Review Horizon, a consumer technology website, tells us that a new gen of E-ink is on the way. It boasts twice the contrast ratio of the current model. Devices using it will have a tougher screen, too.

Best news of all, a higher refresh speed will open the door to videos on the Kindle and other e-readers that use E-Ink. But for those who just want to read a book, higher refresh speeds mean faster page-turns. “Gone,” says Review Horizon, “will be the days when just a page turn would make you fall asleep.”

Read about it here, and check out the video demos.

RC

Yesterday we wrote about toxic e-waste being dumped into landfills around poor communities in Asia and Africa where scavengers, including children, earn a pittance reclaiming and selling metals and other materials, materials loaded with chemicals that poison the air, water, land – and people.

But there is more in that discarded hardware than metal, plastic and wire. There is also information. In 2003 two MIT graduate students discovered credit card and Social Security numbers, medical records and other confidential information in computers that had been thrown away. “Even those with ‘erased’ disk drives may harbor confidential information,” their report revealed. The MIT News article goes on to say,

“Scavenging through the data inadvertently left on 158 used disk drives, the students at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, detailed personal and corporate financial records, numerous medical records, gigabytes of personal email and pornography….Of the disk drives acquired, 129 were functional. Of these, Garfinkel and Shelat found 28 disk drives in which little or no attempt had been made to erase any information. One of these drives, Shelat says, had apparently come from an automatic teller machine in Illinois and contained a year’s worth of financial transactions.”

If you project the team’s findings to the tens of millions of computers tossed out every year (“More than 150 million disk drives were retired from primary service in 2002,” the report says) well, you don’t have to be an MIT graduate student to figure out just how big the problem is. Read
MIT researchers uncover mountains of private data on discarded computers and learn why even with care it’s far harder to sanitize a computer than you think.

Though the report was written in 2003, there is no evidence whatsoever that users are any more conscientious today than they were six years ago. Meanwhile, the river of e-junk flows ever wider and faster, and, to the toxicity of the metals and poisons in it, you can add countless gigabytes of unsecured information and precious data that are falling into the hands of criminals.

Want to prevent your identity from being stolen? Don’t leave it on the sidewalk for the trash haulers to collect.

RC

On a recent Chris Matthews Show the host asked his guests to “Tell me something I don’t know.” Rick Stengel, managing editor for Time Magazine, said, “By the end of the year you’re going to see a plethora of e-readers – of post-Kindle devices – four color.”

For those of you who have been keeping up with e-books Stengel didn’t tell us anything we don’t know. But here’s something that nobody knows: when the next generation of e-readers arrives, what’s going to happen to the Kindle or Sony E-Reader you replace?

If what’s happening in Europe is any guideline, it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors,cables and similar e-scrap. Elizabeth Rosenthal, covering the story for the New York Times, tells us that “Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa.

“There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.”

Jessika Toothman, blogging on HowStuffWorks, describes how “A whole bouquet of heavy metals, semimetals and other chemical compounds lurk inside your seemingly innocent laptop or TV. E-waste dangers stem from ingredients such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, copper, beryllium, barium, chromium, nickel, zinc, silver and gold.” In fact if you want to see what this “bouquet” of poisons is doing to your fellow man, woman and child, you can view this sickening video of a Chinese e-trash village.

One device not mentioned in Toothman’s list of e-waste is e-book readers. The obvious reason is that we are still in the first generation of e-book devices (or second if you count progenitors like the Rocket Book) and there haven’t been enough readers manufactured to make them a formidable source of trash like cell phones and TVs. But when the next generation of e-book readers floods us with Kindle and Sony rivals – better, cheaper, faster, more colorful, loaded with special features and options – will we simply add them to the tons of lethal junk earmarked for miserable dumps in China, Indonesia or Africa?

Because it is still young, the e-book industry has an unprecedented opportunity to exercise its social responsibility, as we recently pointed out. Here is a three-point program to make sure the e-books business remains green.

• First, manufacturers must be compelled to disclose the chemical components of the e-book devices they produce so that we can evaluate environmental hazards.
• Second, Amazon, Sony, Plastic logic, Philips and other developers must develop programs for either returning their devices for safe (and monitored) disassembly and recycling or for donation to students, armed services personnel and other charitable recipients.
• And third, The cost of recycling and safely disassembling e-books must be built into the price structure of e-books.

