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Traversing the E-book Subscription Frontier

In a world of subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Apple Music, e-book distributors are attempting to explore this new frontier by offering subscription services for e-books, audiobooks, magazines, and more.

Why Subscribe to Books?

With the prevalence of streaming services, it makes a lot of sense that electronic book distributors would attempt to get in on the on-demand game in order to better ensure the security of their books. After all, e-book piracy is just as common as movie or music piracy. It isn’t hard to find a digital copy of a book and just put it up on a file-sharing website – or worse, someone may go to the effort to photocopy a physical copy of a book and upload that file. Even Google cannot escape issues of Fair Use and copyright when it comes to digitally distributing books.

As a way of stopping piracy, groups looking to distribute books are now offering a subscription to the very books people are stealing. This way, those who would pirate the books out of convenience have ease and accessibility to books that they want, and distributors have a legal subscription model that covers their backs in the copyright issues.

Top E-book Subscription Contenders

For readers unsure of what subscription service to use, Make Use Of mentions six services that are going strong, and Book Riot has a list of 17 options available in 2019. Between these and other articles, two names rise to the top.

Scribd, an organization started in 2009, launched their subscription in 2013 and have had a fair amount of success at their price of $8.99/month. They offer over 500,000 books, as well as plenty of audiobooks, articles, documents, and magazines, at a rate that is lower than much of the competition. They were the quasi-pioneers in this world of e-book subscription services.

The other popular option is Kindle Unlimited (KU). Amazon’s own service is priced at $9.99/month or $59.99/six-months with frequent “50% off for six months” deals. Like Scribd, Kindle Unlimited also offers audiobooks and magazines.

With both services, you can listen to or read as much diverse content as you could realistically want or hope to consume in a reasonable amount of time. The difference, then, comes down to convenience and exclusive content.

The price for KU is not particularly competitive unless you snag the 50% off deal, but you can, however, use your Kindle – and, considering Kindle products make up three of 2019’s top five e-readers, Kindle Unlimited already has a large install base of people committed to reading e-books. All those readers have to do is click a button and they’re in the service. It’s quick and easy, and suddenly over 1 million books are available.

Book Riot points out that Amazon does not have an unlimited deal with every publisher that they have on the main website: thus while it has more books in general, it doesn’t stand out in its list of best sellers. You’ll still find yourself paying for some more recent and popular books. Furthermore, Amazon only offers 61 magazines. That’s enough to keep anyone busy, but a quick glance through the cheaper service, Scribd, and its selection shows significantly more magazines than that (in addition to individually searchable articles and documents). Ultimately, it’s clear that Scribd can fill more specific magazine niches.

Niche Services

For readers looking for something other than e-books, some more audience-specific services do exist. Marvel Unlimited allows unparalleled access to over 25,000 Marvel comics anywhere you want for only $9.99/Month, and Amazon has a service called ComiXology that has 20,000 “comics and manga from DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and other publishers.” ComiXology Unlimited is free to subscribers for the first 30 days, but is then $5.99/month. Unlimited offers exclusive members discounts and unlimited reading anywhere.

Epic! has unlimited access to 35,000 books, videos, and quizzes aimed at children 12 years of age and younger. Due to the increasingly expanding nature of digital publishing, readers have a lot of unique options for subscription services.

Is an E-book Subscription Worthwhile?

Subscription reading services are cool on the surface, but you may be wondering if it’s really worth it. Subscription services for movies or TV shows makes sense: we can pay $109.99 for all of Breaking Bad by itself. Or, we can watch the whole thing on Netflix in a few months, watch a two-hour movie every night of the month, and the occasional documentary while only paying $12.99/month.

Not to mention, new Blu-Ray discs of movies can cost anywhere from $5.00 to $30.00 on Amazon. As such, watching two new movies on Netflix, or three to four older movies, could make the cost of the service for the month in the span of a couple days. And Hulu (with ads) is cheaper than Netflix, making it easier to make up the cost if you so desire.

For e-book subscriptions, a reader can order the entire hardback Harry Potter series for $122.99 from Walmart, or they can read the entire series on Kindle Unlimited for $9.99 a month.

So, what kind of reading do you need to do to make up the cost of a subscription e-book service? Apparently, $3.99 is the sweet spot for selling e-books. So, a service that costs $8.99-$9.99 means you’re going to have to read at least two, maybe three e-books to validate the cost.

