It’s true we are lamenting Esquire’scontemptible application of e-ink this morning by hawking thick, gelatinous verbal phlegmgobbers in their general direction, but we’re still excited by e-paper in general: get it cheap, get it flexible, and we’re there.
Plastic Logic isn’t doing any of that, but their new e-paper technology looks impressive: it will store hundred of pages of content and update wirelessly. The screen is large, with real estate 2.5 times the size of the Kindle, which makes it seem as if Plastic Logic is aiming at the newspaper market.
But the question is price, which we should know later today. If the price is right, Plastic Logic’s tech could be the first step in a self-updating display that beams in new content on a regular basis: a nice opening start for the future of Minority Report style e-newspapers at affordable prices.
If they can bring it down cheap enough (say, the price of a regular newspaper subscription), this could be big. If not: another clumsy but necessary stumble along the e-paper’s evolutionary walk.
Another awesome use: reading PDF’s of science journal articles. The Kindle and Reader both have screens that are too small, so if you’re lucky enough to have the PDF word at all, it’s unreadable without tons of scrolling. (And sometimes, not even then.)
The researcher market is just boiling with literally dozens of eager customers!
Looks like fun.
I second DCULBERSON.
I like keeping articles in digital format.
dculberson –
I’ve heard that the .pdf support isn’t that bad in readers now. The Sony Reader 505 has had a firmware update to support reflowing pdfs. A few members of have published fairly positive reviews. There have also been some promising photos of readers displaying medical journal articles.
I’m also told that the Cybook E3 and the Irex Iliad have good support for complex pdfs, but they’re hellishly expensive.
I’d love to have a reader that can display scientific papers; the amount of stuff I print to carry around, read and recycle every month is crazy. Reading actual books would be a bonus, but I’m not a fan of buying DRM-crippled books at near full-price. Yes, I read out-of-copyright and CC-licensed books but not a high enough proportion to justify buying a reader for.