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Irex Iliad and the e-paper paradigm
April 8, 2006 | 10:46 pm
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By Branko Collin
(I visited the offices of Irex Technologies two weeks ago, and talked with some of the people there about their E Ink based Iliad e-book reader. Earlier reports of this visit here and here.)
At Irex Towers a tall glass case contains a number of E Ink prototypes and a Sony Librié, most of them (if not all) set to cycle through a number of images or pages.
The company has also got a couple of large notice boards filled with press clippings about the Iliad, and print-outs of e-mails that were sent to Irex.
Undoubtedly these displays will impress the visitor, but perhaps they also serve as a mirror to the team: this is what we have to improve upon, and this is what we have to work towards.
Several times during my visit P.R. man Willem Endhoven tries to make me understand that Irex Technologies is actively listening to what everybody has to say about what the Iliad should be like; your e-mails, the press, visitors, people receiving sample devices, test subjects, they all seem to play a role in the shaping of the Iliad.
Tabula Rasa
In a sense Irex is trying to make the Iliad a tabula rasa; a device that comes with as little bagage as possible. When you buy a pack of printer paper, you do not ask the manufacturer which texts come pre-printed on the sheets, nor do you ask from which publishers you can print texts on them. I get the feeling that the same goes for the Iliad.
But then again, you do not pay hundreds of euros for a stack of p-paper, and so the question of whether the device will work with the books you have bought or are planning to buy is a valid one.
And yet, Irex skirt around this question. Yes, there are talks with content suppliers. For instance, the company is talking with every Dutch newspaper.
Irex also claim to be in talks with three big names in e-book land, but does not want to tell me their names before these sellers reveal themselves.
The webshop is aimed at early adopters and gadget freaks. While Irex will be focussing on deals with businesses that wish to use the Iliad within their companies, or that wish to bundle their content with an Iliad, these first private customers will receive an almost bare device that may not even function fully. The Iliad will receive auto-updates through the Irex Delivery Service (IDS), so that in time it will become what it is meant to be. Yet, this is still the first generation Iliad, with the second generation planned a year from now.
When the roll-out for trials and the webshop will materialize this April, no DRM-ed books will likely be available for it. However, the Iliad will contain viewers for amongst others TXT, PDF and HTML, so the eager early-adopters will have something to play with.
One of the first viewers was made by a Chinese e-book seller (“think: the Chinese Mobipocket”) and supports annotations. Speaking of Mobipocket: at their forums, a user asks: “Does Mobipocket plan to develop reader software for the upcoming iRex Iliad eInk reader?” To which Mobipocket Support Team Member “mobi_erick” replied: “Perhaps. It is still in discussion.”
Developers! Developers! Developers!
The Iliad may be a tabula rasa in some ways, in other ways design decisions were made and stuck to. The screen size, the wifi function, the touch screen; these are the things that set the Iliad apart from the competition, and that Irex is not planning to depart from.
This tug of war between a daddy-knows-best approach and an open design is also apparent in Irex’s philosophy on third-party development.
Initially I reported that only Irex’s partners will be able to develop for the Iliad, but Willem Endhoven corrected me during my visit; only partners will be actively supported, but independent developers may receive the information they need to roll their own software. The company imagines three levels of developer information that it could release.
Level One is information on how to create content optimized for the Iliad. For example, if you currently put an HTML file on the Iliad, the device will count this as one page. Irex intends to tell users how to create multiple HTML files that are displayed as as many pages. These optimization notes should appear this month, at the same time the webshop is opened.
Level Two will let people code custom viewers. A viewer is a program running on the Iliad that displays a certain type of document format. For instance, there are viewers for HTML, PDF, et cetera. Developers will be told for instance how to access both the hard- and software buttons. This information should be released after the summer, when the system will be considered stable.
Viewers for specific (often DRM-ed) e-book formats should be supplied by the e-book sellers. Viewers control some of the hardware buttons and all of the software ones.
The third level would be to release the entire specification of the device for the hardcore hacker — said hacker shouldn’t count on this information ever to be released. Irex considers a completely reprogrammed device no longer an Iliad, and why should they support non-Iliads?
How to compete with paper?
As I wrote earlier, Willem Endhoven sees paper as the biggest competitor to the Iliad. The device is supposed to supplant paper, not PDAs or tablet PCs.
How this is going to work out, how this is going to result in a usable interface even Irex themselves cannot be sure of. Of course, they have performed extensive user tests. And yet many choices will only surface during heavy, real-world use.
