This morning we had a demonstration from Sony for a new product: Digital Paper.
Digital Paper is a platform to manage documents. The device is not meant for reading books on - like a Kindle. It is a purpose built paper replacement for PDF reading - Onto which you can annotate, and note-take. Sony appears not to be going after the book reading market, but rather legal documents, scripts, contracts and text books or articles for education. It is fairly unique in the tech universe. It's a device that comes in a tablet form factor, but it's decidedly unlike any tablet on the market.
It is a very useful device that can read solely PDFs, and copes with you being able to annotate them, or with writing on it...very well. We saw that this device can display share (through a cable). Battery life is expected to be in excess of 2 weeks of frequent daily use.
It doesn't run games. It doesn't run apps. It can't connect to an online bookstore or even read e-books in common formats like epub. It's just for reading documents — specifically PDFs — and taking notes.
This display output means that we could capture the device live for RE:view, offering some compatibility for capturing writing.
There is a roadmap of developments, and they have asked if we would like to be in the pilot test group - which we will gladly do. There are issues that need to be addressed..... It is not the fastest of devices (like a Kindle), and there would need to be some engineering work to make it work with the present classroom infrastructure....
However....our overall conclusion is that Sony is on to something with this product.
If anyone would like to be part of the trial - please contact Rob in AV (r.j.hyde@bath.ac.uk).
More information about the product is here: http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solutions.bbsccms-assets-show-digitalpaper-digitalpaper.shtml?PID=I:digitalpaper:digitalpaper
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