Saturday, January 9, 2010

A colorful technology

Honestly, I've never much cared about color screens for e-Readers and never really understood the furor surrounding the perceived need to develop one. I suppose if the e-Reader is going to replace textbooks, that would be easier with a color screen, but beyond that, I don't really care. I personally read novels mostly and want the highest resolution black & white screen available to me to prevent the sort of eyestrain generally associated with reading from a screen. If I was going to read a comic or graphic novel, then the collectibility of the physical item is a significant factor in the purchase. A factor that would be negated by buying it electronically. (It's a geek thing.) If we're talking color screens for laptops that don't give me a headache after looking at them for about eight hours straight... well, then we might be on to something. As we've discussed before, the "e-Ink" screens used in the Kindle (and almost all other leading e-Readers) haven't yet been able to present color. Debuting at CES this past week, it looked like Pixel Qi might just have cut the Gordian knot on the color page front. Anyway, if you're looking for full-color e-Books, I suppose this is good news for you! Read more at GizModo.

2 comments:

  1. I am actually hoping for a high-quality color e-reader because I would love to subscribe to magazines on it and stop receiving wads of paper in the mail. That's my main priority right now because they are so disposable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. But where would they put all those subscription cards and perfume ads?

    You make a good point and that harkens back to what I was talking about that the other day, re: Print Journalism via tablet/e-Reader. That said, at present I see my laptop as a decent venue for photo-heavy and short-form reading so the offering would have to be just that much better over (or restricted to) the e-Reader in question. Incidentally, no matter the format, I'd happily subscribe to most of the magazines we've recently had subscriptions to in online editions for the same reasons you just cited. Just as long as I got to keep archive copies on my own hard-drive as a .pdf or similar format.

    Of all the e-Readers I've seen reviewed coming out of CES this past week, the "Blio" desinged by Kurzweil interests me the most - at least philosophically - because it seems to lend itself to the widest possible latitude for authors' creativity.

    Thanks for your comment!

    ReplyDelete

Pages to Type is a blog about books, writing and literary culture (with the occasional digression into coffee and the care and feeding of giant robots).