eInk and PVI Crearte One Vertical eInk Company

E Ink, the company that invented the e-paper displays on all the lookey likie ereaders such as the Kindle, Bebook, Hanlin, IRex and Sony and many more, has been acquired by Tiawanese Prime View International, which makes e-paper displays for the majority of the ereaders. The price is claimed to be some $215 million.

PVI acquired the e-paper business of Philips Electronics in 2005 and partnered with E Ink to provide ereader displays for the likes of the Kindle and Sony Reader. PVI also invested in flexible displays and has acquired a majority stakeholding in Hydis Technologies in Korea, who supply the transistor backplanes used in e-paper. The new combination creates a single company dedicated to electronic paper that will potentially speed up development.

E Ink and Prime View (PVI) were already partners and the goal is now to combine forces and expand capacity and e-paper improvements and push developments such as the long overdue colour and flexible displays.

New eBook Readers for 2009

Another show, another launch, more announcements and even more speculation on the ebook front. Following hot on the heels of the mobile piches in Barcelona comes CeBIT 2009 in Germany this week. What’s new and what are the rumours?

Boox ebook reader
It sounds a funny name and is from Onyx International in China. The reader is not available today but Onyx are looking for OEM customers for their touchscreen for their 6, 8 or 9.7 inch touch screen sizes. Other features of the Boox eBook reader can includes Wi-Fi, plus the usual technology specification; CDMA 1XRTT, GPRS, 3G, 400Mhz CPU, 128MB RAM, 512MB Flash or more, a SD card slot, 2.5mm headphone jack and USB 2.0 with OTG. The device supports PDF, TXT, HTML, MOBIPOCKET, EPUB, CHM, PDB, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, MP3, and WAV.

BeBook
Dutch company Endless Ideas launched their BeBook reader in 2008, and plan to launch its next-gen BeBook reader at the CeBIT show.

There are no pictures but it is claimed that the new BeBook model will include wireless connectivity, new touch screen navigation and RSS and also be capable of rendering to the new ePub DRM standard in the coming months.

Kindle 3
Having just started to ship the new Kindle 2 last month there are already runours of a Kindle 3 with Digitimes mentioning it in a story about PVI who delivers the display for the Kindle. Apparently later this year we should see a touchscreen Kindle that also with a larger display.

So we appear to be in a device war before we have the depth and range of content and while issues such as DRM, pricing have been resolved. An abundance of readers can only be good for maintaining the noise level but if each is competing for the same spend they could keep the price up or trigger a device price war. Today they are like the early days of CDs too closely packed on price and we need someone to grab the initiative and go for volume based on price. If this doesn’t happen then the alternatives based on netbooks and smartphones will look increasingly more attractive. Also the longer they remain greyscale, the more attractive colour alternatives will look