All Kindled up, Rupert Murdoch might invest in a K-rival with a ‘four color’ screen. Plastic Logic reader?

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By David Rothman

Back in 2007 Theresa Horner, then the senior director of eBooks at HarperCollins, Rupert Murdoch’s book publisher, put in a good word for e-readers for browsing through a "wide spectrum of reading—newspapers, journals, books, textbooks, what have you."

I’d said the same thing. In fact, I had even tried to interest the Washington Post  in developing a reader that worked with Jon Noring’s OpenReader standard. Why limit e-readers just to book reading?

But what about Rupert Murdoch himself? Has Theresa’s former boss finally caught up with us multi-purpose people? Will we see major interest from him in Kindle-style devices for reading newspapers along with books and the rest? In fact, in Detroit, nonMurchoch newspapers will promote Plastic Logic machine for news-reading, and books would seem a logical accompaniment.

Enter Murdoch

Now the plot thickens. The forthcoming Plastic Logic machine (TeleRead video here) is among those mentioned in Peter Kafka’s Murdoch-related article in AllthingsD—headlined Does Rupert Murdoch have Kindle Envy? News Corps Mulls an E-Book Reader Investment. Its 8.5 by 11-inch screen would be a nice size for reading newspapers, at least at home. Trouble is, Kafka says Murdoch wants color, and this one so far is only black and and white. But you never know. In the past the Plastic Logic people have mentioned four levels of gray scale. Could that be what Murdoch is talking about?

Excerpt from Kafka piece:

"Please bear in mind that this is a very rough paraphrase, from notes I was taking in real time:

We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there. [Did I just hear that correctly?]

"After the event, I checked in with a News Corp. spokesperson, who confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating: News Corp. is indeed in ‘exploratory’ talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies."

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