The original note, as written at the time
I think it is about time someone made a Book Phone. Not those pretentious flip open smartphones. I mean real page leaves that can be opened. Maybe the traditional smartphone screen is what is on the front cover, but once you open the book you have these low energy consumption flexible LCD-like pages. You could have 10 of these to simulate the reading experience. The content displayed on these sheets can of course be changed in an app.
Ongoing development
Somebody should make a book phone. Not the pretentious flip-open smartphones — real page leaves that open.
The front cover is the conventional smartphone screen. Open the book and there are ten flexible, low-energy pages, and reading happens across them the way reading has always happened. The content on each sheet is set from an app.
The reason this beats a tablet is not nostalgia, it is the hand. A page is held at an angle, turned, marked, and abandoned half-read on a table. Two pages facing each other give you a spread, and a spread is a different cognitive object from a single tall rectangle — it is why we still print things we intend to think about.
Ten pages is a deliberate constraint. A book is not a scroll; you cannot have infinite leaves, so an author has to decide what occupies the spread. That decision is editorial and it is the thing the infinite scroll removed.
The engineering risk is the hinge, which is where every flexible display has died. Ten pages means nine folds and a spine, and the spine has to survive being opened ten thousand times while carrying a conductor that fatigues. This is why the concept will be attempted by a small company and not a large one.
The honest use case is not novels. It is the documents that people read for work and then keep — a report, a specification, a set of drawings, a legal agreement. Those are things you want spread out, annotated and left open on a table.
A screen that behaves like a page is a different product from a page that behaves like a screen, and nobody has built the first one yet.