The E-Book Wars Begin

ARS Technica reports: If I had any doubts that the e-book wars are officially on, my first day at the Consumer Electronics Show dispelled them thoroughly. Note that I said "e-book wars," and not "e-reader wars." That's because there's a tidal wave of E-Ink-based e-readers that are about to hit the U.S., so that by the second half of this year (at the latest) E-Ink screens will be a dime a dozen. And on top of the E-Ink screens will be the tablets, and on top of those will be LCD/E-Ink tablet combos in various configurations.

But as thick as the market will be with e-book hardware, the readers aren't the only crowded part of the market. Everyone also wants to control a distribution platform. And then there are the publishers, who are scrambling to adapt to the new medium.

In short, right now, the emerging e-book market is in a full-blown melee—a free-for-all where everyone along the chain from content producer to reader is trying to be the first to figure it all out. Many of the combatants are involved in more than one area—Qualcomm Inc. is in displays and chips; newcomer Copia is pushing hardware and a storefront; Sprint Nextel Corp., Hearst Corp., Skiff LLC, and LG Group are all allied across displays, storefronts, and publishers under the Skiff banner; and so on.

The Sprint/Hearts Skiff and the Plastic Logic QUE: Most of the e-readers coming out in the next few months are based on E-Ink, but that doesn't mean that the displays will be identical. Reading devices will compete with each other on size, thickness, resolution, contrast, and price. The screens will also compete to offer color as quickly as possible.

Of the readers that I saw, the Skiff has the edge on size so far with an 11.5-inch diagonal screen. Plastic Logic comes in a close second, but, to be 100 percent honest, I couldn't actually tell that there was much of a difference in sizes (I saw them one after the other); the Skiff executive I talked to told me that the Skiff's screen was a bit bigger. Regardless, both are easily large enough to view a full 8.5 x 11 inch page without doing any scaling, and both have solid industrial design.

As far as contrast goes, Plastic Logic's screen definitely looks better than my Kindle DX—the latter has a grayish cast, while the former presents a much cleaner black-on-white look. I can't judge between the Skiff and the Plastic Logic screens on contrast, though, because I didn't see them in similar lighting conditions.

Both the Skiff and the Plastic Logic QUE were incredibly thin—about quarter of an inch or less. This thinness is made possible in part by the fact that both have flexible display substrates—Skiff's uses a foil substrate developed by LG, while Plastic Logic's uses a plastic substrate developed in-house. Both of these make for flexible displays, but of the two only the Skiff itself is physically flexible (you can actually bend the device a bit and it doesn't hurt it).

On the resolution front, the Skiff wins at 174 dpi to Plastic Logic's slightly lower 150 dpi. I couldn't visually tell a difference, but again, lighting conditions were drastically different.

Color E-Ink is in the offing, and I saw a prototype of it at the Skiff presentation. At this point, the technology looks promising but it needs a lot of work. Color saturation was pretty poor, and right now I'd prefer the black-and-white to it. There are supposedly better color E-Ink prototypes than the one I saw, and if I can catch a glimpse of a superior iteration of the tech, then I'll post an update.

E-Ink may be the 800-pound gorilla of the emerging e-reader market, but it's not the only game in town. I got a close-up look at Qualcomm's Mirasol, MEMS-based technology that I mentioned in my CES preview article. A Qualcomm rep showed me a static screen with a color picture on it, and I have to admit to being pretty disappointed.

I saw the screen in some good light, but color saturation was just too poor; the dpi also seemed quite low. It sort of looked like an old-timey lithograph; if the unit had featured not a magazine cover but a Union soldier holding a rifle, it would've been a dead ringer for a piece of Civil War memorabilia. OK, that's an exaggeration, but it did look unexpectedly dim and metallic. I had seen a few photos of Mirasol that gave that impression and had been hoping that it was an artifact of the lighting or camera, but it isn't. The Mirasol demo doesn't quite seem ready for prime time to me.

I'm not ready to write Mirasol off yet, though. It looked better to me than the color E-Ink prototype that I saw, and the MEMs-based idea behind it seems solid. My guess is that they'll keep working on this until they get something more vibrant.

Tablets, slates, and hybrid approaches: There are at least three attempts—Barnes & Noble's Nook, the Entourage Edge, and Spring Design Inc.'s Alex e-reader (more on the last two in a later article) that combine LCD and E-Ink in an attempt to get the best of both worlds. The Nook and the Alex have a similar layout, with a larger E-Ink screen sitting over a smaller LCD screen; both of the units run Google Inc.'s Android on the LCD portion.

LCD and OLED are also in the running, and I saw at least one e-reader based on the former out on the floor. Such "e-readers" are essentially tablets, and in fact the line between an e-reader, a tablet, and a portable media player seems fairly blurry right now and is drawn mainly based on size.

There is also at least one dual-LCD-screen e-reader/netbook combo from MSI, and other vendors may be pursuing this idea, as well.

In need of an edge: Almost everyone I talked to today in the e-book space realizes that the "e-reader" as such isn't really something you want to bet your company on unless you have a real edge. The reason is that people will read on any portable device with a screen; and with all of the tablets, "superphones," smartbooks, and so on slated for this year, e-readers will be competing for attention with that many more (full-color) screens. It's also the case that, as LCD alternatives like color E-Ink and Mirasol improve and acquire video capabilities, "e-readers" based on these passive display technologies will be competing with an assortment of phones, portable media players, tablets, and other devices that use those same passive displays.

So at some point soon, the dedicated "e-reader" will be about where the "feature phone" is in 2010—at the bottom of the mobile barrel, having been outclassed by a raft of devices that do much more than just display books.

The inevitable and soon-coming relegation of the dedicated e-reader to the boneyard of low-end, discount obsolescence has left e-reader makers scrambling for an edge. One of these edges is touch, but touch has two major problems: Many readers will have it this year, and all of those touch-enabled readers will be more expensive than their non-touch counterparts. Even the ubiquity and added cost might be OK if touch wasn't super-wonky on an E-Ink screen, but it is. Refresh times for E-Ink are still low, and the result is that iPhone-trained users expect touch-based e-reader interfaces to react much faster than they're capable of. In the two demos I saw of the Skiff and the QUE, the former given by a Skiff executive and the latter given by the QUE's industrial designer, both demonstrators struggled at points with getting the display to respond as they tried to show off markup capabilities. Given this, I suspect that touch will frustrate many early-adopters this year.

In addition to touch, Skiff and QUE boast their thinness, size, and flexible substrates as edges over the competition. But because the two products are so comparable on those metrics, even that isn't enough. Increasingly, then, it's looking like the edge that every e-reading player will pursue is content availability. But the relationship between publishers and e-reading platforms is a topic for another day.

Because e-readers will be commodities by the second quarter of this year, the margins on such hardware will be fairly thin. But there are still major opportunities for making money in the e-book hardware space, if you can get your chips widely adopted by e-reader makers. That's where Marvell, Qualcomm, and others will compete with one another for a share of the growing e-reader pie. But that is a story for another day.

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Jon Stokes is a deputy editor for Ars Technica.