Fujitsu Flepia is slow, expensive, but heralds a color e-paper age

Fujitsu is set to sell its own Kindle-like e-book reader in Japan, with one critical difference from Amazon's offering: the new heart of the new Flepia reader is an 8-inch, 1,024 by 768 pixel touch screen...in color.

Pretty pennies must be shined: it costs $1,000, or the price of an industrial newspaper press in five years.

Consider a Flepia when doing your Christmas shopping for me. And my birthday is just 11 months away!

Don't expect this in the Kindle 3 just yet, as the technology needs time to mature: a three-pass screen refresh necessary to rebuild a full 260k color page takes eight seconds. (Even a 64-color image takes almost two.) But it's out of the labs and into a product, which is a huge step towards ubiquity.

[#1 posted by dargaud , March 18, 2009 8:55 AM]

I want one, I want one... But on the gizmodo site it says they'll cost $12,685 and $21,137. Huh? Is that Japanese dollars ? C;-)

[#2 posted by mkultra , March 18, 2009 11:28 AM]

1. Bump the resolution to 300dpi, 2560x1600 say, and manage a

2. Put it in a package with a battery life measured in days, and a weight measured in ounces.

3. Give it a proper multi-touch screen, and almost no bezel.

4. Get the price under $500.

5. Make sure it reads proper PDFs, at the very least.

6. ????

7. DESTROY THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY.

Hell, I work for a small dead-tree publisher, and even I would switch everything we do, if this had an installed base. Don't get me wrong, there will always be dead-tree books, but eventually they will be relegated to the confines of the elderly, the technophobic and the obsessed.

I read John Scalzi's "Agent To The Stars" yesterday through Stanza on my iPhone. It was fantastic, and the first fiction eBook I've ever read. I am a convert, and I'm saying this as someone with close to a thousand linear feet of books in my home.

[#3 posted by yri , March 18, 2009 11:36 AM]

I'm waiting for e-paper to be, well, like a sheet of paper. Is that asking too much?

[#4 posted by OM , March 18, 2009 2:28 PM]

"Pretty pennies must be shined: it costs $1,000, or the price of an industrial newspaper press in five years."

...Or the price of a single issue of a comic book, if the publishers continue to have their way with the Drug Pusher Economics model.

[#5 posted by PaulR , March 19, 2009 4:53 AM]

mkultra @ 2:
"Bump the resolution to 300dpi"

Um, not necessary. Really. At 150dpi, even small text is quite legible.

As far as weight and size: If it's smaller and lighter than a book, you're already ahead, no?

And if you can FINALLY read all those articles you keep downloading off the 'Net, you're ahead too, no? (That's why I got one..)

[#6 posted by devophill , March 20, 2009 3:15 AM]

@OM- You're looking for a good mobile .cbr reader, too? 'Cause man, I sure am. Hey, does anyone know of a good hackable digital picture frame?