Frank Ahrens from the Washington Post chimes in on the newspapery fictional universe of a cheap flexible screen in "Ink and Paper or 1s and 0s?"
Would you read this story if it were electronically printed on a paper-thin video screen the size of a tabloid newspaper, or maybe something bigger, like The Washington Post, and resembling a vinyl placemat, like the image you see under these words? What if this new electronic paper could be folded under your arm like your dad's sports section or rolled up inside your yoga mat?
As newspapers fight declining circulation and face rising newsprint costs -- and their corporate owners demand wider profit margins -- editors, publishers, reporters and technologists have worked over the past few years to devise new, paperless ways to deliver the news.
I'm sorry if I sound cranky, but this sounds like just one more story slightly divorced from reality about how large flat flexible displays are going to lead to "electronic newspapers". Why should the bitstream from the Washington Post get e-ink on that screen and not, say, Memeorandom, or Google News, some other future news aggregator that tells you what everyone else is looking at in your field of interest. Just because the new medium would happen to be big and flexible and flat and electronic doesn't mean it is suited for the mush of news, ads, features and editorial that comes from most newspapers.
UPDATE 10/18/05: More commentary from if:book: "a future written in electronic ink?" referencing the WaPo piece.
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