調查：網友慣用電腦閱讀電子書

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亞馬遜十大暢銷書 Kindle版賣超印刷本1倍

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Barnes & Noble unveils color Nook with touchscreen

The new NookColor features a touchscreen and a batch of interactive features.

By Julianne Pepitone, staff reporterOctober 26, 2010: 11:08 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Barnes & Noble unveiled a new full-color, touchscreen version of its Nook e-reader Tuesday in New York City.

The new version, priced at $249, will begin shipping on or around Nov. 19, and is now available for pre-order. Unlike Barnes & Noble's current Nooks, the new one won't have a 3G network connection. It will only be able to get online through Wi-Fi.

Two decades of e-reader evolution

Barnes & Noble's new color Nook is the latest milestone for e-readers -- which first hit the market 20 years ago. Here's a look back.

View photos

The NookColor is latest strike in an ongoing price and hardware battle among e-reader manufacturers -- and a bold move away from E-Ink, the technology Amazon and other booksellers insist makes for a better reading experience. E-Ink boasts a backlight-free display and reflects light like regular paper does. It's more comfortable to read for hours, but it's far less flexible and much slower than a traditional touchscreen display.

The NookColor is powered by Google's Android operating system. It's a half-inch thick, weighs less than a pound, and has a "laminated" screen that minimizes glare, according to Jamie Iannone, Barnes & Noble's digital product head. The battery allows up to eight hours of continuous reading, and the gadget's 8 GB of internal memory can hold around 6,000 books.

Barnes & Noble played up the NookColor's social features and interactivity. A new developer platform invites creators to build "reading-centric apps," and readers can recommend books to friends on Twitter and Facebook with the tap of a button.

The company is particularly targeting parents and young readers with its new gadget: A new catalog of children's books will launch with "hundreds" of picture books, plus 11,000 chapter books. Interactive childrens' books will let kids play with animation, and a "read to me" button has a professional narrator read the children's story.

A tense battle: The original Nook launched last November with a black-and-white E-Ink screen for reading text, and a smaller color touchscreen for browsing book titles. Prices range from $149 for a Wi-Fi-only version to $199 for the Nook 3G, which can connect to cellular networks.

Barnes & Noble said it will continue to enhance its existing Nook technology, including enabling faster page turns. Those devices will remain part of the Nook portfolio.

"We think there's a sector of users who want E-Ink only," Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said.

The iPad's April debut cast doubt on the long-term survival of dedicated e-readers. For a starting price of $500, the iPad offers e-book apps plus broader multimedia features for Web surfing and watching videos. Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) sold 7.5 million iPads in the gadget's first six months.

But competition is still hot. Amazon's Kindle has largely dominated the e-reader space, relegating the Nook, the Sony Reader and Borders' Kobo to also-rans. Amazon consistently refuses to divulge Kindle sales, resorting instead to vague press releases -- which most analysts take as a sign that sales aren't earthshattering. Still, the Kindle is believed to have sold several million units in its three years on the market.

"Nook has sold well over a million units, and we're on our way to a million more," Lynch said.

Barnes & Noble (BKS, Fortune 500) has a vast retail network, but it's been the underdog in the e-reader fight against Amazon.

On top of a two-year head start, Amazon has a much larger catalog of e-books -- and they're often cheaper than they are at Barnes & Noble, an issue that has drawn scrutiny from consumer advocates who suspect Amazon and Apple have negotiated some potentially unfair pricing deals.

Barnes & Noble is a major bookseller competing with tech companies, but its Tuesday announcement indicates it views the e-reader fight as one that will be won on technology -- not content.

On that front, it lags its rivals. Barnes & Noble touts its "2 million plus titles available" for the Nook, but a giant chunk of those books are pre-1923 texts that are in the public domain. Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500), on the other hand, doesn't include public domain titles when it says there are 750,000 books in its catalog.

Price fights: Amazon and Barnes & Noble both slashed their readers' prices in June, after the iPad debut in April.

Prices have continued dwindling since then. Ahead of Barnes & Noble's event, Borders announced on Monday that would it cut the price of its entry-level E-Ink Kobo reader to just $99.

But the $250 NookColor price tag is here to stay, B&N CEO Lynch pledged at the launch -- even if Amazon races out with a cheaper, touchscreen Kindle.

"We're not thinking of lowering the price anytime soon, no matter what happens," he said.  

(CNN News)

摩托羅拉推出首款電子書 配Android系統可上網

http://tech.weiphone.com/2010-11-01/Motorola_introduced_the_first_online_e-book_system_with_Android_225809.shtml

Peel me an e-book

ITRI e-ink display. It's wafer thin.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The secret to building an inexpensive flexible computer display is not in the core components of the displays themselves. It's in the material those components are mounted on.

The fundamental elements of e-ink and OLED displays are small enough that they won't break if laid down on flexible backing. The problem, according to Janglin Chen of Taiwanese government-funded research lab ITRI, is the backing itself. The substrate the components are mounted onto has to have certain physical properties, especially during the manufacturing process. To date, the primary material on which displays have been layered has been glass, which meets the needs: it's rigid, transparent, and reliable.

ITRI has found a way, though, to create a display backing material that is all these things during manufacture, but becomes flexible when the building is finished. It's a polymer material that can be sprayed onto a glass backing and that maintains its properties (it doesn't discolor, for example) while the rest of the display is being deposited and built up on top of it. When the displays are done, they can be peeled right off the glass.

In addition to the polymer substrate, ITRI also had to develop a "release material" that's sprayed down on the glass before the polymer, so the final product can peel off without tearing or sticking. Think cooking oil and crepes.

The big advantage to this process, Chen says, is that existing fabrication plants can be used to make flexible panels. Aside from spraying on the chemicals to coat the glass with high-tech Pam and the polymer substrate, and the post-manufacture removal of the display from the glass, the process is the same as making a rigid display.

ITRI has signed at least one non-exclusive deal with a Taiwanese company that makes black-and-white e-readers, and Chen expects the first flexible panel using ITRI technology to be in a consumer product next year. Color displays based on OLED technology are likely after that. E-ink and OLEDs lend themselves well to working on flexible backing, Chen says. Traditional LCDs, which require separate lighting components and filters, do not. The sole existing color e-reader, the new Barnes and Noble Nook Color, uses traditional LCD technology. All current black-and-white e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, use e-ink displays built up on traditional glass substrates.

Janglin Chen (center) and lab ITRI researchers Tzong-Ming Lee (left) and Jia-Chong Ho (right) with their sample e-ink display.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The flexible technology isn't limited to displays. ITRI's technology can be used for touch panels (on top of displays, or separately) and for sensor technology. And, I assume, for solar cells, although that's a somewhat challenging market.

I talked with Chen a bit about the market for flexible panels. It's a science-fiction dream to have a foldable or rollable e-book or phone, but there's more to the market than a little flexibility. Chen notes that removing the glass back-plane from a display makes it safer, more durable, and lighter than a traditional display. This is good for low-end products and for devices that end up in the hands of children. And while the ITRI process is not yet less expensive than current display-building technologies, the raw materials do cost less, as the backing glass is reused after every screen is made, instead of getting shipped with it.

But the real flexibility is what this could allow gadget designers to think up. "We're trying to break the glass dimension and give it back to the designer," Chen says.

Previously:

• Army invests $50 million in flexible displays
• HP unveils displays that yields to the touch
• Display technology's flexible future

「紙」 仍是有效的學習工具

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網路書店出招 推內容產製空間

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彩色電子紙 元太、台達電互槓

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