In the slimming race the Plastic Logic e-reader beats the Kindle DX, but can it fatten the revenue of the newspaper industry?

Posted by Christie Silk on May 28, 2009 at 3:39 PM

Plastic Logic showed off its super slim, large screen e-reader prototype in a demonstration during the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference on Wednesday. When released sometime in 2010, the device will enter into direct competition with Amazon's broadsheet Kindle DX, due to be available this summer.

Plastic Logic's e-reader is 0.27 inches thick, much slimmer than 0.33 inch waistband of the Amazon Kindle 2.

The e-reader has been designed primarily with the business market in mind. The 8.5 x 11 inch E Ink touch screen display makes it seem "it seem almost like a large notepad", Wired.com enthused. Its large screen means that users will be able to view Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files and it boasts Wi-Fi and 3G cellular capacities. Newspapers, books and other documents can be downloaded from the company's own e-commerce site.

Richard Archulet, the company's chief executive, emphasised that his company's project aimed to satisfy the demands of a different user base to the mainly leisure orientated market already dominated by Amazon:

"Everything is designed for the business user, and business users require a lot of different types of content. It's really not about books at all."

A priority of Plastic Logic is to provide its clientele with news content. If the device does prove commercially popular, it can be expected to have positive ramifications on the newspaper industry, or at least the publications willing invest in this new technology. The company has already made arrangements with publishers including Financial Times, USA Today and Libre Digital, which manages several digital newspaper titles, which could benefit from an additional e-revenue generated from subscriptions. Detroit Media Partnership announced an agreement with Plastic Logic for these aims, in which a trial would see the distribution of the e-readers with electronic editions of the Detroit News and the Detroit Press. Currently, models are in development for lease plans that would allow DMP subscribers to rent the e-readers.

Such plans are in their developmental stages, and as only prototypes have been released to specific clients, it is yet to be seen if the new e-reader will achieve a sufficient market success to warrant the time and resources put into such partnerships by publishers.

Sources: Wired.com, NYTimes