With most offices drowning in paper, Plastic Logic plans to revolutionise the way you read and annotate documents, writes EAMON McGRANE
THE WRITING is on the wall, or more appropriately on the web. Certainly, the age of the printed word for media outlets seem to be on shaky ground. Increasingly print editions are giving way to online media.
News that Google has settled a multi-million copyright lawsuit with book authors and publishers opens the way for it to digitise the world's great libraries. The deal came the same week that one long-time US media outlet The Christian Science Monitorannounced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper and operate solely online.
The next phase of the digital takeover depends largely on delivery. Current devices like laptops and palm devices are flexible, but they're still nowhere near as hardy or cheaply replacable as paper.
Great forests of office paperwork still remain in office environments. For all the e-mail and pdf options, there's still an incredible volume of printed business documents that keeps office printers humming.
There are, however, moves to stem the tide. Products such as Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and iRex's iLiad all store thousands of pages and are designed for the leisure-reader of books, magazines and papers.
The latest device however, comes from a firm called Plastic Logic, which is set to release what it claims to be the first e-reader aimed at the business user.
A demonstration of a prototype of the Plastic Logic e-reader met with widespread praise at the DEMOfall 2008 industry conference at the end of September in San Diego. At the event, the Plastic Logic reader was awarded the "People's Choice" award. This is the show's highest honour. The device itself is the size of a sheet of A4 paper, about three-eighths of an inch thick and weighing 13 ounces. It has a grey-scale screen - according to Plastic Logic colour is coming - and can store thousands of documents for reading and annotating.
One reviewer at DEMOfall described picking up the prototype as "more like a piece of thick cardboard than any electronic display you may have tried".
Judging from the online demonstration of the product, its images are sharp and scrolling from page to page seems easy with only a small lag in doing so.
One of its interesting facets is the robustness of its screen, which was hit with a shoe without any evidence of damage and still worked. Note taking, drawing and adding text will all be available when the product ships, probably in the second quarter of next year. Documents can be downloaded from a computer via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or a wired connection.
While it sounds, for all intents and purpose, like the anorexic cousin of the tablet PC, Plastic Logic is not after the PC market - it wants to replace paper.
Joe Eschbach, vice-president of marketing at Plastic Logic, told Innovationthat the business reading market is much larger than the recreational one, which is being targeted with devices such as the Kindle.
"The average person reads about three books a year of approximately 300 pages, so that's less than 1,000 pages per year. Yet we all struggle with hundreds of e-mails every day, in addition to all the other documents we read for work - so that's why we're focused on the business market," says Eschbach.
Plastic Logic's reader sits on an open platform and its makers claim it can support any kind of document you have in your office.
This is also ideal for publishers who produce content in many different formats - so the style and layout will not need to be converted in the reader.
According to Eschbach, the Kindle strips out all the formatting from the books and documents it downloads.
"Publishers spend a lot of time laying out their publications and it's part of their brand. It gets 'munched' into this 'vanilla' Kindle look and feel," he says.
The surge of interest in green issues looks as if it could also play into the hands of e-readers and it is a point that Eschbach recognises - not only is Plastic Logic trying to replace paper, but its electronics could revolutionise the semiconductor industry. The company is focused on manufacturing in plastic what is currently done on silicon and making semiconductors from plastic. With its low temperatures and quick production time, this could be 40 to 50 per cent cheaper than using silicon.
"At the moment, semiconductors are silicon on glass and it's a slow, high temperature process that takes weeks. The procedure we have lays down layers of plastic composites and can be built in a couple of days. This means huge cost savings," he says.
Part of the love affair we have with paper is its touch and feel and this is obviously a barrier to e-readers becoming popular. Eschbach explains that his company has taken this into account when designing its reader. So its size is that of an A4 sheet of paper and it is thinner than most business magazines.
"We're very aware of the paper metaphor and the appeal of a physically light product. The user interface will be touch screen and you'll be able to employ the same gestures such as when you're reading books or periodicals," he says.
"We also want to be able to do things better than paper. For instance, search and find - think of the kind of struggle you go through when you're looking for that one page with the right information on it . . . the reader will be able to address that with its search function," says Eschbach.
In addition to being able to load a document on to the reader via a USB connection, the user will also be able to access content wirelessly. Eschbach says the objective is to be able to get content in real time whenever you need it. This was of particular interest to newspapers, because when the Dow Jones drops 500 points, they want to be able to send that information to their readers straight away instead of having to wait until the next day and talking about it from a historical perspective.
According to Eschbach, reaction to the product has been very positive. There has been talk in the IT industry about the move towards the "paperless office" for many years. Will e-readers and similar devices finally see that goal achieved?
"I think paper won't go away. It's been around for a long time, but part of our lives can be changed with this product as we reduce the paper we need for specific purposes," he says.
"Look at vinyl records, they haven't gone away. Products such as these all end up having their place in the market. Paper will find its point in the market like fountain pens and analogue watches," says Eschbach.
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?The big flops
THE WORLD is littered with good products that didn't quite make it and ones that were just plain stinkers from the start. While e-readers are still a nascent technology, various manufacturers and interested parties will hope they do not go the way of some of the following products.
APPLE NEWTON
The dream:The future of computing - a personal digital assistant (PDA).
The reality:Ahead of its time, very pricey, too big. Slagged off by satirists.
The story:Released ahead of its time in 1993, the Newton - officially called the MessagePad - was hyped as the future of computing. It would be the first in a new line of PDAs. The MessagePad was the first pen-based system running on the Newton Intelligence operating system. It sported a reflective black-and-white touch screen and Infrared port for communication with other devices. It could fax, send e-mail, had applications to organise names, dates, phone numbers etc, and perhaps the most important of all, it could supposedly read and recognise handwritten words on the screen.
The Newton's exorbitant $1,000 (€710) price, poor handwriting recognition, large size and lampooning in the Doonesbury comic strips pushed it towards failure.
Now most businesspeople have a PDA of some description.
MOTOROLA ROKR
The dream:A phone from Motorola with help from Apple. It had to be good, didn't it?
The reality:Slow transfer rates of songs killed it.
The story:Strictly speaking, the iPhone is not Apple's first cell phone. In 2005, it partnered with Motorola for the ROKR phone. As with any Apple product, it was hotly anticipated. It featured an MP3 player with an interface similar to the iPod's and allowed users to playback music purchased from iTunes. The phone had decent specs for its time, but it still flopped, mainly due to very slow transfer rates compared to dedicated music players and firmware, which limited only 100 songs to be loaded at any time.
SEGWAY
The dream:No more walking.
The reality:You will look silly (no, you will).Too expensive.
The story:Dean Kamen, a designer took the extremely thriving 200-year-old bicycle concept, moved the wheels so that they are alongside each other and then had to add thousands of dollars worth of state-of-the-art electronics to stop it falling over. Banned from use on pathways in some American cities, it is most commonly used in warehouses and industry and by some police forces.
WHEATIES
The Dream:"Hey kids, you can play with your food."
The reality:"Hey kids, stop playing with your food."
The story:Introduced in the US by General Mills in 1994 under the Wheaties name. The basketball shaped, sweetened corn and wheat puffs cereal promised that kids could have fun while eating. As any parent could have told them, however, the moms and dads of the US didn't want their children playing with the food, and sales plummeted.
