Over the past week, the Quirklogic website has been down, and all of its backend services are no longer working. One of the big selling points of the Quirklogic Papyr, their 13.3-inch writing slate, was collaborative sharing and sending content via email. None of these features are working anymore, and it remains to be seen if they will be brought online sometime in the future.
Good e-Reader broke the story in January that Quirklogic was teetering on disaster. They stopped selling their Papyr digital note-taking device and the Quirklogic Quilla, their digital whiteboard solution. The Paper was based on the Sony Digital Paper DPT-RP1; the hardware is around six years old. They had a white-label supplier based in the United States, and I believe the supplier needed more units to sell. Quirklogic needed help finding another stockpile of devices to market.
According to Crunchbase, Quirklogic only raised around $1.2 million during their business’s lifetime. This only goes so far when you spend tons of money on hardware and an internal development team that constantly releases firmware updates and introduces new features. Device sales were strong initially, but their overall sales paled compared to the Remarkable. The Papyr was always a niche device that got little attention in the consumer space.
Will Quirklogic go out of business and suspend its website operations for the foreseeable future? It looks very likely.
Update: March 31st, 2023.
Quirklogic is based in Calgary, Alberta Canada. They have moved out of their offices and there is a big “for lease” sign in their former office building. This does not look good.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
