4 ms·
I’m guessing, but I have to imagine production volume has something to do with it. Little e-reader screens for cheap devices like the 6” kindle are where the vo
by dalbasal 9y ago
I’m guessing, but I have to imagine production volume has something to do with it. Little e-reader screens for cheap devices like the 6” kindle are where the volume is.
In any case, I’m kind of bummed that the e-ink/ereader market has sort of settled on the current state of affairs.
What I’d really like to see is good e-ink laptops. First, because of battery life. I also think they could be great “focus machines.” A laptop you can use to write, code, read emails and maybe articles but without the full blown “multimedia PC experience” we were sold back in the early 90s.
A little “kindle PC” designed for writers as the canonical user could be a great contribution, and right up amazon’s alley. Way more interesting than the kindle-fire stuff. I guess content for kindle fire looks like a juicier market, but… no one is making e-ink laptops! We have plenty of app stores, music services and online video stores.
On the reader front, I was really hoping amazon would do more to change the business of publishing. When magazines or paperbacks became mass market, publishing changed. The type of stuff that got published changed. e-readers, a lot less.
Amazon seemed to be focused on making big publishers happy, and they were focused on keeping the industry’s structure intact. I wanted more of a shake-up.
Publishing could be more democratic. The writer-reader relationship could be more disintermediated. We could have more short stories by authors in their prime, maybe as trailers for novels. We could have more short/concise nonfiction, without the need to fill out a “whole book.” Some parts of journalism could have been changed. I know of no better platform for “micro payments” to writers than kindle's…. It feels like they left the job half done.
So, I’m with you on big readers. I’ll raise you one laptop and a small-to-medium publishing revolution.
- donatj 9y agoI don’t think they’d sell well at all in laptops. I don’t think the tech is far enough. The ~1 FPS performance and occasionally needing to flash the entire screen to clear artifacts are really poor selling points for productive work. Things like for example scrolling a document or moving a mouse pointer would be quite painful and streaky.
- dalbasal 9y agoYou’re probably right, but are these insurmountable hurdles, or just problems that exist because no one has solved them yet? Someone has to start making them, and they need to improve over a couple of generations. At first, the software would need to navigate around any issues they can’t solve. Surely there’re alternatives to scrolling and mouse pointers, at least as primary UI elements. I mean, is a good email client or word processor really impossible in e-ink?
- bunderbunder 9y agoThese characteristics are also annoying, but not "product-killingly annoying", for e-readers. So if they're going to be fixed, I'd expect them to be fixed in the e-reader space first, and then applied to laptops. Putting out an e-ink laptop before the tech is ready would just be throwing money in a hole. I just wouldn't expect what's going to be essentially a mid-'80s word processor (Xerox Memorywriter, not WordPerfect) style user experience, complete with the screen with the really low refresh rate, is something that would sell.
- dalbasal 9y agoWhy would the software be bad? The display is the only thing thats different in terms of hardware. Besides that, circa 2000 hardware specs are embedded in £40 devices these days, even ereaders. Word processing has been fine for a long time. No need for bleeding edge performance, or even somewhat sharp.
- bunderbunder 9y agoSo the only analogue I know of for a device that was designed for that kind of task, and used a display with those kinds of limitations, was word processing appliances like the Xerox Memorywriter. And I also know that nobody actually liked working on those things; they just put up with them because because, at the time, an actual computer set up to do the same task could easily cost something upward of US$5,000 in today's dollars.
- 9y ago
- thescriptkiddie 9y agoYou can do a lot better 1 FPS that if you're willing to accept artifacting. I have a rooted nook touch with fast display mode enabled, and you can play games on it no problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2CVXzpK5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2CVXzpK5s (not my video)
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYou can hack one together at https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/kindleberry-pi-the-second/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/kindleberry-pi-the-second/ . It allows you to ssh into raspberry pi.
- monochromatic 9y agoThat much latency would be annoying while typing.
- Derbasti 9y agoWhite-to-black can be done quickly and without artifacts. Black-to-white and grey-to-grey can be done quickly, but produces artifacts.
- monochromatic 9y agoInteresting. What does "quickly" mean in this context? Like 10ms or like 100ms?
- rb808 9y agoMany 3rd party ereaders run Android, I'm not sure if they can use bluetooth keyboard but assuming they do that is a good start.