Through paidContent.org comes news of a $100mm funding round for Plastic Logic, a UK company, to build a factory for the production of flexible active-matrix displays. “Flexible active-matrix displays” is another way of saying thin sheets of flexible plastic with the ability to display text and graphics.
A major advantage of newspapers (and books, for that matter) is that they are portable. No matter how robust the Web sites we use for news, we just can’t take them on the train, to the park, or in the car. Sure, we can read a few words at a time on PDA and cellphone screens, but that gets tiresome for anything longer than a paragraph or two. A flexible plastic sheet, however, is another matter.
This sheet is eminently portable and once it can be made to receive wireless signals, it could be a killer product. Imagine buying this sheet and reading any Web site or newspaper you want on it, whenever you want, wherever you are, and seeing the presentation in it’s full-screen glory just as if you were at home in front of your computer. Now imagine if these sheets could be made as thin as paper. They could be bound together in a “book” of 100 or so pages. The content of this “book” would change from news to fiction, to poetry, to movies, all of which would be delivered wirelessly. It would be bound as a “book” to give the reader the ability to page through in addition to search and bookmark. This lack of ability to flip through the pages is another desirable attribute of print that hasn’t carried over to screens, but paper thin screens would allow that. Once you bought this “book,” it would be the only book you would ever need since anything you wanted to read could be downloaded to its pages. There is probably a better model than that of a book, but using something familiar would certainly help with adoption.
We’re not quite there yet, but the fact that Digital Logic is building a factory means we’re getting awfully close.
