I believe that print as we know it is dead. I know that there are some arguing that print is having a resurgence – just as there are those who think that vinyl is on the way back for music – but reports that physical books are gaining ground at the expense of digital are just plain wrong as is explained in this article. I saw this before with digital images where people argued that digital images would never replace traditional photography because of quality and price. Well, of course, we know that the quality of digital images increased and the cost of getting them decreased (when I was a student in the 80s it would have been bizarre to imagine that everyone would have a couple of cameras on them at all times) – but it was not this that killed traditional photography and eventually put the giant Kodak out of business. What killed traditional photography was when you could go to a gig, take a photo, and share it almost instantly with your friends around the world. Traditional photography could never compete with this.

Some people prefer reading print to looking at a screen though I am not one of them. But imagine when an e-document feels like paper, is light and flexible, but you can carry a whole newspaper with you (not to mention all the novels you have ever read) by carrying just one piece of it. And it looks just like print.

E ink, the company behind the pigment-based, low-energy monochromatic displays found in many of today’s popular readers has worked out how to create up to 32,000 colours using almost the same technology. For the first time they can create colours at each pixel using yellow, cyan, magenta and white pigments. The new display is 20-inch with 2500 x 1600 resolution. The image below is rendered in this way. This leads to the possibility of having coloured moving images made out of ink – just like the Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter movies. Well, not quite like that yet. But it’s coming. More details here.