"Toshiba is claiming a world first - a large, flexible liquid crystal display which "opens the way to the display on curved screens". The display can be flexed in all directions and bent to form a curve with a radius of curvature as high as 20cm, Tosh says.

The new flexible LCD is a full colour active-matrix TFT-LCD, and it supports SVGA. It measures 8.4in in diameter, it's super-slim, less than 0.4mm deep, and weighs less than 20g. This is 20-25 per cent the weight of other similar-sized screens built using low-temperature polysilicon, the material used for this screen....

Tosh's new technology is a stepping stone towards to foldable LCDs, a long-term goal, the company says.

The curved LCD gets its first outing in Boston this week at the Society for Information Display 2002. But it's not expected to go into mass production until after financial year 2004 - Toshiba has to develop the production technology first.

And what about applications? Toshiba names just two: TVs with curved screens which can mounted in public; and information displays in trains and buses." [The Register]

Fits right in with last week's France Telecom announcement of Communicating Clothes, and it could make ebooks more interesting.

"John Scalzi is relying on readers to determine what his science-fiction e-book is worth. He's offering Agent to the Stars free from his website as shareware and asking for donations through Paypal. He's publicizing his offer with an advertisement at Penny Arcade, a site that's popular with video game fans.

In just a few days, more than 1,000 people have downloaded the book and those who have hit the Paypal button have paid on average $3.80 -- almost four times more than the suggested dollar amount the author requests. Authors with New York publishing houses get an average royalty of $2.50 on an e-book sale." [Wired News]

More BigCos (in this case, BigPubs) being cut out of the picture (and the profits).