Winged Printed Word on the Caspian

By Sasha Meyer

The confluence of two technologies promises a boon and a challenge to governments of the Caspian Sea region.

The first is Wimax and its competitors, which deliver broadband Internet wirelessly over the distance of dozens of miles.

The other is e-paper. It’s an electronic display that resembles paper – thin, flexible and even rollable. In fact, it can be plain old paper, coated with a thin film of flexible electronics. Compared with other types of displays, it consumes almost no electricity.

Combine the two – as Amazon did with Kindle - and you have a product with profound implications for Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Providing education becomes much cheaper once textbooks are published and delivered electronically. (The Dutch are already trying to do just that.) Kindle, which still has some of the crudeness of a first-generation device, is the size of a paperback, weighs just 10 ounces, and holds up to 200 titles. That means students would need just one e-book throughout their time at school. With Samsung promising 128 GB flash memory cards by next year, the library as we know it is set to disappear: E-book users would have an entire library at their fingertips 24/7.

Similarly, newspapers' finances will be in a much better shape: Printing and distribution in the U.S. accounts for 70% of their total cost. That figure is probably higher in the Caspian region, where printing is more expensive and wages are lower.

News media is already testing the waters with this new product. Two newspapers – Les Echos in France and De Tijd in Belgium – have been experimenting with e-paper editions. Hearst, a big American media conglomerate, plans to introduce an e-reader with a flexible screen device the size of a tabloid paper. And a Kindle edition of The New York Times is already available.

But therein lies the challenge to governments such as those in the former Soviet Union that wish to exercise editorial control: What to do when anyone can start a publication and easily distribute it everywhere?

The task becomes truly daunting once e-paper is coupled with yet another wireless technology.

Digital Radio Mondiale (profiled earlier) can be used for datacasting, that is sending text and images as files alongside or in place of a radio broadcast. DRM datacasting is slow (bandwidth is 24 kbps, about half of dialup's) so sending a newspaper to an e-reader might take a whole day. But DRM's global reach puts it beyond any control, a virtue that might outweigh its limitations for fans of independent news.

Using a radio station to deliver a newspaper might seem an odd idea, but it has been done. On December 19, 1938, a St. Louis station, using technology called radio fax, began a daily broadcast of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. On May 12, 1946, the Chicago Tribune distributed its Radio Tribune edition using WBGN, a local FM broadcaster. Others followed suit: the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald in 1947, and The New York Times a year later. Those were pilot projects that didn't lead to mainstream adoption, due to the high cost and cumbersomeness of analogue electronics, the kind of obstacles that are easily overcome in the digital era.

Andrew Odlyzko, a scientist and well-known technology expert, writes that it takes a new technology (DVD, for example) about a decade to replace the existing one (VHS tape). Both e-paper and Wimax have been commercially available since 2004-2005, and the pace of innovation and product offerings has quickened in the last two years.

If Dr. Odlyzko is right, then the media campaign surrounding the next cycle of presidential elections in the former Soviet republics might turn out to be unique. But it cuts both ways: Russian newspapers might send themselves to homes in Peoria in a bid to influence the 2012 U.S. presidential race.

Cold War 2.0 promises to be very high tech and very unusual.