Screen Technology for Electronic Books, Magazines and Newspapers
Ever since computers were invented, there has been speculation that they will displace printed books, magazines and newspapers. Electronic texts have many advantages. There is no printing cos
t, and the costs of distribution are minimal. Text and images can be updated instantly, a great advantage for news reporting. Video and sound can be incorporated with the text. Despite these advantages, book sales have continued to be strong and selling books has become one of the most successful online businesses. One major reason may be the limitations of screen technology. Early computers offered low resolution monochrome images that were tiring on the eyes. They were also bulky and heavy, certainly not convenient to carry around. The picture at right shows an early computer, the Tandy Radio Shack TRS 80 sold in 1981.
Today's computers are much better, offering color and high resolution images, although they are still not as sharp as printed media. Some are small enough to be carried conveniently in pocket or purse. And new screen technologies are making the images sharper and more pleasing to the eye.
One of the first commercially viable electronic book readers was the Sony PRS-500 Reader which was launched in September, 2006. A new product which may be surpassing the Sony is the is the Kindle which was launched in November, 2007 by Amazon.com. The Sony and the Kindle have 6" diagonal (3.6" x 4.8") grayscale screens displaying 600 x 800 pixels (Wikipedia ). They use electronic paper technology designed to look like ink on paper. Rather than 
using a backlight like most computer screens, these screens reflect light and hold the image without being constantly refreshed (Wikipedia).
Sales of the Kindle have been strong, despite its $359 price tag. It offers instant download of a large number of book titles at reasonable prices, as well as access to some newspaper and magazine texts.
The Sony's and Kindle's small format makes them more like a paperback book than a newspaper or magazine. In September, 2008, Plastic Logic announced a portable screen the size of an ordinary sheet of paper (Taub). Video Here. It uses the same screen technology as the Sony Reader and the Kindle, but the screen is twice as large. It can be used for reading business and academic documents which are typically printed on 8.5 by 11 inch paper. It is not as large as even a tabloid newspaper page, but newspaper stories might seem more readable on it than on a handheld or even a conventional computer. Products using this new screen technology are not yet on the market as of September, 2008.
Sources:
Wikipedia articles on "Sony Reader, "Amazon Kindle" and "Electronic Paper" accessed on September 10, 2008.
Eric A. Taub, "New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes the Look of Paper," New York Times, September 7, 2008.
Photo of TRS 80 from InsightBroadband, accessed on September 10, 2008.
Photo of the Plastic Logic screen from Stephen Wildstrom, "Electronic Paper for Business," The Tech Beat, Business Week, September 2008.
Note: This is a reasonable model, in terms of length, form and content, for your Individual Project pages due on October 25. This paper follows its sources closely, but the text is not copied and pasted. "Fulano" wrote it himself, as you should for your assignment. Simply copying and pasting a Wikipedia article or any other published or unpublished work by anyone else is not acceptable under Rutgers rules on academic integrity and may result in formal academic censure from the dean's office. For this kind of document, a certain amount of paraphrasing is acceptable, but you should not paraphrase an entire article, you should draw on several sources. The sources for both the text and the illustrations should be given, both in the text itself and in a list at the end. TG