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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."
The alternative link listed in the article is working at the moment.
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From the article:
Plastic Logic's new device has an A4 sized display, can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents. Richard Archuleta, the chief executive of Plastic Logic, said the display was sufficiently large enough to match a newspaper's layout. "Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers are what everyone asks for," said Archuleta.
The device has the display size of an A4 sheet of paper. This is the size size as office documents, technical reports, and white papers, or a newspaper folded up to read on the train.
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They couldn't sell it at that price. A newspaper costs less than $1. So to be value for money this has to outlast 500 newspapers... at one a day that means it'll be about a year and a half.
If the newspaper costs 50c then double that.
It also has to be as light as a newspaper, be simple to read when commuting and fold up into pocket sized otherwise it's doomed.
I think the problem is while the older generations still like news in dead tree format for the younger generations that time has past. Walking across the college campus I don't think I have ever seen a student actually reading a paper. What I see everywhere is little netbooks that let them read their news online AND watch Youtube AND do some document editing. So why on earth would anyone want to pay MORE than a netbook for this thing which does less?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's not quite right, the iLiad DR1000S is on the market right now (and the wifi capable DR1000SW in soon) and they both have similiar sized screens (an A4 sized piece of paper sans normal margins). The difference is that these screens are traditional e-ink screens with glass (?) prone to cracking/breaking while Plastic Logic's is flexible.
There are other drawbacks to both. This is Plastic Logic's first device. 1st Generation devices can really suck, not to mention 1st one ever out of a company. iRex's pushed out previous ereaders (iliad) but they all suffer from a battery problem: as I understand it the CPU never really goes to "sleep" - draining the thing in a day. One of the point of e-ink was that it takes no energy once the display is rendered. So obviously this is a drawback. Also, since the battery is non-user changeable it will cost that much more to replace more frequently. They promised to fix it soon, but what are promises worth?
OTOH, iRex recently opensourced much of their software system with more soon to come. Which is a major plus. Also, it has a wacom enabled screen - allowing you to annotate your texts and take notes on it. The problem with all e-ink displays right now is that there will be lag from your writing and it being rendered.
In reality, we're in the opening stages of the e-ink revolution (much like cell phones in the 80's) and that means we won't have a truly GOOD device for many years. Kindle helped really kickstart it. Hopefully we will see color soon, although that is really one of the lower priority things considered.
IMHO, this is a niche that a competent software/hardware company (Apple) could really exploit much like they did in previous 'established' niches when the time comes. Just set up a book section in iTunes and they'd have half the market already.
This is a little more like it.
I've recently seen a similar new product for musicians and teachers. It's a display like this one except mounted on a standard music stand. It's got a monochrome display, a SD card slot and a USB port (I believe there's a wireless option, too) and is made to display pages of sheet music. The pages are "turned" by a foot pedal. It can hold scanned sheet music as well as connect to music publishers. There are already several "fake books" (something working musicians use to enhance their repertoires) available in this device's native format. It can also display PDFs and the native format of some of the sheet music editing/publishing applications on the market, such as Sibelius Forte.
As someone who teaches music a bit and has tons of printed music, I can see this (or the less expensive version which is sure to come soon) making my life a lot easier.
Oh yeah, I think there's even a touch screen for making annotations or for input of musical calligraphy.
We've been waiting for products like this - e-readers, etc - to hit the mainstream market for what seems like an awful long time now. I think it might finally be here (I hope).
You are welcome on my lawn.
exactly. while I read the newspaper every day at work, when i am not at work i get my news from other sources. there are so many choices and I have found that if i really want to know what is going on in the US especially with the US military I turn to the BBC first. CNn isn't normally too bad, but the rest of them are so damn slow unless it is the latest celebrity that it just isn't worth it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Maybe they actually want to be able to read what's on the screen while walking across the college campus under the bright noon-day sun.
I'd really like to get one of these e-ink things, but it still just feels like its too early. The current devices remind me of that MP3 player I bought with 32MB of compact flash memory and a crappy little 1-line red LED display. The e-ink readers are still very pricey and lacking in basic features like that. Crappy support for viewing PDFs, inability to display multiple languages, super-slow refresh rates.
That thinking is limited. This isn't a 'newspaper' reader. It reads pretty much anything. What would it have been worth to have all your heavy schoolbooks in this instead of lugging around some heavy bag? And reference guides? I got a lot of free (legally) books off the web to learn computer languages, etc. The small ereaders are not useful for for such things (they are more fiction writing oriented), but this size screen works.
If you also figure Americans (for one) move every seven years - what would it be worth to just have everything on this device and a few memory cards rather than boxes and boxes of books - most left unread past the first chapter anyway statistically? (I'm the type to digitize everything - cds, movies, etc for such convenience).
The price will have to (and will anyway) come down for mass acceptance, but this technology is not mature enough for that stage yet anyway. It's still with the early adopters, most of whom of professionals with disposable income and gadget freaks.
" 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.
One problem that acceptance has is that there is religion around books and TV. It is this magical thing where if you read it in a book, you are somehow magically turned into a smart person, and if you see it on TV, you are somehow magically turned dumb. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, books are a force of good and TV is a force of evil. See previous story for a perfect example of people trying to prove this.
The problem for e-readers is that most people perceive them as falling into the TV category because the picture can change. They see them as TVs with REALLY slow refresh rates. Thus they are tools of the dark forces and will make you dumb by touching them. Since there is no hope of convincing these people that books and TV are not devices of good and evil, the only hope for e-readers is to distance themselves from TVs and its younger brother the computer.
"Why should I buy a Kindle when I have a perfectly good laptop and a palmtop or two (phone, PDA) that have basically the same technology?"
They don't have the same technology though. The advantages over LCD are that they are much much nicer to read, the battery lasts (apparently) for weeks and they are (at least in plastic logic's case) considerably more light-weight.
The advantage over actual paper is that they can store many more pages, and they don't waste paper.
They will succeed even if they aren't quite as nice as paper simply because you can carry your entire collection of books/papers/sheet music around with you. You might say 'Why do I need that?' but then why do you need to carry your entire music collection with you?
Sit in the middle of the park on a sunny day with your $300 laptop reading the screen and then tell me it's as good as an eInk display. I spent a lot of this summer reading papers in the park on my iLiad. I could sit anywhere from shaded areas to the noonday sun and still read the screen easily. With my laptop I can only just see it in the shade and it's completely invisible in direct sunlight. The battery life is also a lot better than the laptop too - I can read the iLiad for a transatlantic flight, while my laptop battery will run out sometime in the middle.
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