the newspaper business

In the near future, Plastic Logic will introduce a flexible screen - e ink - that will make it possible to send newspaper content to the screen and maintain the traditional look of newspapers.

Their prototype screen is 2.5 the size of a Kindle, which would be about the size of a tabloid. (Demo video ) The prototype will be available for the International Consumer Electronics Show in January.

That’s not crystal ball gazing. That’s fact.

Esquire has the first mass-produced e-Ink magazine cover for their  75th Anniversary. It’s a pretty lame use - just blinky text, but it is a use. (The cover has a small battery to give the cover blinky power for about 90 days.)

Here’s the crystal ball gazing: Instead of investing in one centralized printing plant, newspapers will invest in decentralized repeater stations. Instead of charging for delivery of the newspaper, newspapers will charge to rent (or lease-to-own) a flexible screen receiver. Overnight, the newspaper business could be transformed from ink on paper to pixels on screen - in a very large scale.

You read it here first.

UPDATE: It’s thin! According to Ubergizmo, the device will measure in at 8.5 x 11 inches, and is capable of browsing docments in PDF format as well as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. As well as packing a battery that lasts “days not hours,” the device has wireless connectivity, though Plastic Logic is quiet about exactly what type.

Gawker is pretty much a junk news site so one shouldn’t hold them to very high standards, but it’s pretty obvious they didn’t even wikipedia their story about the New York Daily News adding color.

The headline for the story was Adventures in ROYGBIV: Why the Daily News Is Going Color.

If you don’t remember seventh grade science or art, Roy G Biv is the mnemonic way to remember the colors of the light spectrum in order of wave length: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Which has nothing to do with printing color in a newspaper.

For those non-newspaper readers, all those lovely colors are created from four inks, referred to as CMYK. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (K)

Pretty amazing, huh? That newspapers use four colors and nature uses seven?

I read in E & P today where a daily didn’t realize until Tuesday morning they had a power outage which shut down their servers over the three day Memorial Day weekend.

You can imagine all the hassle this caused.

For $300, the production manager and four other people could have been alerted by an automated phone call.

The same equipment will also detect high temperature so if your server room is overheated for some reason.

The Temperature Guardian Plus is a full featured, stand alone temperature monitor and alarm system. The Temperature Guardian Plus monitors both HIGH / LOW temperature and power wherever it is located. It can dial up to FOUR emergency phone numbers, and the integrated voice tells you the temperature and whether the power is on. You can also call anytime and hear the temperature of your home, office, or work area.

If you would rather know sooner than later that you are facing problems caused by power loss or temperature fluctuation, this is worth the $300.