Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

efore you fly off elsewhere, but enclosed in the finite space of a single day’s
“paper.” It’s almost cozy.
It makes sense that the Times, of all newspapers, would move in this
direction. Though it breaks plenty of news, it also strives harder than most
newspapers to be thoughtful, analytical, even literary. It is the ruminative daily
par excellence, which is why the phrase “Sunday Times” evokes thoughts of
long hours in a comfortable chair. But because it is screen-based, the Times
Reader can’t quite replicate that trance-like absorption. Its “pages” are two-
dimensional and intangible, so they don’t “relate” to the hands, eyes and brain
in the same way. It is not flexible, tailorable or manipulable. After a while, it
begins to feel like an android imitation of paper, a decent likeness but no soul.
One occasionally has the urge to pull it out of the screen and give it life.
And that is where the technology may need to go if it wants to save
newspapers: toward a new medium that brings digital reading into the third
dimension, incorporating all the best qualities of the Web and real paper. Such
a hybrid would be the best hope for reuniting the two sides of newspaper’s
personality. In fact, high-technology companies have been working for many
years to develop exactly this sort of product. Electronic paper or e-paper, as it’s
known, is not being developed primarily for newspapers. When the concept is
discussed in the media and elsewhere, newspapers often are not even
mentioned. Instead, books based on the e-paper model have generated much
of the excitement.
The basic idea is to create a new type of display that looks and feels like
paper, and has the same spatial presence, but with embedded electronics that
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