This is why I follow William Gibson on Twitter:
Speculative fiction writers have come up with innumerable ways to deal with the issue of paper in their novels. The golden era of Bradbury and Asimov maintained paper in their universes; PCs and iPhones were the stuff of pure fantasy. Modern science fiction writers have found any number of ways to address the issue, either by making excuses for paper or replacing it with technology. My favorite is probably David Weber, who simply refers to his characters handing “hard copy” without elaboration; my least favorite is the Battlestar Galactica remake, which was awesome except for the utterly impractical corner-free printouts.
Now that electronics are commonplace, the next logical step was always going to be e-readers, e-books, and eventually e-paper. Today, Korean company LG says the age of electronic ink is here:
the new display is made from a flexible e-paper that gives the user the feeling of reader a real newspaper.
the display measures 19 inches across and is only 0.3 mm thick.
the screen is able to achieve this remarkable thinness and flexibility because it’s backed by a metal foil rather than glass substrate. this metal foil allows the device to flex and then return to its original form while remaining durable
It’s fitting that I should get this link from a writer whose novels both invented and anticipated the demise of cyberpunk, a subgenre of sci-fi set in the near-future. There came a day when science fiction became news, and therefore too contemporaneous to call “speculative.” The template of this blog has always been designed with this very notion in mind — the “ink” is an intentional irony.
For now, this is still cutting-edge. The displays are far more expensive than a newspaper, and will probably remain more expensive than a one-year subscription for quite some time. Add to that an industry (newspapers) making new efforts to get its content behind paywalls, and you guarantee slow development of the market for this item unless the newspapers get involved.
And that really is the message newspapers ought to take from this news. After all, there was a time when they could have owned the internet, but instead acted as if the industrial age had never ended. They could own this technology — and wean themselves off the newsprint that eats their budgets — by forming technological partnerships with e-reader makers.
One drawback: archaeologists spend an extraordinary amount of time going through garbage ancient people threw away. Future archaeologists will have an easy time dating the things they find in our garbage because are so many newspapers in our landfills; they might regard the demise of printed newspapers as a scientific travesty.
