Have you read any good e-books lately? For years bookworms have been tantalized by the promise of electronic book readers that are easy to use yet are able to change their contents at the touch of a button. A really usable e-reading device, however, is long overdue.  At last, a truly exciting new chapter in electronic books has begun. Unfortunately it has begun only in Japan, in kanji and katakana. It has some annoying quirks, and it costs about 40,000 yen, or roughly $375. But it's exciting anyway because it is the first electronic book reader to use a new "electronic paper" technology that's nearly as effortless to carry and read as a paperback, and the product is bound to be released over here soon.  Sony's new Librié EBR-100EP is about the same size and weight as a slim paperback. The black-and-white screen is relatively large, about six inches diagonally, yet the reader itself is so small and light that one can read it one-handed. With ten megabytes of internal storage, it can hold a summer or semester's worth of reading15 to 20 average-sized novels or a year of FORTUNEand with an optional Memory Stick card it can match the capacity of your home library. Titles can be downloaded from a store on the Internet to your PC and then transferred to the reader via a cable.  There are a couple of problems, which I'll get to in a bit, but just as you can't judge a book by its cover, the real brilliance of the Librié lies within its pages, er, page.  Sony's e-reader is the first consumer device to use a screen technology developed by E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., and Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. Unlike earlier e-books that used bulky, battery-draining LCDs, the E Ink-Philips high-resolution screen is thin, energy efficient, and highly readable at any angle. Essentially it's electronic paper, and it's not hard to imagine all sorts of applications for it beyond future e-books. The screen in the Librié is rigid, but rollable and even foldable sheets of E Ink "paper" are already being developed. Imagine having the controls for your iPod or cellphone woven into the sleeve of your jacket, a wristwatch that's almost paper-thin, a map that constantly updates itself, or a desktop-sized display for your wireless PDA that, when it's no longer needed, folds up to fit in a shirt pocket.  Technically, the electronic-ink screen is called a microencapsulated electrophoretic display. Millions of tiny capsules, some white, some black, are suspended in a thin layer of liquid. Applying a small electric charge to the white capsules (positive) and black capsules (negative) rearranges them to form readable text that has a higher contrast ratio than even newspaper print. Once the capsules are arranged, they stay in place until signaled to dance once again. That means the screen draws minimal power except for brief moments when "pages" are turned, and thus the book operates for days or weeks on just a quartet of standard AAA batteries. (However, the Librié requires a clumsy, external AC power brick when downloading books from its host PC.) The screen doesn't generate any light of its own and can't be read in the dark, but that's a knock that applies to old-fashioned paper too.  All in all, the device itself is a marvel, but unfortunately it's crippled by an unclever proprietary copyright protection schemelet's call it "copywrong." (Sony calls it Open MG.) The scheme basically puts the rights of the publisher ahead of the convenience of the user. Only 1,139 titles are available for downloading from the electronic library, mostly books in Japanese, with a few hoary tomes in English like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Currently there are no newspapers or magazines on the virtual shelves.
Taking a page from science fiction, the Librié is a handheld personal electronic library. Have e-books finally arrived? We checked it out.