Screening the Latest Bestseller describes the new Sony e-book reader:
The screen uses E Ink technology developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It consists of 480,000 tiny ‘microcapsules,’ each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When current is applied to electrodes underneath these capsules, they turn black or white, depending on the polarity of the current.The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There’s no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be ‘refreshed’ 60 times per second or more).
The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color — between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony.
Sony will sell e-books through its own iTunes-like store, but it has also said that its Reader “will be able to display content from RSS feeds and from PDF files.”