Highway 62

MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: The Sony Reader - manga friendly

LInked from The Beat, obviously. And here we may indeed have a big step forward. I was able to get the main page for the Reader to load up, and I'm using Safari. Maybe Sony's site just doesn't like Firefox, I dunno.

Here's the features page.

I'm guessing this is the first generation of devices to use the new electronic paper technology developed by Siemens, which was talked up at ABE last year. It's strictly monochrome (ie black or white), but looks like it can deal with grayscales pretty well.

It makes no mention of the active resolution. That may or may not prove to be a big deal. Typical comics are printed at 300 lines per inch, higher for black and white art. You can read text at 72 lpi (screen resolution), but it's sure not pretty. I'm guessing this tech is in the neighborhood of 200 or more. I can't remember off the top of my head what sorts of resolution the e-paper tech was generating.

Anyways, it looks ideal for printing up, say, manga, though you won't be getting any double-page spreads in your reading experience. It certainly seems like a far better platform for reading than the PSP. The fact that it's not a backlit LCD screen means a lot in terms of battery life. Though I was interested to see that the device isn't capable of real animation as it renders each page "statically". Perhaps it is capable of animation, but not super-smooth 24 frames per second and up like we're all used to.

Maybe this will TOTALLY KILL animated comics (which to my mind combine the worst features of cheap animation and comics--or at least the ones I've seen lately do, and I've been watching this stuff since they did Video Comics back on Nickelodeon in the mid-80s.)

Am I interested in this? You bet your bippy I am. What sorts of twisted electronic distribution routes will spring up? Will there be syndicates that companies ally themselves with? Will artists embrace the technology and design for it, instead of sticking to comics formatted pages and trying to shoehorn things in?

And yes, you can listen to your MP3s on it at the same time (though since I'm an iPod guy, my .AAC files are hosed unless someone writes a plugin for it.)

Looks like Tokyopop is wasting no time making books available for it. Wonder how they're translating their files to the Reader's format? Is it just a plugin in their page layout application or what?

Oh yes, very interesting indeed.

EDIT to add that Marc-Oliver of POPPD has some additional analysis.