Last week Sony UK released the somewhat awkwardly named PRS-505 electronic book reader; a handheld device about the size of a paperback novel that can store and display thousands of documents (so-called eBooks). Some of you may have previously read eBooks on your personal digital assistant (PDA), mobile phone or laptop and will be wondering what all the fuss is about.

The key difference with the Sony Reader lies with its 6” screen. Until recently, portable devices relied on energy-gobbling liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Most PDAs, mobile phones, portable games consoles and the like use LCD technology which is capable of producing detailed, richly-coloured images at extremely high resolution. However, LCDs require a constant trickle of electricity, both to maintain the displayed image, but also to and drive a light that makes them visible. The efficiency of LCDs has gradually improved, and the replacement of fluorescent backlights with white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have made them much more frugal; but the useful battery life of any device using an LCD is measured in hours rather than days or weeks.

The Sony Reader and its kindred us an alternative technology known as an electrophoretic display, better known as electronic paper. These displays differ from LCDs in that they do not need a constant supply of electricity; rather, they only consume power when they change. Turn off the power, and, in theory, electronic paper will retain an image for decades. Electronic paper has been a long time coming. The first practical electronic paper, called Gyricon, was developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1990s. The Reader uses a related technology called E Ink created by the E Ink Corporation, a subsidiary of the Dutch electronics giant Philips.  E Ink displays can be thought of as a sandwich. The front of the display is a transparent sheet facing the user. It is divided into hundreds of thousands of pixels, each of which can hold an electrical charge. The back of the display is designed in a very similar way although it does not need to be transparent. The sandwich is filled with hundreds of thousands of hollow plastic capsules each about half the diameter of a human hair. The capsules are filled with a dark oily chemical and thousands of microscopic particles of titanium dioxide; a chemical so blindingly white that it is used to brighten everything from paint to toothpaste.

Crucially, titanium dioxide is attracted to a negative electrical charge. If a pixel on the front of the display is given a negative charge, the titanium dioxide in the capsules behind that pixel move towards the front of the display turning it white. If the same front pixel is given a positive charge, the titanium dioxide flees to the rear of the display revealing the dark oil and turning the pixel black. Electronic paper does not need a backlight; it relies solely on the light falling on the display; unlike an LCD that becomes increasingly hard to read in brighter conditions, electronic paper performs best in bright sunlight. (Of course, without a backlight, it is impossible to read electronic paper in darkness)

The most obvious drawback to electronic paper is that it is currently restricted to displaying black and white images (or to be strictly accurate very dark grey and very light grey images). Colour electronic paper is theoretically possible, but no practical demonstrations have yet been made. The second drawback, and the most serious, is that electronic paper is a relatively sluggish technology. It takes between half and one second to completely redraw a screen created on electronic paper – in comparison the latest LCDs can refresh an image in a few hundreds of a second. Electronic paper is not suited to displaying animated images such as movies and games, so it is unlikely to find a home on your computer or screen any time soon.

However, a screen holding an eBooks doesn’t need constant refreshing, it only needs to be changed when the reader goes to the next page. Rather than measure battery life in hours, E Ink displays measure their charge in page turns. A device the size of the Sony Reader can hold enough power to turn over 9000 pages! Which means a fully charged reader might not need recharging for weeks. If you’re like me, and liable to carry kilos of books on a trip, the prospect of replacing all that weight with one small device that doesn’t need power adaptors and cables must be very attractive. As well as Sony, E Ink has been adopted by a number of other manufacturers for devices such as the CyBook Reader and the iRex iLiad. In the UK, it is likely the Sony Reader will come to dominate the market. It is made by a well-known brand with enormous financial muscle and a tie-in to the Waterstones bookshop chain.

However, it would be unwise for Sony to be complacent as there is a superior product available in the United States. The Amazon Kindle uses the same E Ink technology as the Sony Reader, but its designers have chosen to design a stand-alone device rather than one that plugs into a PC. To accomplish this, the Kindle has a built-in wireless connection that allows the reader to connect to the Amazon online store and obtain books in a few seconds. Kindle users can buy books wherever they are without needing to spend time trying to find a computer with a network connection, web browser and necessary software.

