e-paper Archives | Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments

I found UP2U (site already down) through del.icio.us and I’ve been hooked. UP2U lists a lot of e-magazines and e-books in PDF format for download. It’s a site you’d know won’t last long because I’m sure, pretty soon publishers of the magazines listed there would be ganging up on it.

UP2U offers The New York Times e-paper, Time, Fortune, eWeek, PC Magazine, PC World, Macworld, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Science for download. It also offers a lot of adult e-magazines, from FHM to Playboy to Penthouse and even Private.

It recently placed prominent notices in its site and even in the PDF files that the magazines were meant for “borrowing” and you’re supposed to delete the files after 24 hours and buy the original publication if you like it. Yeah, right.

The Washington Post recently interviewed Russ Wilcox, the chief executive of E Ink Corp., a company that “has created a paper-thin video screen that combines the ease of reading words on paper with the Internet’s access to information.”

Wilcox told the Post that we’ll see by 2015 the introduction of newspapers similar to that depicted in the movie “Minority Report”: paper thin video screens that can be folded or rolled. Wilcox says newspapers would be buying these gadgets in bulk and hand these out to readers.

Wilcox told the Post in the interview published Oct. 12: “It’s going to be free and the reason is that newspapers are spending $150 per year per reader on making the paper. (Figuring in cost of newsprint.) Within 2 or 3 years you’ve built up $300 to $500 of budget per reader so you can give it away for free because the device itself will cost less than $300.”

The technology, however, may be available even earlier.