Sony bending the eReader rules

Thursday 16 September

Is this the Sony Reader of the future?

If there’s one device that looks on a hiding to nothing from the advance of the iPad and its tablet compatriots, it’s surely the eBook reader.

After all, no sooner had the likes of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader convinced a skeptical public that electronic books really were worth a dedicated gadget all on their own, than along comes the iPad, happily able to masquerade as an eBook reader (or technically an iBook reader) – when it’s not performing any of another dozen or so other duties, that is.

But if you thought the likes of Sony and Amazon are getting ready to turn the page, as it were, on their eReader misadventures, think again. At Sony’s annual dealer convention in Tokyo recently – a chance for the electronics giant to showcases some of the concepts and prototypes it is working on – the company had on display a flexible electronic paper technology surely earmarked for future generations of Sony Readers.

The secret behind this flexible ePaper is the use of a plastic substrate instead of the typical glass substrate, which not only allows the screen surface to bend and flex, but also makes it far more difficult to break.

Of course, a single prototype on display at a dealer convention is a world away from an affordable mass-market technology being used in everyday gadgets, but it does have the potential to associate eReaders more closely with the books they’re aimed at replacing, and add a much needed unique selling point over the oncoming freight train that is the tablet industry.

Chances are it’ll still be a year or two before the first eReaders offering flexible paper find their way onto the market. Let’s just hope there’s still an eReader market left by then.