Electronic Paper

About Electronic Paper

At one point, the question of what technological breakthrough was going to generate a lightweight electronic substitute for paper - and when that breakthrough would occur - was an open question. That timespan was most of the effort of this weblog, "Electronic Paper".

I didn't keep up this interest during whatever Singularity produced consumer equipment like the Kindle and the iPad, and thus this weblog should be considered finished; if there's something new to take up on any of the topics it once thought about covering, I'll somehow wedge them into my regular catch-all blog Vacuum.

This season's gift, the Kindle

I would not have predicted when I started this blog that the Kindle would be the hot seller on Amazon:

Thanks to you, in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display. In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009. We're grateful for and energized by the overwhelming customer response. (Amazon, Dec. 13 2010)

I still have a hard time thinking of an electronic document and a book as being the same thing, but that just might be my age showing. Indeed, if you are going to treat books as consumables and not as permanent relics to put on your shelf, then you might feel that owning the digital shadow of the book in perpetuity would be worth more than having a hunk of print and having to store it somewhere you can find it again.