At the Future of Science Journalism symposium at MIT in February 2008, E Ink’s director of marketing, David Jackson, presented the company’s technology for flexible displays that mimic paper. Most of the examples were small.
One of the journalists in the room asked whether such a display could ever be made the size of a broadsheet, so that the pages could be opened out and the information scanned. Mindy McAdams, also speaking at the symposium, wrote afterwards that the questioner “was thinking about imitating a dead format that most people find awkward and inconvenient”.
The reading offered here was that the question was predictable rather than shocking. People adopt a new technology through the practices and norms of the one they know, so print journalists looked at electronic paper and asked it to reproduce what paper already did. That is the wrong test. Paper is extremely good at being paper, and there is no prize for replicating it electronically; the question worth asking of a new display is what it makes possible that paper cannot.
E Ink displays did reach a mass market in the years that followed, as pocket-sized readers rather than as electronic broadsheets.