E Ink, Progress Technologies to Deliver a New Comic Book Experience

E Ink Holdings announced its partnership with Progress Technologies Inc., a technical service for design development, to bring E Ink’s ePaper modules to a first-of-its-kind E-Manga solution, the eOneBook.
 
Developed for readers who prefer paperback comic books to tablets, the eOneBook combines an entire volume of manga comics into a single device using E Ink’s low-power, high contrast paper-like display.
 
Japanese manga comics have drastically grown in popularity year-over-year, accounting for $3.91 billion in physical and digital sales in 2016. Of that total, digital manga alone represented $1.28 billion. While the sales of eBooks have stabilized in some markets, the Japanese market has seen steady growth. Japan’s Research Laboratory of the Publishing Science revealed that the eBook market increased by 13.2% nin 2016, totaling 25.8 billion yen in sales.
 
“With the increasing popularity of manga comics, avid readers are clamoring for a convenient solution that can store their collections in one location for easy, on-the-go reading,” said Toru Konishi, executive director at Progress Technologies. “Typical LCD screens often distort or fail to convey the fine details of comic book art and many readers experience eye fatigue after long periods of staring at the screen. To address these issues, we saw an opportunity to partner with E Ink to use their ePaper technology to create a solution that could house an entire manga collection on one device, while preserving the experience of reading a paper comic book.”
 
The eOneBook solution is made up of two 7.28” E Ink electronic paper displays (EPDs) enclosed in a paper casing, resembling the desired look and feel of a paperback comic book. The device features both Japanese and English language settings, and is expected to ship in April 2018 with a planned retail price of 37,800 Japanese yen ($336).
 
The first manga E-Cartoon collection will be the “Hokuto-no-Ken” (Fist of the North Star) series. All 246 chapters and 18 volumes of the manga series will be accessible on the device. The eOneBook launched on Kickstarter starting Sept. 13, 2017.

eOneBook (Source: E Ink)