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E-Paper Moves Closer
squaretorus sent in this story about electronic paper at the BBC. Seems that everytime any of the e-paper, e-ink, e-whatever companies have a new demo unit they run out and call a press conference. But none of it matters until they have ultra-thin, durable, flexible pages that can be manufactured cheaply...
Actually about 70% of Slashdot readership uses Windows/IE. Less than you thought, but still a rather high number if you look at the anti-MS mentality around here.
You've got to be kidding. Did you read my post or just the title? I didn't mention books, nor even make a subtle reference to IP. I'm talking about personal papers for businesses and homework assignments for schools. eBooks may be more expensive, but ePaper in general will be cheaper because of the personal data you can store on it.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
But I WON'T buy it if it only supports encrypted content.
I hate reading on the Palm : the screen is too small, the contrast sucks and you have to scroll all the time, but the Palm is small and convenient enough to convince me not to load my suitcase sometimes. The Rocket Ebook was much better, but still not very exciting. The Everybook had that dual A4 color display that was big like an open window, and impressive, but I still was uneasy holding the thing to read.
So, it brought me to think about it : what do I like so much better in a book that even the near-perfect Everybook reader didn't provide ? well, of course, there is the fact that books don't need batteries, they are not nearly as fragile, they are less heavy than the majority of paperback releases (I'm not talking about Dostoyevsky). But there is more : the texture of the paper is gratifying to touch, the turning of a paper page is part of the pleasure of reading, the letters never have staircase effect, even if the printing is crappy, the white of the paper reflects different color shades with the lighting, one can see the sun dance on the pages at dawn or dusk while reading on the train, etc etc ... Even the back, with its different material (cardboard), its artwork and sometimes embossed or golden letters is part of the reading experience.
So, to convince conventional "pleasure" readers, E-paper will have to have all of that : round letters, paper-like light reflection, paper-like texture, the exact same text layout than on a regular book. All of that is part of the joy of reading, and E-paper won't provide that for a long time. I, for one, never read for pleasure on any form of computer device. I read a lot of articles, financial reports, tech manuals, online and the cold screen light doesn't bother me because the reading is only pratical, but I would never read Azimov on anything else but a book.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's a lot easier to believe if you have good groupware tools. I was filling out 100% electronically routed Lotus Notes expense reports in 1995. Currently, we get a Excel 2000 template that we have to print out and stick into snail mail -- mainly because the standard MS tools are too shitty to handle something like paperless expense reports. (MS employees, feel free to speak up :)
In publishing there are few editions of a manuscript ever printed that contain no errors. When enough errors exist in a given edition the publisher will often times issue a reprint with errors corrected. This used to be a big problem of publishers before the advent of computers when legions of people hand take a handwritten manuscript and pre-press it all by hand. Things in the books also get changed by the author or rights holder of the manuscript. Sometimes the book you read is not the same one the author originally wrote. If you want to do a little homework to see how drastic this can be sometimes, pick up a copy of the original draft of John Locke's Treatise on Government and then read the touched up copy they give you in a US government class. There's several major editions all with several large variances because when Locke originally wrote the treatises he wrote under a pen name with little to no fear of reprisal but later editions left things out because it was figured he was the author, then later after certain revolutions took place those things were re-added. For a second project look into a comparison between old or middle English copies of the Bible and the modern King James edition. A good deal of the passages lose a bit of their meaning when you read the archaic copies. The modern language does not mesh very well contextually with the archaic language though the mechanics are similar.
Now skip ahead to the modern times when books are often times written on word processors and a single editor reviews the work accepts and suggests changes then finalizes the draft and sends it to an electronic pre-press. There's far fewer human based errors in modern print books so there's fewer editions from the same publisher printed. The only big changes are the one the author or editor decides to make in terms of actual content of the book. This is perfectly legal and fine for them to do. It is fine because most often if there was an original print of the book it ended up in some library or catalog somewhere. A hardcopy exists of the original work. Say someone actually got a copy of Catcher in the Rye printed with fewer profanities and got it out to the public at large. You'd know it was an edited work because you could go find an original print of the book if you really wanted one. As long as a group of extremists went and burned the original copies of the book you couldn't pass the profanity free copy off as the real thing. Hard copies of things can be difficult to get rid of because they are so entirely physical.
Enter e-books. Ahead fifty years from now, the printing of hard copy paper books is passe so all books are published electronically. Books are are now ethereal constructs. They can be transmitted in less than a fraction of a second to thousands of people and a library of them can be stored in a square inch of physical space. Man how revolutionary! They can also be wiped out by a single keystroke. The ethereal entities that books are can be wiped out or changed with the same whim it takes to transmit or store them in come digital medium. A scratched optical disk or pulled power plug can wipe out an entire strata of contemporary society. Was I the only one who read and understood 1984? Most of the shit you know or think you know is what you've been told. If someone is teeling you bullshit, all you know is bullshit. The books that did exist in Winston Smith's world were rewritten en masse to accord themselves with the contemporary situation at hand. You don't need to be a wild conspiracy theorist to think up some situations where the metaphysical nature of literature is abused. Shit, in computer terms, if a bug exists in code put into a CVS root the rest of the servers pulling from that root will get the same bug. Fouling the source fouls up everything. It's fairly easy to foul up the source if the only source is electronic. How many Gutenburg books have you seen with major typos in them, in fifty years literature students might discuss the poetic use of bad grammar in a work just because the only copy of the book in existance has been a fouled up copy with a typo from some text file that ran afoul of gzip. I'll stick with real paper.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.