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5 Comments

  1. I wonder what the device will cost?

    I’m a pretty tech-geek kind of guy, but these products seem like expensive and less useful solutions to a problem that has been solved for centuries.

    I read a lot of magazines, and other than the subscription postcards that fall all over the place, and the perfume/cologne ads that stink the place up, I like the magazine experience.

    It’s tactile, can be taken anywhere, consumed anywhere. I can store them in stacks in my office and know that so long as I have eyes, I’ll be able to read them.

    Of course, these folks will work out the color issue soon enough. Technology always advances.

    I just can’t see spending hundreds of dollars on a reader that I’ll have to re-buy every couple years to replace a dead one or ‘upgrade’ to be able to read new content.

    For now, at least, I’ll stick with paper over plastic in the magazine/newspaper department.

  2. @Will Seberger

    ‘For now, at least, I’ll stick with paper over plastic in the magazine/newspaper department.’

    Go Will. Kill some more trees. And all because …

    These physical objects with screens that you touch, they’re just not tactile enough!

    You find it really hard to figure out how to put these portable objects into your bag and take them with you? And

    You won’t have any fading paper in stacks in the corner of your office gathering dust. It’s so much slower to pick up the magazines, scan through them and try and find what you were looking for. That is, if you can remember the issue it was in and where that issue is, before you even open the magazine. All this compared with speed of clicking on a bookmark, or searching the web in your browser. It must be really frustrating to imagine a time where you save time and space.

    The only real thing a paper mag offers over an online mag is you can wipe your arse (ass) with it (it’s not even that good for this, rather like the slide side of ‘scratch and slide’ toilet paper).

    Mike

  3. @2:

    “Kill some more trees. And all because …”

    The environmental argument doesn’t hold much water. Trees, at least, are a renewable resource. The elements required to make lcd’s are running out faster than oil. WSJ summary of New Scientist article: “A Metal Scare to Rival the Oil Scare”: http://tinyurl.com/37maox

    And all of those iPods and laptops and Kindles have to go somewhere when they die. Turns out they’re giving cancer to people in Asia where a lot of the e-waste dumps are. Science Daily article: “Recycling Of E-waste In China May Expose Mothers, Infants To High Dioxin Levels” : http://tinyurl.com/4upa84 or the Salon article: “Where computers go to die — and kill” : http://tinyurl.com/3ezbw3

    Certainly it takes a lot of energy and materials to produce and deliver paper publications, but there’s a ton of electricity being used to run the 50-100 computers involved in delivering an electronic publication to your personal computer (editorial production, advertising production, online and inhouse archiving and backup, routes and nodes along the internet as the information travels from computer to computer, etc.) Each one of those can use up to the same amount of electricity as a fridge each year (especially all the multiply redundant online data servers kept in climate controlled rooms in Texas or in google’s newly planned offshore floating computer heaven), not to mention the environmental cost of replacement and disposal.

    There’s a lot to be said for the convenience of electronic media, but the environmental accounting is a lot more complicated than killing trees vs. not killing trees. And I’d rather be killing trees than killing humans…

  4. I must admit I cringed bit when I saw this article. I sent it to Rob because he seems to be looking in this direction as the future of magazines and newspapers.
    I am not against the idea completely, it’s just so much more drastic change in a short amount of time. We should be used to this by now.
    Will, I agree that it is a pain to have to buy a new electronics product every couple years, because the one we have is already obsolete. Unfortunately, we do it all the time with other electronics products. Computers, cell phones, and especially cameras are all expendable and close to worthless after 4-5 years.
    Remember when you would buy a good camera system and it would last for decades? Perhaps even handed down to the next generation? That seems like a silly idea when you think of it in terms of a Nikon D-70, or a Motorola flip phone.
    M. Scott Brauer, I agree with you as well. The damage from discarded electronics is scary.
    But progress will progress, and capitalism will produce a huge variety of “electronic readers”, if in fact this becomes the norm.
    So to me, the big question is:
    What is a more realistic idea? Is is more conceivable to print on paper, as long as the trees are grown specifically for that purpose? Can we get nearly everyone to recycle the paper to keep this chain of events going?
    Or, if the printed word is done away with and is completely replaced by electronics reader alternatives, will it be possible, on a global scale, to regulate the disposal of broken, old, obsolete electronics in a way that has minimum impact on our world?
    I don’t mean to sound full of apocalyptic doom and gloom. But the world keeps growing in population, and demand will continue no matter what.
    What do you folks think?


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