When Kindle Unlimited launched, most titles were only worth $0.99 to $4.99. Sure, it has gotten better as time goes on, but most book services will run into this same issue. You would have to read about five to ten books to make that cost back, and many of them are probably books you haven’t heard of. And books can be long — significantly longer than movies and TV shows.

If you look at the length of audiobooks, it’s not entirely uncommon to have an audiobook listening time of more than 24 hours total for the same price as a Blu Ray disc. Some books are significantly longer, like Stephen King’s It, which has a listening time of almost 45 hours. You’re getting a lot of time out of that book, certainly, but that’s just one book. It may be better for certain readers to just buy that one book than to subscribe to a service where they will only read it once.

You have to be an incredibly voracious reader to get an appropriate amount of value out of a subscription reading service. Basically, if you read two books a month, then it may be more cost effective to buy them outright.

Also, the unlimited e-book subscription services are still figuring some details out regarding royalties. Written Word Media mentions some interesting things about Kindle Unlimited, for example. While it used to be that someone adding the book to their library by buying it was enough to get the author paid, now people have to physically enter and read the book for the author to see a cent of payment. Not to mention, Scribd has changed their plan from unlimited downloads, to limited, to unlimited a few times, causing distrust with its subscriber base.

While the niche services seem like a good idea as well, their contracts don’t seem to include a free range of books – rather, they offer discounts to members for comics and figurines. This lack of contract clarity can be confusing for new subscribers.

The world of subscription e-book services is a real frontier’s frontier. It adds the debate about the viability of subscription services to the already fluid world of digital publishing. The royalty model, in addition to the low average price of books in the services, indicates that e-book subscription services may not be worth it for the average reader or the author. However, the world of subscription e-book services, like any digitally published form of entertainment, is constantly evolving, growing, failing, and triumphing anew. It’s up to individual readers like us to decide when to move out west.

The Fleeting Nature of Technology

The internet and technology are either extremely permanent or uniquely fleeting. Your Facebook post from that cute diner a week ago is still there, but the odds of anyone ever needing or wanting to find it again are practically zero. However, efforts like Project Gutenberg strive to preserve literature in a digital format so that generations will have access to it without having to worry about the physical decay of printed books.

Nonetheless, technologies are always fighting each other for dominance. If someone said the greatest movie in the entire world was only available on HD DVD, and I would probably never make any effort to see it. Blu-ray won the race and proved to be the dominant format. It would be inconvenient to find, buy, and set up an entire piece of technology just for the sake of one movie. Any HD DVD specific art films are lost to the annals of obsolescence and the impermanence of digital content. The world of digital publishing has been and certainly will be affected by the obsolescence of technology: for every preservation project, there’s an art form lost.

Lost Formats

Adobe Flash Player has been a staple of internet playback since its release in 1996. It helped revolutionize the way we view content online. It opened up a whole world of games, animation, and multimedia content that has become a staple of the internet. In its early days, YouTube used Flash Player to display videos. As such, it was a safe bet to use Flash Player to create content. Things like “Faith” require Flash to display the E-Poetry, which is fine in a world where Flash player is everywhere. However, time marches on, and technology changes at a rapid pace. CNN Business states the following:

But the software has been plagued with bugs and security vulnerabilities in recent years. Modern browsers support open web standards like HTML5, allowing developers to embed content directly onto webpages. This has made add-on extensions like Flash mostly useless.

Flash player is being phased out. Its whole deal, as an add-on extension, is becoming obsolete. YouTube moved off of Flash in 2015. HTML5 is simply better than Flash for the purpose that it serves. However, things get lost in the transition. What happens to “Faith” when Flash disappears in 2020? Unless the author/artist or someone else takes the opportunity to recreate, port, or record it, it’s just gone. E-Poetry commonly uses Flash. Some interesting poems are going to simply disappear as a result. It’s not worth it to resurrect a buggy, and vulnerable software just to read/watch avant-garde poetry.

E-poetry like “Girl’s Day Out” and “Pentametron” bring other interesting questions into play. They are files that can be downloaded. However, they only have versions tailored to Mac or Windows operating systems. That’s completely fine, for the most part, but what about other operating systems? For example, 30 million students and educators use Chromebooks as of January 2019. These files will not run on Chrome OS.