Some of the choices that Irex are faced with (as doubtless the other e-paper reader manufacturers are): when the user doesn’t tell you otherwise, should you keep displaying a page forever (the default for epaper)? How do you notify a user when the battery is empty? With LCD, the screen will refuse to display when there is no more juice, but the E Ink screen will refuse to undisplay.
As for blanking the screen on purpose, either by pressing a button or after a set amount of time, I assumed this would be important mostly from a privacy viewpoint. However, the Irex people came up with a different example: when the stewardess in the airplane asks you to switch off your “computer,” you will want to make it appear switched off.
For the Iliad to compete with regular paper though, it will have to offer something different. Irex considers those advantages to lie in the areas of distribution (a company can distribute its internal documents electronically rather than on paper), and of on-time delivery.
Awareness, standards, paradigms
When I asked who Irex consider to be the biggest competitor for their e-reader (and received the reply “paper”), Willem Endhoven added: “and our greatest colleague/ambassador is the Sony Reader”. Irex consider the market to be big enough for all parties, and together these parties can work on awareness for E Ink devices, and on standards, and on the e-paper paradigm. Irex know the folks at Sony — when the Japanese giant was working on its Librié, Irex founder Jan van de Kamer was their liaison at Philips — but haven’t contacted them yet about cooperation in these areas, although they eventually would like to.
Speaking of trials, as we wrote before Irex are running a trial with subscribers of the Belgian financial newspaper De Tijd (“The Times”). The company plan to announce a second trial before mid-April.
Many other companies will start using the Iliad in in-house trials soon, according to Irex.
Conclusion
The time I spent with a functioning E Ink based e-book tablet was too short to draw any definitive conclusions. As I said before, I was dismayed by the speed of page “flips”. Undoubtedly part of this slowness can be fixed, but in the meantime the competition is developing LCD screens that are increasingly less hungry for electricity.
Assuming companies will keep producing (cheaper) LCD based e-readers, the choice between LCD or e-paper will be one decided by the qualities of the display type. For this reason I will be very interested to read about the experiences of those who have experienced the e-paper “paradigm” for real.
This is the third and last part in my series about the Irex Iliad e-book reader. Initially I planned to publish this part after checking with Irex on some uncertainties, and on some of the follow-up questions you had. However, that would have delayed the publication of this entry to the point where publication would become pointless. This is why I decided to write using the information I already had. There will be no fourth part; as far as I can tell, the Iliad will be offered for sale somewhere mid-April, after which I hope Teleread commenters will honour us with some of their own reviews.
Related: further first-hand (re)views of the Irex at Iliad by Sandra Vogel, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (Dutch), Teleread reader RobBl, and Nick Hampshire.
Montage: An Iliad, a Zire and an A5 notepad side by side. The poor lighting shows, and because of lense distortion I had to correct each sub-image, which may have caused slightly differing relative sizes. The screen of the Palm Zire measures 67.5 by × 49 mm.
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Comments:
Thanks a lot Branko.
I hope i’ll be among those who can afford an Iliad and write a review here.
You put a lot of hard work into your review and answered many of our questions. If i ever “nagged” you about bringing the third part of the review out, I sincerely apologize…:-)
Oh…I just found something I didn’t quite understand..
You wrote that the Iliad sees a HTML doc as “one page”…what does that mean?
At the time I thought it had to do with the page count/navigation control at the bottom of the screen. I should have probed further. But this is one of those things that should be answered by next week if Irex stick to their mid-April estimate.
Hi, Branko. Your usual nice job, of course. So is the actual screen contrast at the same level as the photos would appear to indicate–that is, text vs. background? If so, maybe it’ll be better than what I encountered on my Librie. The contrast problem on the Librie was more of a problem than the page-delay problem. Meanwhile it’s good to know that the iRex’s software approach is more open than Sony’s. Thanks. David
Hey Branko, thanks for the las part. Soon we will see the new wonder with our own eyes.
About the ‘one page’ thing, I am a web developer but you don’t need to be one to notice that the concept of ‘page break’ does not exist in HTML. So an HTML page should display as one very long piece of paper that you need to scroll down to read (scroll down as opposed to flip page). I don’t know how they would manage it, but the w3c CSS standards (cascading stylesheets, you use them to control the layout and appearance of a page), does define several media for a page (be it browser, a reader for disabled people or printer). If you develop a page with a CSS stylesheet set to ‘print’ media, then you do have the ability to define page breaks. So if iRex goes the standard way, that’s how we should develop HTML for the reader: include a stylesheet with the media set to ‘print’ and define your page breaks there.
maybe mobipocket will make a reader for the iliad…then we won’t have to make that change as the reader simply divides the html files into pages…and does a rather good job too. I don’t often use real mobipocket-format-files (whatever the ending is), just normal html and txt files and they both work very well on my PDA…much better than the adobe pdf viewer software for pda..that’s a real bother actually…I hope the iRex PDF viewer (xPDF?) is better.
