I imagine somewhere around the first century AD, some scholar scratched his beard and said "Nothing will ever replace the comfort of reading cuneiform on a sun-warmed stone tablet." The guy next to him most likely agreed. "This bright velum, it hurts my eyes." he complained.

Perhaps five hundred years later, somewhere towards the end of the 15th century, I'm certain that some respected monk uttered, "Who would not prefer the personal feeling one gets from a codex, to this new and miserably cold movable type?"

Steins of ale were raised and everyone pronouced movable type as doomed without a doubt.

When The Times of London first moved to the steam-powered presses from Koenig and Bauer in the early 1800's,certainly   more than a few people complained, "it lacks the personal touch of the hand cranked press and therefore will never amount to much."

One of the continually promising prospects which arrived on the ebook scene with full press-release force in early 2007 (after seven years in development) when they raised £52 million of equity finance to build a production facility in Germany, is Plastic Logic. The device hinges on a truly brilliant innovation based on polymer semiconductors. Hopefully they're not arriving arriving three years too late to change the game, even with their Barnes & Noble deal and the AT&T partnership now in play. We'll see. The promised launch is next year. Thus far, the press release drum beat from Plastic Logic are oddly focused on "Catching Kindle", which is what some marketers call the "me too strategy", sounding a bit like the fighter talking trash who's going to face the champ without a fight under his belt yet.

My money says that if Plastic Logic wants to change the game, they need to give the device a name people can take ownership in ("I want a Plastic Logic" just doesn't work for anyone I know) and stop comparing themselves to the competition (Did Nike ever say they wanted to catch Converse?).

What we know for sure: Stone tablets, papyrus and velum are soon to be joined by wood-pulp pounded into paper in the "what the heck were they thinking" footnotes of history. How does it all eventually happen?  Who comes out on top? Who goes broke as a consequence? No clue. Does anybody remember the winners and losers when movable wooden type was replaced by the superior movable metal type? I think the answer is, "who cares...move on".

At the certain risk of over-extending my welcome with the publishing for profit theme,  I want to report with a certain sense of excitement mixed with an undercurrent of frustration that the Kindle DX E-Reader (to be released this summer) has been announced just 3 months after the Kindle 2 arrived at market. The DX E-Reader is 10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38", with a display size of 9.7" high. That's 250% bigger than the Kindle 2 device. Sticker shock: $489 a pop as opposed to the Kindle 2 at $349 (same price as the original Kindle). Aren't electronics supposed to get cheaper every year?

The facts are that the Kindle and other E-Readers remain elite products and are in no way promoted as mass market consumer items - partly because of their steep price, which may in fact be largely intentional. The bottom line for right now is that printed books make 5 to 10% higher margins than their digital counterparts, so a cheap E-Reader on the market may in fact be currently viewed as too disruptive. Jeffrey Lindsay,  of  Sanford C. Bernstein says "They (Amazon) don't want to antagonize the book publishers and they don't want to cannibalize their own book sales". What this means is that Amazon can't risk lowering the price on the Kindle, simply because it might take an unhealthy chunk out of their current profit margin in books made of good ol' paper.

In spite of the bizarre economic forces at work the rumor mill seems unanimous at this point that Apple is poised to launch a tablet next year. Back in March, Rueters reported that Apple had ordered ten inch touch screens from Wintex, which is the same company that currently makes the screens for iphones. Apple arrived late to the game with both the ipod and the iphone but have created enormous success stories with both. There's no reason to doubt they can do the same with a tablet capable of delivering books as well as other rich media, but don't expect it to be cheap. The upside is that at least Apple doesn't sell books made of paper and doesn't need to concern itself with profit margins from that revenue stream.

The future has not arrived yet and the present kinda just actually sucks
The implication of the Apple rumor is that they seem to be betting on their existing touch screen technology as opposed to the Kindle, Sony and upcoming PaperLogic solutions which all rely on E-Paper. The touch screen we're all familar with has the advantage of color and speed, but the readability isn't nearly as sharp as E-Paper, which is currently limited to black and white. Recent advances at the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati have proven that color is coming to E-Paper soon. GammaDynamics is the commercial arm of that project, and it's pretty cool stuff. Another strong contender in the display race might be Pixel Qi which was started up by Mary Lou Jepsen. The Pixel Qi (pronounced Pixel Chee) solution is multi-purpose with a full-color LCD mode, a low-power reflective e-paper mode and a low-power basic color transflective mode. Another contender for hearts and minds of display might be Philips. For years, Philips has been promising color e-papers and so far, none of them have arrived. Last week, they did it again with an entirely different approach to the problem that looks just a bit more promising than all their other promises.

Hearst Publishing has been a long-time investor in E-Paper tech. Perhaps, maybe, who knows yet if their own E-Reader (under tight wraps and a shroud of inscrutable mystery for over a year now) can emerge as a true contender, or Hearst is just another paper profiteer that will release a device no one wants to pay for. CNN Money (Fortune) reported in February that Kenneth Bronfin, head of Hearst Interactive insists that "these devices will be a big part of our future". I honestly hope so. I also seriously doubt it.

Quittner suggests the way forward starting with Kindle and Beyond (his article published before the release of Kindle 2.0, pictured left). Kindle from Amazon, for those who have been living in refugee camps or inside the Washington beltway for the last couple of years is a hand-held book interface, an information retrieval device with a very simple proposition. That being, I will store your library of books, show them to you any time and also buy them for you as well. The concept is not much different from iTunes relationship to the iPod. It's an application in your hand, capable of delivering the content people want for a price people are willing to pay.

The beauty of Kindle, much like the iPod, is that you do not have to be connected to the information grid to enjoy the content you have purchased. You can enjoy it anywhere - trains, planes, automobiles, sofa or bed, it's all yours anywhere you go.

Enter Plastic Logic, due to be released in 2010 (hopefully with a better logo and an actual brand name people can take ownership in). It's much larger than the Kindle, measuring in at 8.5 x 11 inches, compared to Kindle's 8 x 5.3 inches. As with any innovation that proves itself, we're going to see cheaper and more powerful eBooks arriving sooner rather than later. Yes they will have color and yes they may even feel more like paper.

Adobe Air is finally coming into it's own as well and may point the way to the real future for handheld applications that deliver content that's easy to pay for and worth the price. I downloaded  The Time 100 Air Application (lots of our favorite Drawgers included in it, BTW) and really enjoyed it. I can easily see a day when Time could ask my handheld eBook if I want to store their next 20 issues for a buck fifty. My index finger would point to yes and I think a lot of other index fingers will do the same.

I'm also surprised that Quittner failed to mention the minor success stories that newspapers are already beginning to realize in delivering paid digital content. The International Journal of Newspaper Technology reports that the largest selling newspaper on Kindle is USA Today. The price that people are willing to pay? $12 a month! The second most popular newspaper at Kindle is The New York Times at $12.99 a month. The number of actual subscribers are stored in a secret vault, but no matter what those numbers are - they are real subscribers, happily willing to pay for editorial content that doesn't leave ink on their fingers. Will those number grow and grow? You bethca.