Why The U.S. Government Should Support E-Ink!

The U.S. government supporting companies such as Amazon with their digital transformation efforts? It’s never going to happen, right? Well, I think it’s worth considering. We all talk about the Green movement to save the planet and take cars out of the roads and replacing them with Hybrid vehicles. I hear all about bank and insurance companies claiming that their paperless approach saves the planet. That is all fine and dandy. What I don’t understand is the credit that Amazon and other E-ink device makers don’t get for their efforts to convert people from using physical paper books to digital books.

I know, we are not there yet. Kindle or other e-book readers are not advanced yet, but with the improvements that I have seen in the iPod, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to have an eBook reader in a year or two that pretty much does everything you can do with a book. I am talking about a glorified Adobe Acrobat like ebook device, with color and all the bells and whistles. Maybe instead of spending on things that don’t matter, the government could give tax breaks to people who bought this more expensive eBook reader. I know a lot of people talk about the experience of reading paper books and how rich it is, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people (especially the younger generation) would be more open to getting a cool gadget like Kindle to read their books, do their homework, and so on than going with paper books. Maybe it’s just me being too optimistic about a little device that is cool but not essential. But at the end of the day, if insurance companies are taking credit for going paperless, maybe Amazon and its rival companies should get proper credit as well.