E-Ink devices suddenly become real

PHILOSOPHICAL question for the aughts: if a vapourware company, capable of saturating media outlets with PR for weeks on end, suddenly began shipping actual product, would anyone know?

While decades on, you still can't answer with certainty about the felled tree amid vacant foliage, we'll solve the evanescence question shortly.

E-Ink, the pioneering Cambridge, Mass electronic paper developer that's been announcing handheld devices "in a year or so" since 2001, has quietly found a manufacturer for its screens, and is not only offering developer kits, they've got an actual mass-market product set to launch in China q4. The folks at Hong Kong-based Jinke, makers of the $299 E-Ink devices, are so excited, they're talking a V2 model running Linux with an SDK that allows for user-created apps before next summer.

Things you never thought you'd write. It got so bad waiting on low-power high-res screens from E-Ink, or Kent Displays, or Sony, or anybody, the old Open Ebook Forum changed its name to the International Digital Publishing Forum, as part of a new focus on downloable audiobooks, while one-time leading content providers have shifted their focus away from ebooks and towards print-on-demand solutions. All wasn't lost in ebookland, Gutenberg's still going gangbusters, but for a time there, ebook professionals in bars were better off muttering something about working as consultants if they wanted tab privileges (with debit card) instead of doling out cash for every drink.

There was a previous E-Ink device, Sony's Librie, which got around the costly screen problem by loading up with so much dracronian rights management none save the technical l33t wanted to buy it. Sony mostly gave up on the thing last November, with reports varying as to whether Libries for sale from Dynamism and Akihabara are new, refurbished, or the same two or three units continually exchanged between the frustrated and the hopeful.

E-Ink was always the company with a hot pedigree (tech from MIT and Bell Labs), late-stage-biotech-class funding (most recently from Intel Capital), displays that wowed 'em at every trade show, journos on hand to film the demos glowingly, and, for half a decade, no products.

Maybe they're being so quiet now because having something to actually sell puts them into unfamiliar territory. µ

David Moynihan runs Blackmask and other ebook sites.