Could there be new hope for print newspaper lovers? Consumer electronics company LG will launch a plastic electronic paper display (EPD) in Europe this April, Mashable reported.

The EPD is 6 inches in size, 0.7 mm thick, scratch-resistant and has a resolution of 1024 x 768, the article said. And, unlike technologies that use glass screens, such as tablets and e-books, LG's e-paper can be bent up to 40 degrees from the center, the article said.

According to Extreme Tech, the display uses e-ink, the technology used in e-readers such as Kindle and Nook. Using e-ink is especially beneficial to manufacturers, the article said.

“Unlike flexible OLED displays, which have been around for a while, e-ink displays are cheap to produce and can run for months on a small battery,” the article said.

ComputerWorld reported in November that both LG and Samsung debuted prototypes of flexible displays at an FPD International event in Japan. While LG’s e-paper used e-ink, which relies on surrounding light, Samsung’s version used OLED, a technology in which pixels generate light when charged, the article said.

When it comes to monetising digital content - an issue just about every major news organisation is grappling with - the discussion too often both starts and ends at the paywall question. This raises the question that many news outlets may be afraid to truly innovate by looking beyond received models in their quest for revenue.

This could be about to change: the emerging e-book publishing trend is reaching such proportions, thanks to several new publications, that news organisations shouldn't ignore the possibilities it represents. What has undoubtedly given a boost to digital publishing is the appearance of electronic publishing start-ups such as The Atavist and Byliner. Thanks to their success, coupled with Amazon's push with its Kindle Singles series, the conditions for monetising long-form journalism have never been so good.

Perhaps it's not that people have shorter attention spans, it could be a problem with platforms. That's the argument made by The New York Times upon the announcement of Amazon's January launch of Kindle Singles, a series of one-off essays and short stories priced between $1 and $5 that you can download to the device or to smart phones, or sometimes find online from the respective content provider for free. This new series is Amazon's attempt to bridge the gap between books and long-format magazines in print with digital content that is actually palatable to read.

The point, duly noted if not emphasized enough, is that books do not always translate to readability in pixilation because of discomfort with reading small fonts on a small screen for hours and hours at a time. Amazon and other companies are responding to this sentiment by starting to publish content that is potentially more appropriate to the platform of handheld devices for the consumer: digital pamphlets ranging between 10,000 to 30,000 words long, in page length between 30 to 90, which, according to Amazon's press release, could be "twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book," and are priced much less than standard books.

Amazon announced on Monday that it would give publishers as much as 70 percent of the revenues it collects from selling newspapers and magazines through its Kindle store, The New York Times reported.

The royalty increase will take effect on December 1 and will be calculated on the retail price minus the delivery costs, The Associated Press reported. However, to qualify for it, "publications must be able to be read on all Kindle devices and applications built for devices such as Apple's iPhone and the Blackberry," Agence France-Presse explained.

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