za3tar

I believe that a user-friendly and reliable electronic replacement for paper is necessary. Take newspapers for example, they are daily consumed and wasted. Many people just take a quick glance at them and then just throw them away, big paper waste! In addition to that, since daily newspapers are targeted for the mass public audience, they have to include many different sections in each issue that do not necessarily fit the interests of every single reader. But you get these sections anyway because they do not know your individual interests. More paper waste!

An electronic version will not only save trees and be cheaper in the long run, but it will come with many added benefits. Easy archiving and quick searching is among the more obvious benefits. However, using PCs exclusively for this task is not an appropriate solution. While many of us spends alot of time infront of their laptop/desktop screens, most people are used to reading books and newspapers in a different manner. Reading habits that were formed and inherited through centuries of reliance on handwritten and printed press are not easily replaceable with the ~30 year-old invention that is the personal computer.

Lots of research has been done on producing electronic papers. Some companies have tried that before, but i really did not see anything usable to hit the mass market through big retailers. Until now. Amazon introduced an eBook reading device that is more of an ePaper to me. Hopefully this new product (named Amazon Kindle) will be better than its predecessors. The cool thing about Kindle in my opinion is its integration with the Amazon store. It is integrated with their Amazon store such that if you buy a book, you can have it as an eBook through Kindle. Amazon already scans every single book they sell in order to gather these statistics (regarding topics and most prominent words/places), so i assume they will be able to deliver all books in an electronic version (even those ones that are not currently available as eBooks). At least hopefully.

Although i am not affiliated with Amazon, and i have not tried Amazon Kindle for my self, i am deeply interested in this topic, and wish there would be a good solution soon.