Colour is coming

One of the neat things about the iLiad ereader is that you can put powerpoints and pdfs on it. However, there is no colour display of the texts, which also sours the experience of reading comics or art books on the readers, not to mention visualizations of stats which would be the text book market, right!

Well “For the first time, researchers released a hand-built prototype outside the Japanese labs where it’s been incubating since 2004.

Similar in form factor to an e-book reader, the Fujitsu version displays color–not mind-blowing color, but still more visually appealing than standard black and white–and is aiming for more commercial applications. Fujitsu’s version is “green” and also appeals to the wallet: there is no power required to show an image. That means the technology can eventually be used for signage without having to replace batteries.”

Another huge leap for printing

A couple of Israeli engineers at thje College of Judea and Samaria are working on a printing press that could print 1000 ppm. One of the examples that they give for usage is that you’re standing at a kiosk at an airport printing your ticket and select a book that you want to read and have it in a minute hot off the press!

Read more:

BookNet meets Bookshelf

BookNet Canada had a season’s celebration party yesterday to celebrate the anniversary of the agency, the birthday of BookNet Sales Data, and to announce three more years of funding from the Federal government. It was a fun party and one of the funniest elements of it, aside from winning a five dollar bet from my coworkers, was a sort of impromptu reunion of ex-Bookshelf staff and one Bookshelf boss:

Digital Assets a-go-go

John Battelle of The Search fame has captured an interesting tidbit about the shift in realization in the digital content world that digital assets are valuable:

“and it all points toward a trend that I’ve been itching to think out loud about: Major media companies are realizing that their digital assets are far more valuable than they initially thought, and they are reacting by putting folks in charge of those assets who they believe will protect the company. Not the *interactive* company, mind you, but the company that owns the interactive products. Why? “

Read more

e-books

The publishing software company on Tuesday is scheduled to release a beta of an e-book viewer and manager called Digital Editions at its Max 2006 customer conference in Las Vegas.

The software is meant to be a stripped-down and more flexible e-book reader, compared with its current PDF-based reader, Adobe Reader, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said.

Read More