Overview

The Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

 LIBRIé EBR-1000EP is a Japan only e-book

E-book

An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

 display device

Display device

A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form...

 in April 2004, two years prior its world successor Sony Reader

Sony Reader

The Sony Reader is a line of e-book readers manufactured by Sony. It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation, is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain a static image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation.Sony sells e-books for the Reader...

.

Features

The 1000EP possesses the following specifications.

• 6-inch
  Inch
  An inch is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including Imperial units, and United States customary units. There are 36 inches in a yard and 12 inches in a foot...
  
   diagonal low-powered display using E Ink
  E Ink Corporation
  E Ink Corporation is a privately held manufacturer of electrophoretic displays , a kind of electronic paper. E Ink is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was co-founded in 1997 by Joseph Jacobson, a professor in the MIT Media Lab. Two years later, E Ink partnered with Philips to develop and...
  
  's electronic paper
  Electronic paper
  Electronic paper, e-paper and electronic ink are a range of display technology which are designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike conventional backlit flat panel displays, electronic paper displays reflect light like ordinary paper...
  
   technology
  Technology
  Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
  
   produced by Philips
  Philips
  Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
  
  
• 600 pixel
  Pixel
  In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled....
  
   by 800 pixel display resolution
• 170 dots per inch
  Dots per inch
  Dots per inch is a measure of spatial printing or video dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch . The DPI value tends to correlate with image resolution, but is related only indirectly.- DPI measurement in monitor...
  
  
• 300 gram
  Gram
  The gram is a metric system unit of mass....
  
  s (10.6 oz) with case and batteries
  Battery (electricity)
  An electrical battery is one or more electrochemical cells that convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy. Since the invention of the first battery in 1800 by Alessandro Volta and especially since the technically improved Daniell cell in 1836, batteries have become a common power...
  
   (190 grams / 6.7 oz without)
• 126 millimeter
  Millimetre
  The millimetre is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one thousandth of a metre, which is the SI base unit of length....
  
  s (5 in) by 190 millimeters (7.5 in) by 13 millimeters (0.5 in)
• Motorola DragonBall central processing unit
  Central processing unit
  The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
  
  
• Sony Linux
  Linux
  Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
  
   OS
  Operating system
  An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
  
  
• 10MB
  Megabyte
  The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
  
   storage
  Computer storage
  Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to computer components and recording media that retain digital data. Data storage is one of the core functions and fundamental components of computers....
  
  
• Memory Stick
  Memory Stick
  Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, launched by Sony in October 1998, and is also used in general to describe the whole family of Memory Sticks...
  
   slot (Memory Stick Pro compatible)
• USB 2.0 port
  Universal Serial Bus
  USB is an industry standard developed in the mid-1990s that defines the cables, connectors and protocols used in a bus for connection, communication and power supply between computers and electronic devices....
  
  
• Headphones
  Headphones
  Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, held close to a user's ears and connected to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio, CD player or portable Media Player. They are also known as stereophones, headsets or, colloquially, cans. The in-ear...
  
   jack
  Jack (connector)
  In electronics and electrical assemblies, the term jack commonly refers to a surface-mounted connector, often, but not always, with the female electrical contact or socket, and is the "more fixed" connector of a connector pair...
  
  
• Monaural
  Monaural
  Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
  
   speaker
  Loudspeaker
  A loudspeaker is an electroacoustic transducer that produces sound in response to an electrical audio signal input. Non-electrical loudspeakers were developed as accessories to telephone systems, but electronic amplification by vacuum tube made loudspeakers more generally useful...
  
  
• 4 x AAA batteries
• 5.2 V external power supply

The unit was designed to be about the same weight as the average book on the Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese market. The E Ink technology is a monochrome (4 level greyscale) electrophoretic display device which changes reflectivity by moving microscopic black and white particles held within spherical microcapsules.

There is a tiny QWERTY

QWERTY

QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...

 keyboard at the bottom of the display, permitting a limited form of marginalia

Marginalia

Marginalia are scribbles, comments, and illuminations in the margins of a book.- Biblical manuscripts :Biblical manuscripts have liturgical notes at the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin...

, as well as a small roller wheel. Content will be available on a subscription basis only, and the price of the unit is comparable to that of some PDAs

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

. Battery life is also comparable to that of many PDAs because while the electronic ink display does not require any power once it is set to show a specific page, the Motorola Dragonball CPU requires constant power, and read and write operations between the storage and the memory stick also require power.

The LIBRIé displays content in the Broad Band eBook

BBeB

BBeB is a proprietary eBook file format developed by Sony and Canon. Although initially designed for the Sony Librié, it is also supported by other Sony e-book readers....

 (BBeB) format. The primary BBeB content provider is Publishing Link, a joint venture between Sony and a number of large Japanese publishers and printers. Using the digital rights management

Digital rights management

Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...

 functions of BBeB and the LIBRIé, content from Publishing Link is set to expire and be unreadable after 60 days.

The LIBRIé is available new from Sony or from retailers (online globally, or locally in Japan) as a Japanese-language version, and through the used marketplace.

Localization

There have been quite a few successful attempts to convert Librié's interface into English. Using numerous files available on the Internet and a USB cable, which comes with the device, a computer-savvy person can perform such a conversion in a matter of minutes. Moreover, a variety of text and graphics file formats can be converted and uploaded into a LIBRIé (unlike purchased e-books, such contents would not expire), therefore making it a usable device for non-Japanese users around the world.

See also

• Sony Reader
  Sony Reader
  The Sony Reader is a line of e-book readers manufactured by Sony. It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation, is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain a static image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation.Sony sells e-books for the Reader...
  
   - introduced in 2006
• List of e-book readers - other similar devices

External links

• Sony LIBRIé home page, in Japanese
  Japanese language
  is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
  
  
• LIBRIé Firmware Translation Project
• A wiki dedicated to the LIBRIé
• Yahoo! LIBRIé group