Slashdot Mirror
Plastic Logic E-Newspaper
Ostracus writes with news of another contender for a next-gen device suitable for displaying a newspaper page. It's very thin but weighs a bit more than a Kindle. "Plastic Logic, a spin-off company from the Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, has recently released its design of a future electronic newspaper reader. This lightweight plastic screen copies the appearance, but not the feel, of a printed newspaper. This electronic paper technology was pioneered by the E-Ink Corporation and is used in the current generation Sony eReader and Amazon.com's Kindle. Plastic Logic's device, yet to be named, has a highly legible black-and-white display and a screen more than twice as large compared to current versions available on the market."
" This lightweight plastic screen copies the appearance, but not the feel, of a printed newspaper. "
I'm reminded of Marshall McLuhan's observation that any new medium will have as its first content the form of the previous medium.
Why would anyone want to reproduce the format of the front page of a printed daily newspaper if you have a completely new medium available? Will the new medium be of such slow speed that the contents can only be renewed on the screen once a day (like the front page of a newspaper)? Do the various print topics have to be arranged in blocks like a newspaper? Will advertising really be necessary?
It's too bad that McLuhan died right when the digital communications era was beginning (1976 I believe). He would have had some significant insights for us.
One thing that I've noticed is that any new digital medium will ALWAYS reproduce its content in an inferior way to its corresponding analog medium. But, the new digital medium allows the content to be used in ways that so astonishingly different from the analog medium that it comes to surplant the original analog medium. The analog medium becomes a specialized subsystem of the new digital medium.
For example, consider music synthesizers. Press the cheap plastic keys on a cheap $50 plastic keyboard in BestBuy and you change the instrument being played by the keyboard. None of the instruments being sounded by the keyboard sound as good as the original instruments in orchestral form. But if you play piano, you don't need to spend ten years learning trumpet or violin to get the sound of a trumpet or violin for your music. You just press the digital button on the cheap plastic keyboard. Real trumpets and violin playing becomes a speciality and limited skill as a result of the original analog medium (instrument) being transformed by an inferior digital medium.