Digital Paper: a few years late, and not so flexible

prototypes
The first cheap, flexible, full-color device for reading e-ink, originally expected in 2007, is now a stiff grayscale board that will be available in 2010.

Plastic Logic (www.plasticlogic.com) last week trotted out its Digital Paper reader, a large-format (8.5 by 11 inches) touch-screen device on which you will be able to read and mark up Microsoft Word documents and PDF files.

Digital Paper owners will have the luxury of wirelessly downloading free content from Plastic Logic's partners (as yet unnamed), through a single Web portal.

The reader will make it easier to appreciate text and layouts that might have been designed for print, such as magazines and newspapers, according to Plastic Logic. (The Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader e-ink displays are closer in size to paperback books.)

Plastic Logic has built a manufacturing plant in Dresden, Germany, a spokeswoman said.

The company would not provide details on its plans to test the product with select users this spring.

Nor would it say what the Digital Paper reader might cost consumers.

Books

Can your videos make money?

If you are looking for a 21st century update to Lenny Lipton's classic "Independent Filmmaking," O'Reilly's "YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts" ain't it. The new book, by Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean, reads like the script to an Amway motivational seminar, or an infomercial for capitalizing on home foreclosures.

"You have the potential to change the world from your bedroom. Don't blow it," Dean intones in his message to YouTubers at the end of this book. There is no shortage of marketing talk, be it about memes, "pimping your profile," or the virtues of "selling out."

But despite the book's tone, which I read as "YouTube made us rich, and it can make you rich, too," Lastufka and Dean come up short in the how-to department. In fact, they concede that it takes real money, talent, and high production values to make movies that make money.

They also fail to note the embarrassing truth behind some of the Net's most famous viral videos (have we forgotten Lonelygirl15?): They were concocted by marketing companies.

"An Insider's Guide" walks you through the process of applying to become a YouTube Partner, so you can claim a share of ad revenues on your page. Lastufka and Dean offer some hardware advice.

They praise mini-DV cameras, for example, as well as the Zoom H2 microphone (which, as I have noted, is hard for beginners to use).

But the authors' suggestion that you score cheap props for your videos from Bed, Bath and Beyond is simply weak.

Of course, they make no guarantee that anyone can get rich on YouTube. Good thing.

If you need a book to tell you (as this guide does) that your "Jackass" remakes are nonstarters, nothing will help you make it in the viral movie business.