August 2013

E Ink reported their quarterly results - sales dropped 46% compared to last year, and the company's net loss was $33.6 million. E Ink expects e-reader sales in 2013 to be between 10 to 15 million (the same as in 2012).

In 2011, around 30 million e-readers were sold. Back then analysts expected the market to grow (IDTechEx's "conservative" estimate was that it will grow to 60 million units in 2015) as nobody expected the tablet market to take over reading from e-readers. I still think one of the biggest problems in the e-reader market is that e-readers didn't really change in past years. Even the old Kindles offer a great reading experience and there isn't any compelling reason to upgrade. That's actually very good for everyone (Us consumers, Amazon who makes money from books and not e-readers, and mother earth) - except E Ink themselves, of course.

Shenzhen Ocean Blue Technology is trying to raise (via IndieGogo) $2000 in order to build the world's first E Ink monitor. This is actually an E Ink (6" , 800x600) e-reader that doubles as a monitor using a stand and a computer connection. Each monitor will cost $99.

Researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Massachusetts and Intel Labs developed an E Ink display that is powered wirelessly using NFC. They used an NFC tag that includes a wireless power harvester microchip and 1mAh battery (to capture and store the energy). The E Ink display is 2.7" in size.

A single NFC transfer can be used to get 0.5Mb of data - or about 20 pages, and it gives energy enough to view all of those pages - several times over.

The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Ontario's new project, DisplayStacks, uses several flexible E Ink panels together that communicate between them using sensors to integrate them into a compound display.

The researchers explain that DisplayStacks basically enables physical stacking of digital documents via piles of flexible E Ink displays. With a conductive dot pattern sensor attached to the flexible dis- play, the system dynamically tracks the position and orientation of these displays in relation to one another. This enables several asymmetric bimanual interaction mechanisms for access and manipulation of information.