Is this where the newspaper business is headed? Foldable and bendable displays.

Being in the newspaper business, (kinda), you are always thinking “what is the future of the newspaper business?”. Many people think it’s the web, but is it, really?

This is where we go backwards by going forwards.

Undoubtedly you’ve heard of things like those bendable and foldable displays coming out “in the future” where you’d just have a sheet of plastic and your new newspaper would magically appear every morning. Plastic Logic is making this a reality.

“Plastic Logic is building the first commercial manufacturing facility targeted at flexible active-matrix display modules for ‘take anywhere, read anywhere’ electronic reader products. It will utilise Plastic Logic’s unique process to fabricate active-matrix backplanes on plastic substrates which, when combined with an electronic-paper frontplane material, will be used to create display modules that are thin light and robust. This will enable a digital reading experience that is much closer to paper than any other technology.”

– http://www.plasticlogic.com/products.php

Can you imagine a website that looks like a newspaper that is displayed on something that isn’t disposeable and infinitely reuseable? It would put all the emphasis back into the layout of the newspaper instead of how it should (or could) be displayed online. Also, would it update the paper as the day progressed, with new articles appearing, possibly having something more important bump the lead article off the prime spot? There are a lot of new ways of thinking that the industry as a whole will have to start thinking about, and many forward-thinking companies do already.

Here is a video showing how flexible the Plastic Logic display is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwld9lGKSz4]