When you get right down to it, a new development in electronic ink technology is generally about as exciting as, well, watching a screen refresh. So it’s hard to blame a site like MakeUseOf for resorting to sensationalistic headlines to spice the news up a little.
“Don’t Buy an E-Reader!” the headline warns, exclamation point and all. Then it promises the low-down on “2 Upcoming Technologies that Kill the Kindle.”
So what are these technologies, and how much of a threat do they really pose? The first one is a reflective color-capable display called CLEARink. The breathless copy in the article seems to have been taken from a press release with miminal alteration, but if it can be believed, this CLEARink stuff offers the response time and color capability of LCD with the low cost and power consumption of e-ink. File under “sliced bread, comma, greatest thing since.”
The other new technology is a new system-on-a-chip called the Freescale IMX.7. Without delving as deeply into technical jargon as MakeUseOf, it promises to make e-ink screens refresh faster by clearing up an image-processing bottleneck that slows everything down. The article originally claimed this chip is used in the Dasung Paperlike Pro e-ink monitor, which gives it a refresh rate close to that of LCD. (Nate Hoffelder, who owns a Paperlike Pro, has subsequently messaged me that the Dasung Paperlike Pro actually does not use the Freescale IMX.7, and the article got that detail wrong.)
I’ve heard all these stories about amazing new display technologies before. The thing is, as I’ve pointed out before, the e-ink reader market has dwindled to the point that we’re not likely to see an amazing new display technology adopted into them. Too few people buy them anymore to make adopting new display technologies economical no matter how good they are.
The e-ink Kindle’s screen is more than adequate to the dedicated tasks for which the Kindle is meant—reading text on the screen and not much else. They’ve never even pretended to be useful for full-service web browsing. Amazon hasn’t bothered to keep the built-in “experimental” browsers updated, and I can’t even log into GMail or Inbox with them anymore (apparently they don’t like the three-factor “tap the button on your phone screen” authentication mechanism Google uses now). And by now, anyone who gets one doesn’t expect it to do anything else.
And these new display technologies don’t make existing Kindles any less easy to read. There are still people out there who happily read all the ebooks they want on their boxy, angular first-generation Kindles. My old Kindle Touch is still perfectly readable in sufficient light, and my couple-generations-old Paperwhite likewise in any light. While some books would look better in color (for example, Charles de Lint and Charles Vess’s sumptuously illustrated The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, which I read on Kindle the other day), the vast majority of text-only titles are just fine that way.
The thing about these technologies is, if they offer the sort of promise MakeUseOf gushes over, the article might have been better titled “Don’t Buy an LCD Tablet or Smartphone!” Because if CLEARink can display color just as well as and more cheaply than LCD, then it would be much better suited to supplant LCD in multi-purpose devices than to supplant e-ink in ones people just use for reading books. It’s those multi-purpose devices that are really “killing” e-ink readers, anyway, as people decide to carry devices that are “good enough” jacks of all trades instead of ones that do just one thing really well.
In any case, one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and all the marketing hype in the world doesn’t mean a new technology actually will be adopted. But if it does, I’ll be happy to see anything that makes tablets and smartphones cheaper, regardless of what effect it might or might not have on e-ink readers. If I could get a device that was as easily readable as e-ink that could also do color and video, at a lower price than existing tablets, I might not care what happens to e-ink readers after that.
(Thanks to Mike Ameden for sharing the link with me on Facebook.)
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teleread.org 
if this were that amazing then Apple would have bought the company, or Samsung would have copied/stolen all of its IP.
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Or given the number of patent infringement lawsuits Apple is in or has already lost, Apple would have “copied/stolen all its IP.” Neither is in line to win an Ethical Business of the Year award. Google and the rest are much the same.
I’ve long suspected that the difficulties geek personalities have with understanding the feelings of others and similar attitudes the very rich have toward everyone else would merge into a moral monster. We’re see illustrations of that in the news almost weekly.
There is, for instance, this July 29 NY Times story that opens: “China appears to have received help on Saturday from an unlikely source in its fight against tools that help users evade its Great Firewall of internet censorship: Apple. Software made by foreign companies to help users skirt the country’s system of internet filters has vanished from Apple’s app store on the mainland.”
The only thing surprising is that the NY Times is so clueless that it thinks Apple is an “unlikely source” for cooperating with nasty regimes. It and its kindred (i.e. Google) has been doing that for many a year. The more repressive the government, the more willing they are to cooperate.
Tim Cook’s shrill refusal to cooperate with an FBI investigation of that terrorist multi-victim killing in California doesn’t illustrate how seriously Apple takes user privacy. It illustrates how zealous the company wants to sell its products to white-collar criminals who want Apple to keep their iPhone from being searched.