Most e-poetry does not have the cultural impact of William Shakespeare or Shel Silverstein, but they will be lost to the annals of obsolescence if Mac and Windows go the way of the MS-DOS. Many books are available as PDFs, as well, but we are not guaranteed that PDF will be the primary file type forever. What happens if PDFs disappear? Digital publishing inevitably loses some interesting comics, articles, books, etc. when new technology takes over. Your favorite e-book may be unreadable on your computer ten years from now.

Corporate Issues

Planned obsolescence is another tactic that has companies like Apple dodging lawsuits: “Italy’s antitrust organisation is also investigating both Apple and Samsung for the same issue.” The biggest tech companies that make most of the market share’s worth of smartphones no doubt operate like businesses with a bottom line rather than preservation efforts. Tech marches on organically like in the case of the swap from Flash to HTML5, but it also happens when companies need to meet deadlines.

Entire marketplaces may become obsolete in the future. It has already happened as Rachel Ward points out:

Microsoft’s discontinuation of their e-bookstore means that consumers will no longer be able to access and view Microsoft’s e-books. Customers who purchased the right to view the e-books within the past two years from the company are now unable to read them.

Microsoft created the store and limited it to the Edge browser to try and boost its use in the market. It didn’t garner enough traction, and now the store disappeared. With no physical trace, the entire store simply disappears. If you don’t get to your library in time for whatever reason, those books are gone.

The only thing that Microsoft offered was a full refund and an extra $25 if you added annotations according to Brian Barrett. He goes on to point out the cold reality: “And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse.” The books are gone.

While things like Project Gutenberg release books freely to download forever, the big companies like Amazon are tied to digital rights management. You simply license books from Amazon’s digital marketplace in the same way that you did from Microsoft. If those stores become obsolete, you’ll likely lose access to any purchases that you’ve made past a certain point.

Amazon has quietly removed books from libraries before. They were missing the proper rights to a version of George Orwell’s 1984, so therefore, readers were missing the proper rights, as well. It was removed from the store without fanfare. The interesting thing is that it wasn’t only removed from the store—it was deleted from readers’ devices.

Consumers are inextricable from the services they use. This connectedness is useful and handy so long as the services continue to operate. In the case of e-readers, we have instant access to thousands upon thousands of books. However, this necessitates that consumers are left crippled if the service is discontinued. We’ve seen it in the case of Microsoft discontinuing their store, and one day, Amazon’s library may be removed, as well. It will have been obsolete for a long time, by then, but many books are published only through Amazon—they will be gone.

Technology is a business, primarily. Consumers, readers in particular, depend on this technology to consume art old and new. Due to the evolution of technology, companies pushing new products, and the fact that digital rights do not physically exist, obsolescence has been and will be a permanent problem in the world of digital publishing.

The Magic of Web Comics

Web comics are a wonderful example of how digital publishing can reach beyond just delivering black-and-white text to readers and exemplifies the digital realm’s near-limitless possibilities. While web comics started out as an obscure moon orbiting the planet of digital publishing, content creators have since colonized it into a little world of their own.

Web Comic History

Modern web comics predate the world wide web. Eric Monster Millikin, a pioneer internet artist and social activist, laid claim to the first web comic: a parody of the Wizard of Oz called “Witches in Stitches” that he self-published on a CompuServe server in 1985. However, Hanz Bjordahl’s Where the Buffalo Roam was the first thing resembling what we would call a web comic today.

The world’s love for comics created a desire to share them in any way possible. The creation of the internet – the ultimate sharing tool – caused the slow trickle of comics to become a flood. David Farley’s gag strip, Doctor Fun, was the first regularly updated internet comic with its own website in 1993.

In The Verge Cat Ferguson said, “…in those early days, webcomics were some of the most influential pieces of the early-ish internet — vibrant and weird. They formed followings, which became communities, which became culture.” Internet comics became their own culture and have helped shape the world of internet humor, as well as art, to this day.

Like video games, message boards, and social media, web comics have become a cornerstone of the internet.

Web Comics, a New Frontier

Garrity mentions that web comic authors “began to colonize [the internet] with comics, mostly black-and-white, newspaper-style strips.” However, digital screens are capable of more than mimicking paper.