I guess 100,000 pieces of paper in my pocket would be a cool thing…
But if i can’t also have the web in there, I myself would feel shortchanged…
-bowerbird
I can’t help but comment on the photo.
Examination of the text reveals this is “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte…
But notice that the title is the same size as the body-text, and it’s not bold either. It is centered, which is a nice touch, but…
Ditto with the “by” line. It’s centered, but has none of the other special treatment that we’d expect based on paper-books…
I assume this is merely a deficiency in the preparation of this e-text, not anything inherent in the reader-machine itself, but even that is a bit telling, don’t you think?
A lot of reader-machine companies think a simple repurposing of the e-texts from Project Gutenberg is “good enough” to make a claim of “x number of e-books”, but i’m wondering if poor e-typography is a turn-off to the hard-core readers that are the prime audience for these machines…
-bowerbird
Ick, I didn’t even notice at first the absence of indentation on paragraphs, which — combined with dropping the blank lines between paragraphs — is a tremendous typographic faux-pas.
-bowerbird
Speaking of typographic faux-pas, I had to edit your comments to make them readable. I am not going to keep doing that to the comments you post to my stories, next time I will just delete them.
As for the sample text, knowing that I am a Project Gutenberg volunteer, Irex had this text prepared especially for me. I am not sure how much time and trouble they put into it, but I appreciated the gesture.
The text on the Palm, in case anyone is interested, is H.G. Wells’ Certain Personal Matters.
I think Irex is making a big mistake in their plans. They should release all the information needed for the hard core hackers. Sure, some people will reprogram the Iliad so it has an entirely different function. On the other hand, the community will likely develop a number of enhancements to the device. These enhancements could easily include applications that never occured to the Iliad development team. Afterall, the hacker community will likely be larger than Irex’s team. In short, if they release the specifications to the community at large, they essentially get free development on their device which they can choose to incorporate into future updates. It’s short-sighted to work against such a potential benefit, especially when they have already said they aren’t going to provide any active support for such developers on lesser matters.
bowerbird, keep in mind that since the device can read PDFs and such, it can certainly handle all the formatting you are concerned about. In fact, we have seen this in other pictures that have been released. Just because one ebook isn’t formatted to your tastes doesn’t mean the device can’t handle formatting. It is probably possible to make a reader that autoformats text files, but it would be a fair amount of work to make sure you got it right (it would have to figure out where the titles are, etc). Even then there’s always the chance that it would mess up on a document that was already formatted or formatted in a way it didn’t expect.
In the end it is the ebook’s problem if it isn’t formatted right. Since the Iliad can handle PDFs and HTML there is no doubt in my mind that it can handle pretty much whatever formatting is thrown at it (though you made need to download a font for it). If no formatting is thrown at it, however, then one shouldn’t expect it to display formatting.
Branko, do not “edit” my comments! What tremendous gall you have! Stop it!
-bowerbird
Sorry bowerbird…but I just don’t understand what your problem is…
I don’t know about the “editing” of your posts…but I’ve seen a couple of comments you posted, and they were often pretty “unfriendly”. Do you work for the printing industry or something? You seem to hate ebook hardware a lot…something which is ok of course, but if you contribute to a tech-blog ABOUT ebooks and their pccompaning hardware, you could at least stay whithin the parameters of courtesy.
Thanks.
Branko! Bravo!
Nice review there!
A little request … maybe you may want to shift the paper stack slightly into view with some printed text … that would create a striking visual!
Better still, display some color check bars to show that the lighting is identical or something. This is optional as the background tells me that the lighting for the three pics are identical if not pretty close already.
Snappy, the part of the paper stack you see now is all there is of the paper stack in the photo. You see, I originally tried to keep my notepad out of the picture. It was only later I realized that it would make a nice comparisson.
Bowerbird, my story, my rules. Letters to the editor get edited. If you cannot abide by the rules, do not comment on my stories here. I am sure even you can set up a Myspace account from where to comment on me.
Roland, Bowerbird (or at least someone going by that name) has a long history of trolling e-bookforums for flames. Which is why he gets special treatment; because he is special.