Right now the hidden cost of computers and other electronic devices is human suffering. It is unacceptable for the e-book industry to boast about environmental advantages while secretly sticking the helpless poor with the bill or contributing to the poisoning of the world’s water and air. If safety measures and sensible recycling add $25 or $50 to the price of their devices, that is an acceptable tradeoff. Because it would be assessed equally on all manufacturers, none would have a competitive advantage over its rivals.

We expect the e-book industry to do the right thing.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

There was a moment of ribald hilarity at the first government-sponsored e-book conference in 1998, where the e-book industry was officially launched in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. As one of the few attendees from the traditional publishing sector, I was surrounded by a crowd of techies, engineers, entrepreneurial pioneers, geeks and dreamers who had toiled in the rocky e-book vineyard for years and were at last about to witness the realization of their vision. After a number of presentations had been given, a professorial gentleman took the podium and began a power point presentation. On the auditorium screen was a picture of what looked like tiny white balls.

The presenter explained that we were looking at something he called E Ink. Suspended in a liquid were millions of microcapsules containing particles that were dark on one side and light on the other, and each side had oppositely charged particles. By applying an electronic field, the white surface became black. And by sending a computer message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like a “W”, the screen would show the letter W. Or by sending a message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like War and Peace, the screen would show a book-length screen containing Tolstoy’s epic.

He touched a key on his keyboard advancing to the next slide. Voila!

“See? Your white balls just turned black,” the gentleman explained. He did not crack a smile.

An undercurrent of titters swept the audience as he droned on humorlessly about your white balls turning black and your black balls turning white. Aside from the inadvertent pun, the concept struck me as preposterous. I turned to a colleague and said, “That dog won’t hunt!”

Last month the E Ink Corporation was bought by a Taiwanese company for $215 million.

My notes on that 1998 conference are lost, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the presenter was Joe Jacobson, creator of electronic ink, who was awarded a patent for it in 2000.

He who titters last titters best.

Richard Curtis

I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think those may be Rupert Murdoch’s hands examining Plastic Logic’s thus-far-nameless e-book reader, a Kindle competitor scheduled for release in 2010.

Why would Murdoch, who presides over a media empire ranging from Fox Broadcasting to HarperCollins Publishers to the world’s largest agglomeration of English language newspapers, be caressing an e-ink reading device? Is he contemplating going E with such papers as the Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal? Media reporter Peter Kafka thinks so.

Kafka, covering the cable industry’s annual show, heard Murdoch expressing admiration for the Kindle and ruminating that he might be willing to invest in a Kindle rival.

“At a Q&A at the cable industry’s annual show today,” Kafka reports, “Murdoch waxed on about the Kindle’s qualities, then made a reference to investing in a machine that could be even more attractive – one that boasted a large, full-color screen.” Reconstructing his notes, the reporter recorded Murdoch as saying,

“We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there.”

Not trusting his notes, Kafka checked with a spokesperson from Murdoch’s News Corp and sure enough, it was confirmed. “News Corp. is indeed in ‘exploratory’ talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies.”

Which device is Murdoch thinking of investing in? Perhaps it’s the no-namer being developed by Plastic Logic, about which we wrote last fall. Though its display is currently black and white, color screens are “on our road map,” VP for Business Development Daren Benzi told The Observer. The plot thickens when you realize that Benzi spent 14 years at News Corp before moving to Plastic Logic. That said, PL already has substantial – $200 million – backing from investors, so do they need Murdoch’s investment too?

Okay, so maybe it’s the Flepia which, we announced just the other day, is in fact developing a color screen. But it too is already capitalized – by Fujitsu.

Could it be the iRex Reader 1000, the potentially Kindle-killing device introduced last year? It’s not in color yet, but a color iRex Iliad has been long rumored.

Rupert-watchers will have a field day second-guessing his thinking. But it shouldn’t be that opaque. Steeped in newsprint though he may be, the shrewd press czar has seen the writing, and it’s not on the wall. It’s on a screen. His romance with e-ink was foreshadowed in 2006 in a speech he gave at the Annual Livery Lecture at the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

What happens to print journalism in an age where consumers are increasingly being offered on-demand, interactive, news, entertainment, sport and classifieds via broadband on their computer screens, TV screens, mobile phones and handsets?

The answer is that great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

And, crucially, newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites such as Times Online or – and this is important – on any platform that appeals to them, mobile phones, hand-held devices, ipods, whatever.

The possibility of converting paper journalism to electronic must certainly have triggered severe myocardial ischemia among the august members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, but Murdoch can’t say he didn’t warn them. The cost of producing and distributing newspapers is ghastly. For instance, the newsprint used in one year’s worth of The Montreal Gazette is the equivalent of 186,816 trees. Multiply that by all of Murdoch’s newspaper holdings and the number of dead trees is nothing short of astronomical.