A web comic’s real magic lies in the things that cannot be done in traditional print. Garrity notes an important moment in 1995 that would alter the course of web comic history:

Well do I remember sitting in front of my uncle’s modem-enabled computer in 1995, waiting half an hour for each page of Charley Parker’s full-color, animation-embedded, visually experimental Argon Zark! to load. Story-wise, Argon Zark! is geeky simplicity itself… But Parker was playing with flashy and imaginative visual ideas when most webcartoonists were still drawing basic art with BASIC gags.

Web comics boomed in the late ‘90s as pioneering artists began to explore the medium.

How Web Comics Direct Our Gaze

With traditional print comics, and even simply drawn web comics, there is nothing stopping the readers from looking at the “wrong” spot in the comic. Sure, authors can draw your gaze; but with digital screens, artists can direct your gaze.

The Team Fortress 2 web comic is an excellent example of how a comic can direct a reader’s gaze. When readers open up the first panel of a comic it seems simplistic; the art is bare, and maybe only half of the digital panel is filled. A simple command along the bottom of the screen changes the game: “Click image or use space bar to advance.”

The TF comics only display what the authors want the reader to see at any given point. Clicking reveals extra panels on some pages of the comic. The comic also allows writers to present real-time modifications of what is already in a given panel at any time; one character’s expression may change, or a new drawing may supersede the current panel. Furthermore, an entirely new drawing may overlay what was already on the screen.

The author never has to fear that a reader will be confused by the arrangement of panels on a page if the grids themselves appear in the correct order. Timing is an important aspect of comedy, and Team Fortress comics strive for a lot of humor. Punchlines in a web comic retain the power to surprise an audience much more reliably than a print comic.

Many web comics also insert animations within their panels to great effect. An excellent example is the Mr. Lovenstein comic, “Pushy.” Sure, an author can convey button-mashing in other ways, but the best way to convey the joke is by simply having the character within the comic mash the button repeatedly; the comic only gets funnier the more that readers watch it—which is only possible on a digital screen.

The Shapes and Sizes of Web Comics

Web comics are not bound by traditional size constraints required of print comics. Traditional comics require strips to fit into certain sizes and shapes that xkcd consistently resists. The comic, “I’m Sorry,” has a completely different shape than “How Old,” which has a completely different form than “Earth Orbital Diagram.” Randall Munroe is confined only by his imagination when it comes to the size and shape of his comic.

LINE Webtoon is another popular website, and application, for reading web comics that approaches the shaping of comics from an interesting angle. What Webtoon offers is the equivalent of selling comics as scrolls since grids in comics confuse readers all the time. Panels run vertically, and readers progress through the comics by scrolling from the top to the bottom of comic pages. In an article from Medium, Webtoon explains that:

The transition from flipping through pages to scrolling down a monitor screen has given more freedom to readers in terms of story tempo and flow. Absence of grid freed the genre of cartoon from the limitations of layout and gave authors more space to experiment with each panel.

Authors can extend the comic-reading experience and add tension to comics; tempo and flow become tools of the trade on Webtoon rather than the liabilities of more traditional formats.

Web Comics Allow Reader Interaction

Users have a unique amount of interaction with authors that is impossible in print publications. An excellent example is SrGrafo who comments on Reddit posts with quickly drawn comics that act as jokes or puns on the subject at hand.

Another example of user interaction is Existential Comics, a strip thatalways has specific and obscure references to philosophers. At the end of each comic there are links to information about the philosophers that streamline the process of learning what the joke means for readers not philosophically inclined.

Cyanide and Happiness takes a fun spin on things and has a section on its website called “Random Comic Generator” that is based on their physical card game Joking Hazard, but allows for a heightened level of interactivity. The generator is a work of art by an author in comic format; a huge part of why it is art is the quick and simple user interaction. A button takes up significantly less space than Joking Hazard and its expansions.

Web comics helped create the internet culture that we have today. They have taken comics and removed many of the traditional constraints associated with the medium. Digital Publishing allows authors to experiment with timing, tension, animation, and even direct citations in ways that traditional print comics only dream about.

The New Libraries of Alexandria

The world of digital book preservation eases the burden of literary scholars and historians while serving to make historically important literature widely available. In the past, scholars had to rely on one or two fragmented manuscripts that likely had inconsistencies. The Library of Alexandria burning down was a big hit to literary history because extra copies were tedious and expensive to produce. In the age of the printing press and mass-produced books, paper decays. Organizations, such as Project Gutenberg, must take special precautions to preserve ancient paper. Your average paperback will probably be printed with short term profit in mind. After all, the smell of old books exists due to the breakdown of chemicals within the paper itself.

