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.

Guest Column: Radio Liberty Coming to a PDA Near You

By Sasha Meyer

International broadcasters like the BBC and VOA have always suffered from physics. They broadcast in AM format on short and medium wave. While AM signals can reach listeners on the other side of the globe, they are highly susceptible to interference. The result is discouragingly noisy and at times inaudible reception.

FM format on ultra-short wave is well known for its high fidelity, but it lacks range. An FM signal goes only as far as the horizon, which is not very: A station with a 100-meter-tall antenna can reach listeners only within 20 miles.

During the Cold War, U.S. government-run VOA and others tried to overcome the obstacles by increasing the power of the transmitters and moving them closer to the Eastern Bloc's borders. (Radio Moscow did likewise, using facilities in Cuba and Eastern Europe.)

After the Soviet collapse, the VOA tried to fix the problem by arranging to broadcast its programs on local CIS stations. This solution has proved both cumbersome (requiring negotiation with a multitude of partners), limited (some countries haven't agreed) and temporary (many partnerships have been suspended, both in Russia and Central Asia).

But the arrival of new broadcast technology – Digital Radio Mondiale or DRM – promises to solve the problem once and for all.

DRM enables the delivery of FM-quality audio over AM distances. Field tests show clear reception of a DRM broadcast from Portugal in places as far away as Finland and Cyprus. (Listen to samples here). The next step – DRM Plus – promises CD-quality sound, albeit over shorter distances.

The future for DRM seems bright for several reasons. It enjoys broad support among broadcasters. They see it as their last fighting chance against the Internet and satellite radio.

Unlike the latter two, DRM is cheap: Existing transmitters can be used with an addition of a computer that digitizes the audio. Furthermore, it significantly cuts electricity bills.

Geographically large countries - Russia, India and Brazil - are among its biggest backers. For them, DRM is a cost-effective way to deliver news across their vast distances. A Chinese company already makes DRM-capable Himalaya radios and Russia has produced one called Orlyonok.

The DRM plans got an extra boost last year when Swiss semiconductor giant ST Microelectronics announced plans for a tiny DRM decoder. The chip can be built into anything from car radios to PDAs.

DRM broadcasting is already a reality. For example, the Kremlin's Voice of Russia has been broadcasting since 2003 in DRM format to China and to Europe (in English, French and German).

Expect Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle to start beaming their DRM programs into the CIS once Orlyonok hits store shelves in Minusinsk and Khujand.

Many Spaniards celebrated the recent demolition of Radio Liberty's huge antennas near Barcelona. But, with DRM's arrival and experts saying that Cold War 2.0 is imminent, that destruction might seem a bit rushed.

Photo: Euthman

Rights: Creative Commons