue it is either efficient or right but it does invariably turn out the best way to do things (not all things, but many).