Plenty of books are worth preserving, even in a world where cheap, by-the-numbers romance novels dominate every grocery stores’ shelves. Knowing just which books will be important has not been determined yet. Books are snapshots of time, and as such, are necessary for a more complete view of history. Digital preservation seeks to make as many books as possible available digitally to anyone who wants to read them.

Project Gutenberg

The most successful group has been Project Gutenberg. PG is at the forefront of digital preservation. Rather than the literal printing press that its name refers to, this press makes strides in digital preservation. They have been “the original, and oldest, etext project on the Internet, founded in 1971.” Michael Hart had, essentially, indefinite access to a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois and a simple premise: “anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely.” He came to the conclusion, even in the 70’s, that something recorded digitally could be reproduced in any number of copies.

The internet is a dream come true for Hart’s idea of spreading the books around as far as possible. As PG developed, a philosophical system has also developed. The first aspect of this philosophy is “The Project Gutenberg Etexts should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost. They should be a general size that fits on the standard media of the time.” As such, the reader has the simplest access as possible.

The texts are transcribed in American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, which is the simplest transcription of text possible: “Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world.” Basically, any written book can be done in this format and translated from there. A glance through the Gutenberg Press catalog shows that you can download epub, Kindle, plain text, or just read it online in HTML. The texts are easily put into any of these formats from the initial input.

The second part of the philosophy states that “The Project Gutenberg Etexts should be so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them.” The simple ASCII foundation also lends itself well to being discovered from a simple search. Their website is simple to use and lends itself well to this quote from their philosophy page:

We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etexts to Peter Pan when they come back from watching HOOK at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK.

The point of searchability is that you can look for phrases you’ve heard in conversations, quotes you saw at the beginning of movies, and the names of authors you are interested in.

The management of Project Gutenberg is what makes this possible. PG is a non-profit organization and is run by Dr. Gregory B. Newby, volunteer CEO. The books are all submitted to the Project by volunteers, as well. They do not have to worry about maintaining a staff.

PG only publishes what is in the public domain. So, as soon as something enters the domain and a volunteer shows interest in the book, PG can enter a submission. PG, as such, avoids any potential legal issues that come with the tricky world of copying works of literature. From the volunteer force to steering clear of lawsuits, everything about Project Gutenberg is designed for the purpose of digital preservation and the dispersion of texts.

Google Books

Issues arise when you overlook copyright laws. Google Books is an excellent example. The idea is great: They wanted to physically scan books and make them searchable on Google. As their own website states:

…in a future world in which vast collections of books are digitized, people would use a ‘web crawler’ to index the books’ content and analyze the connections between them, determining any given book’s relevance and usefulness by tracking the number and quality of citations from other books.

Google partnered with Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford, and Stanford. However, Google sticks strictly to copyright-unprotected works. They encountered legal trouble which boils down to copyright law: “Plaintiffs, the Authors Guild, Inc. and individual copyright owners, complained that Google scanned more than twenty-million books without permission or payment of license fees.” The Authors Guild accused Google of doing the equivalent of walking into a library, just scanning everything, and then putting it on the internet.

After a decade, Google won, but “the company all but shut down its scanning operation.” Their books are available to rent or buy, and are searchable, but is a fractured database that has not been updated in recent years. However, the operation has been put to some use, though: “Through the HathiTrust Research Center, scholars can tap into the Google Books corpus and conduct computational analysis—looking for patterns in large amounts of text, for instance—without breaching copyright.” The project was ambitious and still has benefits today.

Million Books Project

The Million Book Project straddles the line between independent, volunteer projects and ambitious, big-tech business. They were a nonprofit organization that scanned physical copies of books. As their objective states, “The objective of this project is to create a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, primarily in the English language, available to everyone over the Internet.” Similar to Project Gutenberg, they simply sought to preserve books, along with backing from universities in China, India, and even Egypt.

However, the Million Book Project was expensive, and ultimately ended. As of January 2008, their website said they anticipated over ten million books in the next ten years. The project ended that same year. In addition to those universities, the website states, “National Science Foundation provided funding for Scanners, Computers, Servers, and Software.” A necessary web of manpower is required to pay for and run all of these machines. Million Books had a Rube Goldberg machine of sponsors and staff that was bound to break. Most of the texts could only be accessed through Internet Archive’s efforts.

