ILiad

• 1. Introduction

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  In December 2005, iRex Technologies announced the iLiad, promising a general release the following April. That deadline slipped. By the end of July 2006, the device was finally in consumers' hands across Europe, priced at €649. At launch, the iLiad carried the largest e-paper screen of any commercially available e-reader. It came from a company that grew out of Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. What drove that screen? Why could owners write directly on the documents they read? And how did a device with so many promising features end up shutting down entirely by 2010?

• 2. Paper-Like Display

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  E Ink Corporation supplied the Vizplex Imaging Film at the heart of the iLiad's 8.1-inch display. The technology produced 16 levels of grayscale at a resolution of 768 by 1024 pixels. That gave the screen a density of 160 dots per inch, and a display area measuring 124 by 165 millimeters. Unlike the backlit panels of laptops and phones, this electrophoretic screen reflected ambient light rather than emitting its own. Beneath the E Ink surface sat a digitizing tablet made by WACOM, which required a stylus for input. That pairing of passive display and pressure-sensitive layer made the iLiad physically different from competing readers.

  The device weighed 390 grams and measured 155 by 216 by 16 millimeters, roughly the size of an A5 sheet of paper. Inside ran a 400 MHz Intel XScale processor alongside 64 megabytes of RAM. The operating system was Linux, built on a 2.4 kernel. Flash memory totaled 256 megabytes, split between 128 megabytes for users and 128 megabytes reserved for the system. The iLiad included built-in WiFi 802.11g wireless networking and a wired Ethernet port rated at 10 to 100 megabits per second. That connectivity would soon serve a purpose well beyond simple file transfer.

• 3. Wireless Delivery

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  Les Echos, a French financial newspaper, was among the first publications delivered directly to iLiad owners through the device's wireless service, called iDS. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad arrived the same way. Each publication reached readers without a cable or a download from a desktop computer. Over the same wireless connection, iLiad owners could sync documents from their home or office networks onto the device's internal memory. Storage could also extend to MultiMediaCard, SD, and CompactFlash cards inserted into dedicated slots.

  The iLiad could open documents in several formats, including PDF, Mobipocket, XHTML, and plain text. Image files in JPEG, BMP, and PNG formats were supported as well, though all appeared in grayscale. On the 3rd of May 2007, Mobipocket became fully supported, opening up a library of digitally protected books available through that platform. Despite that capability, the iLiad was withdrawn from North America entirely, because the device failed to comply with FCC regulations.

• 4. Writing on Documents

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  iRex included desktop software that could take handwritten marks made on the iLiad and merge them permanently into the original document file. That started with the stylus. A reader could write directly onto almost any open document, adding notes the way a pen marks a printed page. Those annotations stayed attached to the file and reappeared every time that document opened on the iLiad. The company described this capability as restoring malleability, a property of physical books that most e-readers had removed. Readers could annotate a paragraph, highlight a passage, or personalize a text in ways that a standard device would not permit. For professional users who needed to mark up contracts, drafts, or academic papers, that feature changed what the iLiad was. It functioned as a practical working tool, not a reading device alone.

  iRex also distributed a software development kit alongside the device, inviting outside programmers to extend its capabilities.

• 5. The Developer Community

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  FBReader, a popular e-book viewer, was one of the first applications the developer community ported to the iLiad. AbiWord, a word processor, and StarDict, a dictionary program, followed. Community contributors also created iPDF, which made full-screen PDF reading available outside the device's factory software. Anyone who wanted to build for the platform could request shell access directly from iRex. The Linux operating system at the iLiad's core made that openness possible in the first place.

  Independent users pushed further, porting mobile web browsers to the iLiad's Linux environment. Those experiments produced limited results, with many reported bugs, but they showed what could happen when a device left its doors open. By September 2007, iRex was ready to put a revised version of the device on sale.

• 6. Updates and Bankruptcy

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  In September 2007, iRex Technologies released the iLiad 2nd Edition, an update that the company itself described as a minor revision. The changes included a redesigned backplane, increased battery capacity, an updated travel charger, and a bundled case. Software version 2.11 added stylus calibration and extended battery life. Notably, iRex made the 2.11 software available to first-generation iLiad owners as well.

  In May 2008, the company introduced the iLiad Book Edition. That model dropped WiFi connectivity and adopted a silver finish. The price fell to $599 in the United States and €499 in Europe, a reduction from the original. It shipped with fifty free classic works, drawing on titles from Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Leo Tolstoy.

  In early June 2010, iRex Technologies of the Netherlands filed for bankruptcy protection. Chief executive Hans Brons pointed to a single cause. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission had been slow to approve the device, and that delay had directly caused sales to collapse. The iRex Digital Reader 1000, a later device from the same company, held a notable distinction as late as early 2011. Its 10.2-inch display was the largest e-paper screen being sold anywhere at that time.