Why would you want an Amazon Kindle, which is kind of bulky, not too attractive, and of limited scope when you could have a real digital document reader that is thin, easy to use, and very strong? That’s the business case from Plastic Logic, one of the first companies to be on stage at DemoFall.
The company’s plastic reader is designed to store dozens or hundreds of business documents on a very thin digital reader. It can store e-books, magazines, newspapers, PDFs and all kinds of information, the company said.
It’s made with plastic, not glass, meaning that it is designed to be strong and to be able to stand up to being hit with objects or, presumably, even dropped.
It looks pretty cool, and is said to weigh only ounces, “not pounds,” has a battery that lasts days and can be read in bright daylight.
Production starts soon and I guess they’ll come up with a name for the critter that hopefully won’t be too dumb.
It certainly has an easier form factor [for me] to deal with compared to existing devices.
The real key to these devices is the “book” store behind them. The perfect device is worthless without content. Lets not forget the “free” cellular access to the web that the kindle has, which makes adding books to it and reading rss feeds a no-pc / no-wifi affair.
Interesting form factor, Amazon should buy them.
Very nice, this is something I would buy, depending on price. I would love to replace many paper documents with this. Glad to see the concept moving forward. I hope they do not hobble it in some stupid way.
Why would you want an Amazon Kindle? No cost web browsing for one. I read blogs way more often than print media these days.
No colour? Don’t market it until you have colour.
It is bad enough that most of my web experience looks like some DTP fool designed in 1996. I certainly do not want a monochrome experience for digital.
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Next model: Color. Sensor-based color “e-crayon”. And a clip at the top for more fiber-based sheets.
Eventually some genius will realize that the reason vertical sheets are so popular now has to do with books opening along a spine plus the need to keep the whole open folio within ergonomic width limits, so they’ll turn it all sideways and reinvent the laptop.
Sony will probably introduce a MUCH MUCH better version that will go down the drain because of DRM overkill…
Price range and memory.
Memory should be no real problem as there are micro sd disk bout a thumbnail size right now, with a couple of gigs for cheap.
Problem is always having a small enough reader if you are using some stand alone memory.
Probably has some wifi/blue tooth kind of thing.
Makes changing content easy hopefully.
I will get one probably, hope the surface don’t scratch too badly.
It would make my life even better with less pounds of books to log around, plus having my vast digital library available always would be soo good.
LOL, probably use it so much that the battery life would be an issue. 🙂
Would be great for poor school children around the world.
Just think, add a solar panel on the back to charge. And have it be able to down load school work every afternoon at school. This would make much more sense than those laptop for every child programs. The kids get to do home work that the teacher can breese through with her tablet. No worry about pencils, paper, and books. Make it water proof to 2 meters and your set.
Geez…load all my sheet music onto that. Would make gigging so much easier. The back-lighting would be a gift from above as my eyesight is starting to get really crappy.
I’ll be in line.
No offense, but that isn’t a very sharp observation. This is an electronic replacement for books, not a “Laptop Lite”(c). Books (at least most of the ones adults read) have little or no color. The important thing here is legibility, readability, and operating life. E-paper is bistable, in that it needs no power when the image is static. (That’s one reason it’s momochrome, as color is possible but expensive.) That bistability gives any e-paper (or cholesteric LCD (kent displays), to be fair) device a significant power advantage over a standard display that needs to be constantly refreshed in order to maintain an image.
This tech (or one so similiar as to not make a difference) will eventually prevail. It will provide a significant market. Books will not die, but they will become less of a market force.
$200 and I’m in.
I’m in if the content is there and can handle standard PDF, Word or Powerpoint files.
If you can roll it – perrrrfect!
Lets go back to the days of papyrus and ancient Egypt.They could call it the Reed.
All school kids need these…
Can you twirl it? What incisive questioning from our intrepid reporter… Gaaaaaaaa
Didn’t they have some like this on Star Trek TNG? They called them PADs, I think. Years later, that got rebranded as PDAs. How about calling this product DAPs. It’s been a rock, paper, scissors game with these three letter, for years.
There is nothing magic about books to say that they will “never” be replaced. Once the characteristics that people want from books are reproduced in this technology, books will be museum pieces. We don’t read scrolls anymore, do we? Hell, you could make a multi-page e-paper display look exactly like a book, if that’s what people want.
18,
…and that’s why the light bulb replaced the candle.