The Kindle’s WhisperNet wireless technology is known as EVDO and runs on the older American CDMA mobile phone network that has never found favour in the UK and Europe. For this reason, the current Kindle cannot be used to buy eBooks outside the United States. However, there is no reason why a future Kindle could not support one of the more common 2G or 3G telephone networks that can be found on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even more advanced than the Kindle is a prototype device from a Cambridge start-up called Plastic Logic. Their eBook reader uses the same E Ink technology as other readers, but has sandwiched the display between two sheets of electronically conductive plastic. The change in material means that Plastic Logic’s displays are cheaper and larger than rival displays using fragile glass. Even more remarkably, there is no reason why the Plastic Logic display could not be made flexible, raising the possibility of screens that can be rolled up into cylinders or wrapped into watch bands, jewellery or clothes. Plastic Logic is promising to release their first consumer product in early 2009 and you can see a video of the extraordinarily thin device on the company’s home page.

So is the paper book doomed? Not entirely, and there are two reasons not to expect bookshops to die just yet.

The first reason is that eBooks are currently available in a multitude of formats, some of which are proprietary and restricted to certain devices. Amongst others there are the familiar TXT (plain text), RTF (a document interchange format used by many word-processors), DOC (Microsoft Word’s native format), HTML (the format used by the World Wide Web and understood by all browsers) and PDF (the Adobe Acrobat format). Less common formats are MOBI (Amazon’s MobiPocket format), LIT (for Microsoft’s Reader program), eReader (designed for Palm’s Digital Media electronic books), AZW (for the Amazon Kindle) and BBeB (Sony’s proprietary format). It is all too common to find an eBook, but to then discover you can’t read that format - a situation that has been called The Tower of eBabel! Fortunately, this situation is improving; a number of publishers and technology companies have collaborated to create the Open eBook platform; a document format that anyone is free to use. In theory any device or program that can understand Open eBook documents will be able to read any document published in that format. The format, known to users as ePub, OeBPS or IDPF is gradually gaining acceptance and may well soon come to dominate the market for eBooks.

The more serious problem lies with a topic I’ve mentioned previously – Digital Rights Management (DRM). Since eBooks are comprised of digital data, they could be copied a thousands of times in a fraction of a second and these copies distributed over the Internet for free. To protect against this, many commercial eBooks are protected by DRM that ties each book to a strictly limited number of devices. In some cases, the DRM ties are even more severe – you may be limited to the number of times you can download a book, you may be prevented from printing the book, it might even have a limited lifetime.

Compare this approach to a traditional book with which you can do almost anything; write marginal notes, tear out pages, add PostIt notes, lend it to a friend, sell it on… Current DRMed eBooks allow almost none of these – if you love a book and want someone else to enjoy it, you have to persuade them to buy their own copy. Worse still, if you upgrade your computer or have it stolen, then there’s a chance the DRM won’t allow you to read titles on your new computer. Some of the DRM schemes don’t even allow you to make backups of the titles you’ve purchased.

There’s no doubt that authors and publishers need to protect their incomes, but the current implementations of DRM do not respect paying customers. It should be mandatory that I can always download another copy of a book from a retailer; likewise I must be able to back up valuable eBooks in case of disaster. But why not go further - going back to the original paper book, if I lend a book to a friend and they like it, they may go on to buy their own copy. Even if they don’t, no sale has been lost. Why can’t I do the same with an eBook? Let me send a number of time-limited copies to friends. If they like it and buy the book, give me a discount on my next purchase; if they don’t, the book vanishes and no one is hurt.

If you want to start reading eBooks, you don’t need to buy a dedicated reader; your PC, laptop, PDA or mobile phone is almost certainly capable of running one or more eBook reader programs. You don’t even need to spend money on eBooks to get your hands on legitimate copies. A number of sites such as Project Gutenberg and feedbooks.com have huge collections of free titles made up from out-of-copyright books and those books where the author has chosen to make freely available.

So, have Sony killed the book? Not yet - eBooks and eBook readers are too expensive, too fragile and too restrictive to threaten the paperback; the technology behind them does show us what a future computer might look like - one that runs for weeks without charge, one that can be slipped into a pocket - perhaps even be part of your clothes, and one that is never out of touch with the rest of the world.

Mind you, that last point - never being out of touch with the rest of the world, makes me think of one of my favourite short stories - E.M. Forster's 1909 story 'The Machine Stops' - and coincidentally that's a free eBook!

