Plastic Logic Supersizes E-Readers

If Amazon’s notepad-sized Kindle e-reader didn’t quite replicate the experience of thumbing through a pile of hot-off-the-copier printouts for you, a company known as Plastic Logic may have the next best alternative. The company’s new e-reader reaches the size of a regular 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, yet remains no thicker than a standard magazine.

Although Plastic Logic’s reader has white margins that make the actual display part of the unit significantly smaller than its full surface area, it still remains larger than most competitors. The reader supports a number of common formats, including documents from Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, plus Adobe PDFs, newspapers, periodicals and books.

The company has kept other specs on the reader, including capacity and battery life, relatively vague, promising only that it can hold “thousands” of documents and offers “long” battery life.

Plastic Logic will open its first factory in Dresden, Germany on Sept. 17, which will immediately begin producing the readers. They should be commercially available by early 2009, but no price has yet been announced.