How do you follow the news? Websites? Television? Radio? Social media? Maybe you’re a real connoisseur who gets the paper delivered, knowing there are few pleasures in this world like cracking open a broadsheet over a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning.
Project E Ink won’t be replacing any of those avenues any time soon — and really, that doesn’t appear to even be the intention. Creator Alexander Klöpping describes the entire pursuit as a kind of hobbyist side project that eventually took on a life of its own.
“I’m a news junkie, and the power and allure of a newspaper’s front page have always fascinated me,” he writes. “So, when I stumbled upon an article written by a Google engineer who had built an e ink device with the front page of his favorite daily newspaper prominently displayed on his wall, I was jealous. So, I built one as well, using off-the-shelf hardware.”
From the sound of it, the devoted newspaper e-ink screen took on a life of its own after hitting Hackernews. The project garnered enough interest to convince the co-founder of Dutch news aggregation platform Blendle to start selling the thing.
Image Credits: Project E Ink
Klöpping found an e-ink supplier in the form of Visionect, a Slovenian company that creates low-power interactive signage for offices, hotels and airports. “It turns out that the dimensions of the screen they sell for corporate use are identical to those of an unfolded newspaper front page,” he adds.
The 32-inch diagonal displays comes in at 27.84 × 16.29 × 0.53 inches and weighs a bit under 18 pounds. There’s a VESA mount on back, which lets you hang it on the wall using a TV mount (again, it’s fairly heavy).
The product’s site notes, “Project E Ink is not affiliated with any newspaper. It’s a display that loads URLs of newspaper frontpages. We encourage you getting a subscription to your favorite newspaper, as quality journalism deserves our support.”
It’s not cheap. The system is now available, priced at €2,783 ($3,050). You’ve got to 1) really love news and 2) approach the whole thing as a bit of functional art. So, how much do you love newspapers, really?