Indeed, given how Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe illegally conspired in a non-compete compact, it seems clear that the executives at those companies have their own reasons for wanting to conceal any illegal activities that they engage in on their smartphones.
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That also explains why Silicon Valley’s uber-rich were so hot to see Hillary elected. For many of us, the fact that she was a life-long crook made her unqualified for high office. For Silicon Valley executives political corruption is a “must have.” They have money, oodles of it, so they love politicians they can buy. And in dealing with one-party dictatorships such as China, they’re quite willing to sell off the freedoms of a country’s citizens into order to make more money.
Here’s how the China whose repressive regime Apple is aiding and abetting ranks in freedom. China’s ranking, 6.5 out of 7.0 is quite similar to that of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. It only moderates its repression enough to keep the economy growing. I quote:
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“China received a downward trend arrow due to the chilling effect on private and public discussion, particularly online, generated by cybersecurity and foreign NGO laws, increased internet surveillance, and heavy sentences handed down to human rights lawyers, microbloggers, grassroots activists, and religious believers.”
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https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/china
And what do Apple and Tim Cook do? They purr with contentment and cooperate with the Chinese dictatorship in every way possible, pouring billions of dollars each year into its economy.
They even toady in little ways. The Clock app in iOS lists cities in brutally occupied Tibet as Chinese, but it refuses to list a country for Taipei, capital of free and democratic Taiwan. Check it out for yourself. And while you’re at it check out that repressive hell-hole Gaza and compare it to Jerusalem, capital of free and democratic Israel.
We saw the same in the 1930s with Nazi Germany. Can you recall a single pre-1939 movie from Hollywood critical of Hitler’s brutal regime? You can’t because the giants of entertainment never made one. Only when war in Europe cut off their lucrative German market did they begin to make films like “Casablanca.”
Money ruled in Hollywood during the 1930s. It rules in today’s Silicon Valley.
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/china
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@Michael: Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree with the your concern over tolerance of Chinese oppression. That said, Trump doesn’t help our moral standing, given his love of Putin and other tyrants–not to mention the Kushners’ conflicts of interest in China. Hillary has flaws, plenty, as a creature of the Democratic establishment, but she is worlds apart from Trump.
Now—about Hollywood and the Nazis. You’re very right for the most part. I haven’t read this book but am well aware of it: The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Still, let’s not forget some exceptions to the rule, such as the highly anti-Nazi satire The Great Dictator, which is an American film distributed by United Artists, even though Chaplin came from the U.K.
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Hi Chris, thank you for the critique. As always, I appreciate your insight and elegant writing style.
My main point was this: All other reflective panels failed because they were too expensive or didn’t look good enough. CLEARink is both (supposedly) cheaper and better looking than E Ink. I suspect, though, that their decision to not include a frontlight and reflective layer in the E Ink stack is why it’s cheaper. I definitely could have been more objective. Even so, unless I was outright lied to, CLEARink seems to be more than competitive with E Ink.
BTW, you have a minor error in your article. I did not change any statement about the i.MX 7 being in the Paperlike 2 (I still suggest that it is inside of the Paperlike 2). The only thing I edited (as of 7/30) in was a section about eye damage and insomnia being caused by UV/blue light.
Nate has yet to publish anything about the SoC inside of the Paperlike 2. There is currently no information online about its guts. Once he publish something, I’d gladly admit to the error and give him a backlink.
Also, if I’m wrong about CLEARink, I’d glad eat humble pie in 2018 and similarly write a piece admitting to the mistake — while crediting your article for being the cold water that extinguished my smoldering fanboyism. 🙂
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Cookbooks and illustrated childrens books are two categories where a color display is better than black and white. I’m sure there are others.
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As the article points out, color tablets and large-screen phones have largely supplanted E-ink readers already. Dedicated e-readers are a niche product these days.
Now that even cheap tablets have all-day battery life, the only real advantage e-readers have is that they can be read in sunlight. And most people try to avoid skin cancer, so…
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Thomas, I’m afraid you are missing the point. EReaders do outperform tablets and smartphones in just one aspect. And that aspect happens to be essential to all of those who are not just casual readers, but like to read fro extended periods of time.
And that aspect is: unlike LCD backlit displays, e-ink is easy on the eyes. Reading for extended period of time does not strain your eyes.
That is all.
(I would add that not even high resolution in a tablet makes a huge difference in one’s reading experience. Of the three ereaders I have (the Sony T2, the Sony T3 and the Kibo HD Glo, each having hagher and higher resolutions) my favorite remains the T2, which has the lowest resolution. How come? Resolution just doesn’t matter much, and my T2 has the best form factor of these…)
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