Hum! I thought the screen would be A5, but it seems the whole device is A5-sized, so the screen is not as big as I thought.
I have just read an article at this site where Mike Davidson, the lead page designer at ESPN, makes interesting comments about their recent switch to standards-compliant design for the ESPN homepage. Davidson says something very interesting:
This isn’t a new thing, but it’s the first time I don’t hear it coming from a CSS evangelist (whatever that means).
Like I said in my previous comment that there is a way of displaying a page on printed media using standard techniques. I think that, with all these new devices popping out every other minute, you should rely on these standards instead of figuring out a quick and dirty propietary solution that no real site will adopt. So again, I don’t know how they plan to present XHTML on the iLiad but I certainly hope it is standards-based somehow. ESPN doesn’t have a CSS file for printed media, but many sites do already. The iLiad could benefit from these if its XHTML viewer had (does it?) CSS capabilities, so you could see a page without a need to convert it or adapt it in any way.
I’m curuious Branko. Did they mention if they based their XHTML viewer upon Gecko or any other existing HTML engine?
Little talker, regarding the screen size, I did not measure the screen, and the photo is distorted, so it may very well be that the screen looks smaller than the notepad, while in actuallity it isn’t. I have no reason to doubt the measurement Irex supplies in their spec sheets.
Regarding the viewers, I find it hard to speculate. I know the PDF and HTML viewers render their formats live, so I don’t think there is a real need to convert a file if you just want to display the document (unlike other devices where you have to convert an HTML document to some proprietary format, such as my Palm). But the HTML viewer apparently has some features that a document could be optimised for.
I’ve been waiting a long time for something better than my REB-1100, and the Librie wasn’t it. It looks like the Iliad will be.
I’m particularly looking forward to the ability to write my own programs – a simple notepad comes to mind immediately. Depending on the level of hardware access, a WiFi finder may be possible. Perhaps a simple web browser(lynx/links/w3m), yes it will be slow, but very handy to have if nothing else is available. RSS viewer – not to read with, but to tell me there’s something interesting and I should go to my PC to read it. Simple grayscale image viewer, for comics, floorplans or whatever.
I hope the XHTML viewer supports CSS, as I use text-indent and margin-xyz when I translate txt files to html. If necessary, I can pre-render the html and fake it with nbsp and empty paragraphs, but a viewer which supports book-style layout tags should be a “must have” feature of the base package.
Oh, speaking of packages, the ability to package up a multi-page collection of HTML and inline images as a “book” is also important. Note that this is not the same as a PDF – a PDF is fixed layout format which is totally unsuited for ebooks. I’m talking about a book which has a cover image, or inline diagrams, or is so big that rendering each chapter separately is necessary due to speed and memory constraints. Wrapping this “book” as a tar or zip(compression optional) makes sense, and makes transporting and storing the book much easier than keeping track of each component. An index.html is a logical start point in each package as a table of contents.
I’ve gone on much longer than I’d planned to, and not scratched the surface of the possibilities of this device. Of course, there are shortcomings, like the lack of a microphone. Conversely, a CF slot and linux mean that expansion is definitely on the cards.
It would be interesting to see if I could get the ReadUp ebook reader working on it. ReadUp is Java 1.4.2, so it would need a reasonable Java SDK to develop for it. I wonder if the GNU classpath code with GCJ would work to compile the ReadUp program to a Linux executable?
Branko, any idea if they intend to include support for Java viewers?
And porting the Linux version of Plucker to it should be a slam-dunk if they support the GTK+ toolkit.
Bill, I have no idea. All I know is that the OS is Linux, the display is using X Windows, and that for PDFs a viewer based on xpdf will be included.
On a different note, here’s an interesting tidbit from the system specs:
That would seem to suggest a user can install his/her own fonts.
More likely means that a viewer or publisher can install fonts.
On Java: my guess is that a platform like this might support J2ME, but not J2SE. The major differences between the two are threads and Swing; J2ME has neither. That would make it difficult to install any Java-based readers on it. It would be nice to know for sure. And what about .NET
Thanks for your article, the comments and the entire site! It’s really impressive! I will try to get an Iliad and use it to view and store my teaching material.
By the way:
If you want to get rid of your paper buy a Fujitsu ScanSnap (duplex document scanner). It will create searchable PDFs of your documents in no time!
I have kind of a stupid question; will this device support non-Latin fonts such as Cyrillic? And in general, how is Linux with Cyrillic texts? I’d love to acquire one of these things, but about 50% of my e-books are in Russian, and I’d hate to find out, too late, that I can’t read them.