The iPhone, the Kindle(-ing), books, and the future of high-rez display stock

A followup to an earlier post: I’ve found an interesting article about text display techologies by Sven-S Porst on his blog Quarter Life Crisis. This topic isn’t so esoteric; consider that Amazon’s got a new e-book reader that they’ve spent tens or maybe hundreds of millions on and which is probably going to flop (others believe this as well), as well as the need for high-rez PDAs and laptops noted in my earlier post, etc.

Two juggernauts, above: The “Kindle” vs. “Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Son Masters (Pulcho Chikchi Simch’e Yoyol), the earliest extant book printed with movable metal type, dated 1377″(image and caption text from this site).

The Kindle is clearly brilliant, I mean, really…it only wastes twice the volume of a regular book, has lower resolution than a $50 Epson inkjet printer, and uses a proprietary e-book document format that is likely to be about as shelf-stable as laserdisc. I’m sure the Kindle’s interface is beautiful, but do you even know anyone who has a functioning laserdisc player? That was only twenty years ago, people. My pronouncement: the laserdisc format is dead in less than fifty. Gone. A complete loss…but at least you could back it up to a more successful format, like VHS, or VCD, or DVD, etc…and you are legally prevented from doing so with your Kindle. It’s just DRL, I guess…digital rights to literature.

There are interesting parallels here to vinyl records, popularity, and longevity, but that’s kindling for a future post.

The good news is that, apparently, the iPhone of all creatures has a 160 ppi screen (almost as high as the Kindle’s 167 ppi), manufactured by a largely-German held corporation known as Balda (BAD.DE, a terrible ticker choice). So, hey Balda guys, build a new factory in China, depreciate it over the next 25 years because you’re poised to dominate the field, and start making millions of 160+ dpi 3×5 touchscreens and maybe some non-touchy ones too.

And get on top of the 600 dpi WQUXGA or HXGA screens too…we NEED these. Do you have any idea how many high-rez displays hospitals would be pressured to buy? Every MRI, every diagnostic suite, and every surgery bay would have multiple displays being replaced–not to mention probably half of graphic design. No more paper proofing? That’s an easy sell–these displays would probably end up paying for themselves! Just give the graphic designers a competitor to print proofing and give the physicians a competitor to 35mm photo resolution at a suitably higher price. It’s guaranteed revenue.

If they can get a decently wide color gamut and brightness on these high-rez panels, I’d buy one…but I’d buy Balda stock first, because apparently no one except Fidelity wants it right now.