Substrate Talk: Kindle For Newspapers Sells Out, Plastic Logic Shows Off Its Wares

Fitz: Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle DX hasn’t exactly gotten rave reviews from techies who note that it still hasn’t moved beyond a black-and-white display, and that it comes with a do-I-really-want-it-that-badly price tag of almost $500.

Yet, the big e-reader designed for newspapers, as well as magazines and textbooks, sold out in just three days on Amazon, reports Steven E.F. Brown in Monday’s San Francisco Business Times. Amazon is saying it will stock some new Kindle DX readers by Wednesday, in time for Father’s Day.

That’s not just theoretical good news for newspapers, as Brown relates this real-life encounter:

“Recently a commuter on San Francisco’s BART system, reading newspapers on her small-screen Kindle as the train raced under the bay, told this reporter she no longer subscribes to the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times, but gets them through her Kindle. She also has an out-of-town paper, the Seattle Times, delivered to the device — another benefit of electronic delivery.”

Meanwhile, Semiconductor International, my favorite bedtime reading, reports on its blog that e-readers were the rage of the recent Society of Information Displays conference in San Antonio. The real nerds are waiting for geeked about ultra-thin AMOLED displays with multilayer stack approaches, and put Plastic Logic Ltd.’s reader among the “less-ambitious projects” at the show. But  Plastic Logic is apparently right on schedule for its early 2010 tests with The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, which will sell or lease the devices as another way of replacing the print product no longer delivered four days a week.