Maarten Pieter emailed me after reading my blog post asking why there were no large eink displays and then my solution building a Kindle array.

Dear Ian,

I came across your blog on large e-inks displays and the kindle array idea. Have been looking into this myself for some time now but not found a good solution yet. There is another initiative out there from a Japanese company called soken to create a Eink wall.This would be what I wanted but by now I settle for the NEC a3 screen ;) (which btw is supposed to have only a 1 mm border so could make tiles as well). I was wondering if you made any progress with your project or inquiries. I did not contact NEC yet did you give it a try?

I have some ideas on the software but the hardware is staying elusive and indeed it is not clear why these devices are not on the market. I am now considering contact some local people connected to Philips here in the Netherlands and see if they can explain why these large screen are not here. Some years ago I worked for a newspaper company and during my research in that period I know there was a test production line producing epaper. I think it will be hard to make the kindles fit well together but otherwise it is a good idea. Another lead would be http://www.epapercentral.com/ but the blog died some time ago though gives a good insight in what is happening.

kind regards,

Maarten Pieter, Netherlands

I did contact quite a few eink vendors but never got a reply… I did float the idea at work and it went down well. However I later found a photo of a large eink display prototype somewhere and I’ve become maybe too busy to experiment in the area myself right now… The A3 sized eink displays sound great and a 1mm border means its almost perfect for setting up an array!

Thanks to Maarten for emailing me and hopefully someone will email me and say, hey its been done or I’ve started work on the eink display array (good old lazy web style)…