Journal 3, May 31

http://beta.technologyreview.com/computing/22705/page1/
Plastic Logic, a company based in the U.K. has just announced the creation of a new e-book reader that will be debuting on the market next year. The e-reader which has many new features compared to e-book readers currently on the market weighs less than a pound as about as thick as six credit cards.

The e-book reader from Plastic Logic claims to hold many new innovations while still working off of the base E-ink as the method of display technology. The new product offering from Plastic Logic however will include a touch-screen interface, and will use a plastic backplane instead of glass that the company claims provides the light-weight enhancement of their product and increases durability. Users can also alter documents by making notes and underlining items and then save these changes which will be retained even if documents are transferred to another platform. Plastic Logic wants to target the business person by providing applications to read newspapers and Adobe Acrobat files. This would allow for less paper and a de-cluttering of office space.

In an article by Fast Company, The Plastic Logic e-book reader is compared to the Kindle and is found to have a more manageable size (with Kindle at .33 in. deep compared to PL e-book reader at .27 in deep), and the Qwerty keypad of the PL e-book reader seems to better integrate and creates more ease of use the actual keypad of the Kindle.

Analysts estimate that the Kindle, the most popular e-book reader on the market currently, has sold between 300,000-500,000 copies in 2008(actual sales data have not been released from Amazon). Although, as Plastic Logic has released the name of publishing partners signed on for its product including USA Today and the New York Times, the question looms if the new offering will take market share from the Kindle upon release.

Another debate currently about the e-book market is price. Currently, the Kindle is priced at $369 and Plastic Logic has not yet revealed its price point for their e-book reader. As Mary Tripsas, a professor at Harvard who studies the e-book industry points out, "The primary factors for the e-book reader market have been content availability and device price," she says.

The emerging creation of the e-book technology is intriguing to say the least but has not caught on in mainstream appeal. I believe when e-book offerings become more affordable, and more publishers begin offering more titles as e-books, you will definitely see an increase in purchases of e-books. I feel it is a remarkable technology that could cut down on de-forestation by saving paper and spare kids back problems from wearing heavy book bags improperly. It also would allow for extreme saving of spaces in schools, office, and basically anywhere where reading materials would have to be stored. I see e-book readers being a valuable tool for our educational system but who will be the first to market an appealing, economically feasible e-book reader is still waiting to be seen.

Other Sources:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090528-713758.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/plastic-logics-e-reader-could-beat-kindle-dx