Free from Philips, iRex launches A4 e-book reader
Electronic paper gives up bookish profile
Philips spin-off iRex has gone up a size to produce an A4 version of its e-book reader, this one aimed at the document-reading business type, rather than the classic-consuming bookworm.
The Iliad is already one of the most expensive e-book readers, packing Wi-Fi, support for various removable memory cards and an open OS onto which has been ported everything from a web browser to a word processor. The new version, the DR1000, will come in at £399 and support a Wacom-provided touchscreen costing another 70 quid, branded the DR1000S. However, it loses the Wi-Fi connectivity of the existing model.
Those wanting to use an e-book to browse the internet will have to wait until the launch of the DR1000W, which will feature Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but the price of that model isn't settled yet.
iRex' DR1000: not for the bookworm?
The most interesting thing about the new device is the decision to support a full-sized A4 screen, at a decent resolution of 1024 x 1280 and 160dpi.
This is the same approach adopted by Plastic Logic, which has been demonstrating its elegant A4 reader prototype clearly targeted at businesspeople who have documentation and memos to read, and are less price-sensitive than consumers, not to mention less nostalgic about the feel of paper.
The ability to annotate documents offered by the Iliad has been a compelling feature for many buyers. The device supports e-books in a wide variety of formats, but like most readers the size is half way between a real book and the A4 size most useful for reading Ofcom's latest magnum opus.
Hopefully, this trend will see a clear differentiation between an electronic book reader - small enough to fit in a jacket pocket - and the electronic document reader - large enough to show a PDF in all its glory. After all, printing out a book into A4 pages is hardly conducive to bedtime reading, even if there aren't staples to worry about.
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COMMENTS
Too expensive, but...
I wanna see these things designed for sheet music. Landscape format, and a nice stand, with a massive library of downloadable scores. Could even have a little decorative brass harp at the top.
This would be such an enormous convenience to musicians, who tend to have reams of scruffy music manuscripts, dog-eared fakebooks etc. that get lost, ripped or mixed up, that they might even pay for those downloads.
Extra extra value if the page turns when you play the last bar. (Relatively easy to do with MIDI devices).
@IanK/Pete - 10.2" screen
The iRex website correctly mentions a 10.2" screen and adds "even A4 or letter-sized documents look great". So this is just a mistake in the article. Looks very nice though - I'd have to hold one to decide whether it really could replace printing things out though. The iLiad wasn't quite big enough for all of the A4 documents I have to handle.
razorblade model ?
The physical part of the price structure in a book is much less than you'd believe. Paper, ink, printing and shipping certainly accounts for less than 20% of the retail price. You must add unshrinkable parameters to your equation : promotion, advertising, author's fee, publisher cut (to pay for the staff and such), corrections, translations, reseller's costs, etc. Oh, yes, plus taxes, of course.
The main part of the price pays for some people's work, and most of this work is highly qualified (read : expensive). Therefore, a razorblade model would yield a higher price for e-books files than paper books. Clearly impossible.
It's no wonder that books are the vessels of knowledge since 2000+ years ; it certainly is the best compromise between available technology, price, size, and ergonomy (writing notes /in/ a book is dead simple).
"400 quid for the hardware is not competitive"
Well, quite.
I was given some years ago a little electronic translater, which translates between languages on a 2-row alphanumeric screen, and will speak the words out loud after you have assembled a phrase. it seems such a compellingly useful thing to have until you discover that in most languages it has a vocabulary of less than 300 words. And that it cost a couple of hundred quid at the time.
For that money you could certainly have got enough paper dictionaries to do the job but also a couple of decent nights out for two as well.
Pirate
Books are already easy to pirate. A well known book was pirated on the web days before it was released last year. Their relatively small size compared to films and music makes it even easier to direct download.
