Portable electronic reading apparatus
AssigneeHewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
InventorsKent D. Vincent, R. Stanley Williams, Xiao-An Zhang
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Abstract
An electronic book, having a single screen, employs an electric field addressable, rewritable, colorant, preferably a bistable molecular colorant, for providing printed pages sequentially to a reader. The electronic book includes the rewritable screen coupled to an extraction-retraction device, an electrode array printer, a sheet position detector, and associated circuitry to download, store, sequence, and print images on the screen. Methods associated with document distribution are another aspect of the invention.
Claims48
An electronic book device comprising:
- a rewritable viewing screen;
- and
- an electrical printhead for writing picture elements of said viewing screen, wherein said viewing screen has a rewritable molecular colorant for printing document content therewith.
A rewritable digital book device comprising:
- a housing means for housing components of said device;
- means for downloading, storing, sequencing, and erasably printing document content;
- and
- viewing means, including a molecular colorant, for erasably writing said content.
A method of providing readable pages, the method comprising:
- downloading data representative of each of said readable pages into a memory;
- providing a viewing screen having an electric field addressable rewritable molecular colorant thereon;
- and
- writing each of said pages to the viewing screen by passing the screen adjacently across a printhead having electrical fields associated with pixels of the screen such that said data is transferred from said memory to said screen.
A method of doing business of distribution of a document, the method comprising:
- transmitting electronic data representative of said document;
- and
- providing a customer with mechanisms associated with said transmitting for said customer to receive said data on a portable reading device having a single display screen including an electric field addressable rewritable molecular colorant.
A method of manufacture of an electronic book apparatus, the method comprising:
- assembling a portable housing with subsystems for receiving data and generating readable images of said data;
- and
- combining said subsystems with a display for said readable images wherein said display includes an electric field addressable rewritable molecular colorant.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.