This seemingly inocuous question holds the key to the future course of publishing. And I’m really not sure which way the fight will go.
In the blue corner we have the incumbent screen display technology, LCD – used in laptops, smartphones, and a mythical tablet device from Cupertino. On the plus side it offers great colour and it works beautifully for moving displays (ie screen-scrolling and video streaming). But it has two major drawbacks – it drains batteries something rotten, which is why a cute little iPhone rips a whole in your pocket and begs to be recharged before the day is done. And it has a backlit display, which for reading text soon leads to eyesore and fatigue.
In the read (ho hum) corner we have the challenger, eInk – and its various cousins. Its defining features are precisely the opposite of LCD; whilst we can assume that the next 12 months will bring us reasonable colour eInk displays, the very reason that eInk displays are so battery-efficient (and therefore lightweight) is that they only consume energy for screen refreshes. So even though today’s sluggish refresh times will surely improve, eInk will never be able to cope with video or screen scrolling. And every effort to finesse this drawback will compromise their basic advantages – ie lightweight & long-life. So their current use in eReaders – the simple, page-by-page transcription of black-and-white books – is pretty good.
However, if eReaders are going to move into the mainstream, won’t they have to be capable of a lot more than simply reproducing B&W books? They want to take on newspaper and magazine content, as well as textbooks. Let alone being capable of general web-browsing. And each of these media are inexorably becoming fully interactive, drawing on both static text/images alongside video.
So what are the implications of either side winning? Either eInk’s advantages in term of weight and visual acuity will win the day, and we’ll see a platform which preserves, as a sort of digital apartheid, the basic division between print and broadcast media. Or the world will choose to lug around eyesore-inducing LCD devices, triggering a genuine revolution and convergence between print and broadcast media.
And of course the corporates are lining up on either side of this revolutionary divide too, with Amazon/Sony/Plastic Logic on the one hand, and Apple/Microsoft on the other… who do you think will win?