Project Gutenberg’s administrative structure is simple. Anyone with a computer can volunteer to type up books for Project Gutenberg. Google Books was ambitious, and ultimately tripped over the red tape it so often attempted to hop over. The Million Books Project is a phenomenal idea, as well, but had so many moving parts that something was bound to breakdown.

Each of these pioneers in the world of digital publishing made important strides and learned lessons that we can take with us into the future. Digital publishing allows unparalleled access to the world of literature preservation available to anyone who thinks to search Google for “What is the Library of Alexandria?”

E-Readers: Why and How

The World of E-Readers

Because reading is so incredibly easy to come by, machines dedicated for the sole purpose of reading have been invented. E-readers employ a technology referred to as electronic paper to emulate the look of a paper book as well as is possible. Most readers would say that it is hard to beat the look and feel of a real book, but e-readers are going to try. Readers on the fence about e-books stand to benefit from understanding what e-readers are and what they can do.

Reason for E-Readers

According to Harvard Health Publishing, computer vision syndrome is indeed a real thing someone can get from spending too much time with their monitors/smartphones, and it can lead to two primary issues. One is dry eye, which can be easily treated by remembering to blink, and the other problem is eyestrain.

Eyestrain can be caused by Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) and Light-Emitting Diodes (LED) screens that are incredibly common. The issue lies in the fact that these screens emit blue light. All About Vision mentions the human eye is not feeble at blocking blue light. The light penetrates directly into the retina with little or no resistance while other lights such as ultraviolet are blocked from getting that far into the eye completely unfiltered. The incredible issue an Amazon search for blue light blocking glasses results in well-over 5,000 results.

How E-Readers Work

E-readers provide a way to read digital content without fear of retinal damage while also using significantly less power. Electronic paper’s presentation is different from the traditional monitors and smartphone screens because rather than backlit screens like LCD and LED, e-paper uses a technology described in the Wired article “Electronic Ink Will Be Everywhere in the Future”:

An e-paper display is filled with really tiny ink capsules, which have electric charges. Some of the ink in each capsule is white, some are black. Using electrical fields, the display rearranges the ink to show different things on the screen…That rearranging takes a very small amount of power, but when it’s done, it shuts off. Keeping an image on the screen doesn’t require any power at all.

E-Reader Advancements

The e-reader technology is a bit behind by the standards of modern computer/smartphone screens. A big issue is the refresh rate for these screens. Ghosting occurs when the previous image is still burned into the screen of an e-reader even after the page has been “turned.”

As a result, these e-readers cannot display multimedia like videos or animations due to the nature of the technology and its intermittent use of power to change the image one time.

Increased Resolution

In The Wired Shopper’s “Comparison of Kindle Paperwhite vs. Kindle”, shoppers can see that the original Kindle had pixels per inch (PPI) of about 167. The advancement made with the release of the Paperwhite, aside from being more like a white piece of paper in appearance, is the fact that it has 300 PPI. The more pixels a thing has, the more it is like looking at no pixels. Good E-Reader’s article “A Short History of E-Ink and the Ereader Revolution” mentions 600 PPI technology on the rise. Electronic paper is steadily becoming more like real paper in appearance.

Color Displays

A major issue in the history of e-readers has been color images. The ink capsule technology used in e-readers only allows for monochromatic colors much akin to a novel or newspaper; which, to be fair, is exactly the reason they were initially designed.

Color technology for electronic paper does exist, however, and it has been tackled in a variety of ways. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) published an article on one method of color for electronic paper displays: “RGB-White (RGBW) color filter arrays (CFAs)” which are as exhausting to understand as they are to see in action. They use traditional red, green, and blue filters over the monochromatic screen to “filter” in colors to the screen.

The E-Ink Triton 2 uses this technology to create these washed-out images. This is the world that Advanced Color Electronic Paper (ACeP) displays are addressing. The ACeP technology is taking a different route. According to the article from The Ebook Reader blog, instead of filtering the color, each cell has four pigments: cyan, magenta, yellow, and white. These colors can produce all eight primary colors, and consequently, can produce over 32,000 colors. The former CFA style of coloring only allowed for 4,096 colors. While that is workable, much like a 150 PPI display, it leaves plenty of room for improvement.

E-Readers are here, and they are determined to only getting better. Although it may never be feasible to replace the look and feel of a favorite book, companies like E Ink are not going to stop trying.