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

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So it’s time for me to eat crow, or depending on your taste, humble pie. Not so long ago I was confidently predicting a drawn out battle between two high definition disk formats; HD-DVD and Blu-ray. HD-DVD, backed by Toshiba and the DVD standards body offered cheaper players but only a limited range of titles; Sony’s Blu-ray was more expensive but had a larger library of movies. It seemed likely that the two formats would continue to co-exist, confusing purchasers who would continue to vote with their feet and carry on buying DVDs. Suddenly everything changed; HD-DVD is dead. On February 19th, Toshiba announced that it would immediately stop manufacturing HD-DVD players and recorders. In little over a month, HD-DVD had gone from a viable format for the future of movies to a technological cul-de-sac. What had gone wrong?

Two factors conspired to kill HD-DVD. The first was Sony’s technological wonder, the Playstation 3, which comes with a built-in Blu-ray player. After a troubled launch, the PS3 has begun to notch up impressive sales with more than 10 million sold to date (more than a million in the UK alone) – ten times the number of HD-DVD players that were sold during its lifetime. People may not have bought PS3 for movies, but they have certainly been experimenting with Blu-ray disks whose sales have been steadily climbing. The second nail in the coffin of HD-DVD was the decision by Warner Brothers to cease issuing new movies on the format. This left only Universal Studios and Dreamworks as committed to HD-DVD exclusivity for their movies. Within days of the Warner announcement; Woolworths in the UK and the colossal American chain WalMart said they were abandoning HD-DVD; the writing was on the wall for the format.

In the US and Japan, many retailers are compensating purchasers of HD-DVD players, either with cold, hard cash or with credits against the purchase of a Blu-ray player. On the software front, things are grim for HD-DVDs with most studios cancelling future releases; but HD-DVD users are enjoying a fire sale of existing titles as retailers dump their stocks, at the moment disks can be had for as little as £6 apiece – cheaper than DVDs! Existing HD-DVD players will continue to play regular DVDs, and in the event of one failing, Toshiba has stockpiled at least 8 years worth of spare parts. If, like me, you bought into HD-DVD, you will be able to enjoy it for many years to come.

The backers of Blu-ray, most notably Sony and the movie studios, are the victors. Toshiba might have lost this war, but it can easily afford to write off the costs of HD-DVD. The real losers in this war may well be consumers, and that is because we’re going to have fewer ways of enjoying our entertainment.

Region coding is part of a trend in media and computer software known as digital rights management (DRM) that aims to control how media can be used. DRM allows the publisher of a title to say where it can be played, on what machines, if it can be copied to another device, even whether the recording will evaporate after being played. You’ve almost certainly encountered DRM every time you play a DVD. When you first put a DVD into a player you will see a number of warnings about where the disk can be used and the consequences for pirating its contents. You may have noticed you cannot skip past these and get on with the movie – the DRM on the disk temporarily disables the functions that allow you to fast forward and go to the next track. The DRM on the disk also prevents you from copying its contents and from playing disks bought in one part of the world from working inside the UK. You can find a map of these ‘region codes’ on Wikipedia.

The DRM on DVDs was introduced as a reaction to the threat of piracy. Older, analogue technologies – such as audio and videotape can be easily copied, but the process is slow and the number of copies that can be created is very small. Crucially, as tape is repeatedly duplicated, the quality of the copies decreases – effectively limiting the number of pirated copies that could be circulated. However, when information is stored in digital form – such as on a DVD – it can be perfectly replicated an infinite number of times. These perfect copies can then either be written on to a blank disk, or distributed across the World over the Internet.

DVD’s DRM is a fairly elderly technology known as the Content Scrambling System (CSS). It was broken long ago and pirated versions of DVDs, stripped of all their DRM (often without the infuriating anti-piracy adverts found on genuine disks), can be found in most towns and cities and circulating on the Internet. When movie studios began to plan the move to high definition disks, they chose more powerful forms of DRM. Blu-ray’s protection is called BD+ and is generally thought to be superior to the AACS system found on HD-DVD as it allows manufacturers to continually upgrade their DRM against attacks. Unlike HD-DVD, Blu-ray also uses region coding to stop users playing and importing disks from other parts of the world. It is widely believed that the movie studios put their weight behind Blu-ray because of its stronger DRM, both because it offered better protection from piracy, and because it served to block the traffic in cheap disks from places such as the United States and Hong Kong.