Watch this space for updates.

RC

In case the growing number of entries into the e-reader sweepstakes is making your head spin, Channelweb has done us the favor of providing a roundup of Kindle’s competitors. We’ve covered some of these, like the iRex, the Foxit eSlick Reader, and the Plastic Logic Watchimacallit (they haven’t come up with a name yet).

Another bunch is described in Channelweb’s survey. Going into the clubhouse turn Kindle is ahead of Sony by several lengths, then there’s the rest of the pack, which includes such notables as the Jinke HanLin eReader, the Bookeen Cybook, the Netronix EB-100, the Fujitsu Frontech FLEPia, the Foxit eSlick, and the Polymer Vision Readius. Don’t smirk. Today’s tongue-twister could be tomorrow’s household name.

The Readius, depicted here, fits into your pocket and sports a screen that unrolls/unfolds. “It offers 30 hours’ worth of battery life (about 7,500 page refreshes),” says Channelweb’s summary, “a five-inch display and 16 levels of grayscale.” The display refreshes in half a second. As civilized humans haven’t read from scrolls in about three millennia, the Readius has our vote for most thought-provoking. Any bozo can reinvent the wheel, but it takes a special mentality to reinvent the scroll.

Despite the large field, it’s entirely possible that the winner hasn’t even stepped into the starting gate. Somewhere in a garage or basement of college dorm, a geek is working on something that might, just might, change the game completely…

RC

The Morgan Library is the most museum-like library in New York City, and so it was fitting that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (pictured above) took the stage there this morning to announce the latest version of his book antiquifier known as the Kindle. His grand vision, often repeated throughout the hour long presentation, is that Amazon wants to see nothing less than every book ever published available to all Kindle owners in less than 60 seconds. Is the Kindle 2 going to be the device with enough popularity to create such a seismic shift in readers’ habits that the world of publishing bends its back to make this happen? Well, maybe. Just maybe. Apparently e-book sales have jumped to 10% of all Amazon book sales in just one year thanks to the first device, after years of staying well below the radar, and now Amazon wants us all to see the writing on the, err, Kindle. I expect word of mouth and adoption to be stronger this time around because the product deserves it.

The new Kindle 2 ($357 and shipping Feb. 24th) offers enough improvement from the original that I can now recommend it strongly to friends and family:

• It has 3G wireless for faster download speed (especially for browsing the Kindle store).
• It uses Amazon’s latest ‘Whispersync’ service to keep your Kindle’s books and notes backed up on the internet cloud and synchronized to other Kindle devices you may own.
• Its shape is now thinner than an iPhone (less than half an inch thick) and perfectly symmetrical, with rounded corners and softer buttons.
• The latest e-ink screen redraws slightly faster (20% over the original) and now does 16 shades of gray instead of just 4.
• 2GB of built-in storage.
• Charging via USB mini-port (everyone has these cables by now).
• It has longer battery life (now up to two weeks between recharges).
• It has implemented a pleasant text-to-speech computer voice reader for any text (it’s better than Stephen Hawking).
• It has a new 5-way button navigation instead of the old up-and-down wheel.

Now, none of these things represent bleeding edge technology and are probably a little more anemic than what most of us dream about in a best possible e-book device. For example, any page-turning lag is still annoying (especially in the age when Google has taught us that people can’t bother to wait even 0.5 seconds more than they have to for a page to load). 3G service isn’t going to make a huge difference in speed for most people downloading new books that are typically 900K. And grayscale screens? Don’t even get me started. But what Amazon is offering that makes the Kindle 2 so appealing is their dedication to the book delivery service. Jeff Bezos wants the device to disappear in your hands while you read it, because no one pays attention to the paper or binding of a book when they get wrapped up in the story. They don’t want distractions. So, the device itself is really just something meant to be unpretentious, transient, and replaceable. What they are selling is access to published books in the most convenient manner yet possible. Amazon is dedicated to helping readers find and download books quickly, and the Kindle 2 serves that purpose better than anything else. And for that I think they have a winner.

What makes the Kindle 2 experience more likely to win people over is that Amazon still seems to be letting the Kindle ride its tide of popularity instead of hard selling customers. More and more e-book content is being converted and added to the Kindle online store every month. The incremental technical improvements in the Kindle 2 are the type that give consumers confidence that the company has a long term investment in their satisfaction, and that more improvements will surely come downstream. Original Kindle owners are even being given a two day opportunity to jump to the head of the queue for pre-ordering the Kindle 2, and what better way to spread the word than allow the converted the first opportunity to evangelize. Instead of a discount or trade-ins, this means hand-me-down first-generation Kindles are going to be circulating amongst friends and families.

Stephen King, at Jeff’s invitation and previewing his new Kindle exclusive short story “Ur,” read a passage where students confront a teacher who has never seen a Kindle before. The teacher likes to think of himself as “old school” and defends the tactile properties of the trusty paper book, such as the musty smell acquired with age. The Kindle-familiar students counter that the words are still the same, no matter what old school or new school device is being used to read them. And that’s the epiphany that many readers are similarly experiencing thanks to e-books. We want ideas and stories foremost, and the digital experience is helping us get the access to texts that generations before us never had unless they lived with a very deep library. Jeff and Stephen have understood this for years. They’ve both been trying to get more people interested in the digital distribution of books for as long as the e-book industry has been around and they can feel rightfully proud that the Kindle phenomenon is really taking off.

- Michael Gaudet

While Sony has been upgrading its Reader, and Amazon may be upgrading its Kindle (we may know in a week or two), rival firms have not been sitting on their hands. We’ve reported on several contenders like the iRex Reader 1000, described as a “Kindle Killer.” Now Foxit has climbed into the ring with a bantamweight called the eSlick Reader.

One thing it has going for it is price – $230. That’s about one-third less than that of its prestigious competitors. And, according to Jose Fermoso of Wired, “It might be the first large hardware eInk device to play eReader files.” Translation: it uses the Palm format, meaning it can run on iPhones and a number of other mobile phone platforms. It would also presumably enable those who carry eReader books on their Palm Pilots to transfer the files to a larger and more navigable display unit. Down the road, if the gadget takes off, it might carry other, non-eReader platforms as well.

Wired’s Fermoso calls the device ugly, and the name “eSlick Reader” scarcely dances trippingly o’er the tongue. But if it gets the job done, and brings us closer to the tipping point of a $99.00 e-book reader, we’ll forgive its homeliness.

RC

We recently reported on a recent conference introducing trade book editors to XML, the markup language that promises to facilitate so many costly, time-consuming and tedious functions performed by traditional book publishers. Among the most significant improvements stressed by Hachette Book Group David Young was that XML could eliminate printed galleys, which Young described as a “major money pit.”

It appears as if we’re going to be wallowing in the pit longer than XML drum-beaters would like. Craig Morgan Teicher writes in Publishers Weekly that “most people would like to put off using e-galleys as long as they can.”

Bound proofs, some plain-covered and others handsomely jacketed, are early uncorrected versions of forthcoming books, submitted by publishers to reviewers. Because of the long lead time it takes for reviewers to read and write up books, it is unfeasible for publishers to submit finished copies. But, as Hachette’s Young points out, it is a big expense. It’s also about as far from green as it gets: reviewers receive hundreds of galleys a week and are only able to review a handful. The rest they toss. Now that publishing is doing digital, proofs submitted via email would seem to be a perfect solution.

Not so fast.

Ron Charles, senior editor for the Washington Post Book World, says, “As a reviewer, I need to have a physical book to read at home and on the subway – the last thing I want in my life is more screen time!” And Teicher reports Lev Grossman, book critic for Time magazine, saying,

“I’ve been offered them before, but only tried to read one once, on an early-generation Sony Reader. I hated the experience. That low-contrast screen, the poky refresh rate! It was like a horrible, crippled imitation of a book. But having said that, I think e-galleys are inevitable. They just make too much sense—financially for publishers, environmentally for everybody. Maybe by the time I’m forced to read them, e-readers will have turned into something less insulting to the eye.”

Despite the resistance, book trade observers think it’s only a matter of time before paper gives way to e-ink, especially because improvements to the production and submission process are on the way.

Read The E-Galley Cometh? and judge for yourself.

RC

Slashgear reports a different approach to ePaper, this one produced by Sharp. It’s an eight-color liquid crystal display that can freezes static images after the juice is switched off. Sharp foresees a variety of markets for it such as grocery displays: by hooking the screen up to a Wi-Fi, store managers can readily adjust prices displayed to customers. It could also be competitive with emerging e-book applications once the cost comes down and some other issues, such as temperature distortion and power consumption, are resolved. The technology doesn’t sound competitive yet with eInk but given Sharp minds, that could change fast. Read about it.

RC