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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.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
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.
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.