DRM is not only found on DVDs, it is used by games companies to protect their products, in satellite and cable set-top boxes, on most music bought from online stores, even in the expensive HDMI cables needed to connect to high-definition television sets. Although there are a huge number of DRM technologies being used by various companies, most of them share a common technological root known as encryption; a field of mathematics concerned with scrambling information to shield it from prying eyes. Crucially, encryption is always reversible – that is the scrambled material can be restored to its original state by performing a decryption. Media documents controlled by DRM are distributed in an encrypted form and can only be decrypted by a user if they own both a decryption program and a second piece of information known as the key. The decryption is performed by dedicated microprocessors in the player using decryption keys stored in the player’s memory. If you use a software application such as Apple’s iTunes to play media files, your computer’s processor performs the decryption and the keys are stored in hidden files on your computer’s hard disk.

Some DRM schemes such as Apple’s FairPlay and Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tie media files to particular authorised computers. When you authorise a computer, the player software extracts information from that machine which might include information including your name, your registered email address, the unique serial number of machine’s CPU, the serial number of the operating system and so on. This information is used to generate the key needed to decrypt the media file. For both FairPlay and PlaysForSure users are restricted to playing a file on no more than five computers; if you try to play a file on an unauthorised computer or to authorise a sixth computer you will be unable to do so.

In Microsoft’s PlaysForSure scheme, machines need to be reauthorized when users upgrade from one version of Windows to another. Information about the machine is gathered, sent across the Internet to the PlaysForSure servers and a new key issued. And this process is now causing a problem because Microsoft is abandoning PlaysForSure in favour of its own Zune music player.

PlaysForSure was an attempt by Microsoft to eat into Apple’s dominance of the music player market. Rather than build a single device to compete against the iPod, Microsoft produced the PlaysForSure standard. Any manufacturer could then build devices PlaysForSure compliant devices with Microsoft collecting a small fee for each machine sold. Music, wrapped in DRM, could then be bought from a number of online stores that supplied music in Microsoft’s Windows Media Format. The idea was that competition between manufactures would quickly drive the price of their players below that of the iPod and users would gradually switch to the more affordable product, allowing Microsoft to steal Apple’s crown.

For any number of reasons, PlaysForSure was a failure and have Microsoft switched to copying Apple’s business model. They designed their own music player, the Zune (so far only available in America) that plays music bought through the dedicated Zune Marketplace online store. Rather than have Zune compete against iPod and PlaysForSure, Microsoft has chosen to kill PlaysForSure by simply switching off the authorisation servers. As soon as the servers are switched off it will no longer be possible to get new PlaysForSure keys from Microsoft. Anyone buying a new machine or upgrading their version of Windows after that date will find they can’t play music purchased from Microsoft’s old MSN Music store. Microsoft originally intended to switch the servers off on August 31st 2008, but after a furious customer reaction, have since extended the scheme, now excitingly branded 'Certified for Windows Vista', until 2011. Hot on Microsoft’s heels, the troubled Yahoo! corporation announced that it would be shutting down the DRM servers that authenticated its Unlimited Music Store from September 2008. This time, following angry complaints from customers, Yahoo! agreed to refund the purchase cost of any music bought through Unlimited.

DRM is turning into a public-relations disaster for media companies. Customers are increasingly chaffing against the artificial restraints placed on their use of products, and more and more of them are realising that DRM only affects law-abiding customers. Pay for a DVD or Blu-ray and you can’t make a copy for your laptop or your iPod, you’re forced to sit through adverts, you can’t even buy a cheaper version of the disk from another country. Pirate copies of TV programmes, music, movies and video games are available on the Internet; they look identical but have none of the restrictions. Piracy exists because it serves consumers’ desires and until the movie studios make their official disks every bit as attractive as the illegal copies, piracy will continue to thrive.

But it is possible that DRM is nothing more than a passing phase in the media industry. Amazon in the US and iTunes now allow people to purchase MP3 versions of music which can be freely copied between devices. As a testament to its popularity, it took just a few months for Amazon to become the second-largest retailer of music in the United States after the iTunes Music Store and it is growing at a much faster rate than the Apple Store. Despite fears from the industry, there has been no explosion in piracy; just many more satisfied customers and an expanding marketplace. Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to wake up and begin treating the people who pay its wages like responsible adults.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts