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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...
I know tons of businesses and schools (in particular) use piles upon piles of paper every year. If E-paper ever gets really good, then not only could there be substantial savings for mass-paper users (anyone from the policy debate community knows what I'm talking about), but also it could help slow the rate at which land fills grow, and also slow deforestattion (yeah, there are ton of other causes like population growth, acid rain, blah blah blah)... of course the key would be proliferating this kind of technology to less well to do nations.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
...the day when microsoft has control of all the e-paper and if the more than three words change, it self-destructs.
my sig sucks.
The paperless office is a vision that belongs in the same category as the flying car. Sure, one day it will happen, but it'll take just a little longer than anyone predicted. I suspect we'll be using paper for at least another 50 to 100 years, when electronic paper might be cheaper than the wooden version.
Don't know about you guys, but the way they described how it works reminds me a bit of the good-ol-days with Etch-A-Sketch! =)
It better leave ink on my thumbs, and potty train my puppy!
I remember seeing an article in a technology magazine a few years ago about electronic books with electronic paper and electronic ink. Apparently, this ink, when charged, would flip from black to white (or something like that). So you could buy the electronic book, download a text from the net for a nominal fee, and have the book automatically typeset itself for the novel. They also touted its ability to do fancy things like animation, font size changes, etc. Never heard anything more about this though (not that I know of at least, but I may have missed something). Sounds like quite the concept, but the technology for some reason hasn't materialized into something mainstream yet.
http://ryan.buterbaugh.org/
I'll admit that its cool that they're coming up with electronic paper solutions to replace wooden paper, while they'll be a hell of a lot easier to lug around with just one sheet of electronic paper vs 500 sheets of wooden paper in a book, there's still the issue of wether it will have the same rights as the wooden version..
I for one would like to be able to share my books wooden or electronic.. We've seen the problems that come with the electronic version, for example, the E-Book.. Whats to make it so that the companies dont put more restrictive limitations on the eletronic paper version? Once htey get past those issues and it becomes as common and cheap as the wooden version then heck yeah I'll buy it, but until then, and until they get electronic paper to have the same rights as the wooden version, I'm not going to touch it with a 6 foot stick..
There are just two cases when I ever use paper these days, and I'd love to eliminate them:
1 - Somebody gives me old fashioned bills or credit card receipts on paper.
2 - I want to see something at >72dpi.
It's hard to get excited about e-paper... I want to have no-paper, not more-paper, e- or not.
This technology seems like a giant step backwards from where we're headed with lower cost, larger, and higher-res LCD displays.
"You can actually think about there being a book now because you can actually put some electronics on the back of this thing and it becomes a display..."
The speaker is quickly skipping over a very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap, flexible, fast, digital electronics that can address every one of those pixels so that they can be turned off and on.
Just getting the speed and resolution necessary costs $110 for a Matrox G-450 video card, which is not flexible and doesn't include digital output. The final signal to a monitor is analog.
Bush's education improvements were
I'll know that it has arrived when I can watch TV on my wallpaper.
...various makers of those little erasable sketch pads for kids scrambled to modify their products to mimic the "e-paper". One company released a statement saying "We're only switching from simple magnets to electromagnets, but in the end we can translate everything into digital media as a result"
I for one will never replace my 50lb *nix manual with an e-paper one. Or for that matter any of my hundreds (if not more) of real paper books that I have collected. And I'm sure that most, if not all, people will agree with me.
The reason is really simple, imo. The e-paper requires a battery, circuitry, special inks, etc. In the end, it will deccay, break down or I might simply drop it into the bath tub while reading it and zap the hell out of me. I've had many electronic devices fail on me, and in all cases all the information stored on them was lost. Completely. The same is true for e-paper. Sooner or later (most likely really soon) it will break down, no matter how well you take care of it.
The same does not apply to normal, paper books. They last. And last. My oldest book is from the early 1900s, and by no means is it old. There are parchments that are thousands of years old. Granted, it's just as easy to destroy normal paper as it might be e-paper, but given proper care, normal paper has an almost endless life.
So if given the choice, I'd rather get an old-fashioned paper book that I can keep for as long as I want rather that a cool e-paper one that will BSOD in a couple of years.
I would consider it a bit of a shame if we simply replaced paper or books with e-Whatevers. Books/paper have been around for centuries and are as useful as ever, if we threw them out we would be throwing a little bit of our heritage.
http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/right-to-read .html
This short story illustrates the evils which could be put into play if digital paper is ever realized. The technology itself is a wonderful leap forward, but, I suspect, that the companies controlling the content might get a little greedy.
Although it's doubtful things will get as bad as are described in the story, the technology certainly opens the door for some of it.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
But SVDave, if you throw out the Digital to Analog converter, you must provide some way of hooking every row and every column with a separate wire. Every pixel must be separately addressable. Also, to meet the design goal, this wiring must be thin, flexible, cheap, and reliable.
Also, the hardware driver could not use a fan, as does the Matrox G-450. Yes, such a hardware driver could be simpler in some ways, but the problems are still mind-boggling. At least they boggle my mind.
Bush's education improvements were
Xerox has had this going for a while. It's been demoed at retail stores (flexible hanging banners with changing messages).
Here's a list of on-line electronic paper resources gathered less than a year ago by Shawn Hellenius.
ourpla.net is your planet
Someone already address that the fact it is monochrome makes a big difference.
;-)
There is an even bigger factor, though. I could live with a refresh of, like, once per minute. Basically, as long as it can render a line of text faster than I can read it, we're good.
So, we are talking more like an original Hercules mono display at 100 times the res and 100th the refresh or something. (or whatever) Probably not hard to do that without a fan
Oh, and the conversion to analog is an EXTRA step.
-Peter
Totally different. Todays monitors refresh at 60 Hz or faster, and all of todays graphics technology is built around this refreshing. One would hope e-paper wouldn't need to be refreshed as long as the information displayed doesn't change. To me, e-paper would only be useful if it could display large amounts of static data in a very high-quality manner, while using no power. The ability to change what is displayed is nice, but I don't expect e-paper to show me movies! We've got other display technologies for that. It would be acceptable for e-paper to take several seconds to change the entire page. Thus, much lower-powered, less complex electronics would do the job fine.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
... my sister rubbed it on the carpet, which zapped the memory... :-)
Has there already been a slashdot conversation about what the ebook revolution will effect the DMCA or the other way around? Will epaper be useless due to fear that they would only reproduce thing thing that had been done already? Doesn't this whole media come under the same laws as do today's formats?
"That doesn't meant that you need to have a wire from the CPU to every bit of memory..."
Yes, the CPU uses binary addressing to communicate with the memory module, so few wires are needed. But, inside the memory module, every bit is connected with wires. And those wires don't have to be flexible.
You are right about the fan.
The basic point I think is valid is that a cell that can be made black or white with the application of a voltage is interesting and important, but is only a small part of the complexity necessary. Designing flexible wires to every pixel, and flexible transistors to control every pixel, if needed, is the bulk of the complexity.
Bush's education improvements were
But I WON'T buy it if it only supports encrypted content.
I can invision the senario, "Sorry professor, I had my term paper finished but my epaper crashed."
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
Unfortunately it's not compatible with most septic operating systems yet.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
In the article, they talk about making a "book" of this stuff -- what an incredible waste! If the epaper's contents can be changed electronically, there's no reason to have a whole "book" of it -- one sheet should suffice (with some sort of input device to capture "page turn" requests) for most everything.
Furthermore, if you view the epaper as simply a medium through which to display information, you wouldn't need a seperate physical volume for each book - they could all fit into something, say, the size of a PDA (compactflash, etc for removable, expandable storage, and a hookup to the epaper to display -- or even a PDA screen made OF this stuff (thin, light, flexible (foldable?) PDA ^_^ ) - would be insanely useful.
All of this doesn't come with a price, however. If publishing of mainstream works went electronic, there would be no "ownership" of a copy of a work, only a "license". Then, by simply encrypting the contents, by any means, no matter how light, makes it CRIMINAL to build, use and/or distribute a compatible viewer, under the DMCA. So whomever is first to market, wins, and has a larger stranglehold on the publishing industry than M$ has on PC OS's - because noone will *legally* be able to compete in that arena. ("Your honor, our file format, which is used by every major publication, is encrypted, and thus protected under the DMCA. The defendants willfully broke the law when they decrypted the contents of our file format and used it to create their product...")
There are MANY more issues here than just a superthin, flexible, high-contrast display. The article doesn't really touch on the major issues at all, and instead only glosses over the technology involved.
All true, but each pixel must be separately connected. Those connections must be cheap, durable, and flexible. When I have tried to design something like that, I have thought that it was a very difficult problem.
I think you're still missing the point. LVDS takes care of this problem very easily and in a very proven method: it drives every TFT screen on the planet without a problem.
Basically you have a serializer which converts your Row/Column accesses to one or more data streams and a clock stream. Each stream is two physical lines. Then you can have the deserializer within the e-paper. So now you provide power and your serial data and clock. Far fewer lines.
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.
E-Papercuts. This will be followed by E-Bleeding, as well as the E-Band Aid(tm).
Ouch. That's going to hurt.
I also like the convienice and feel of real paperbacks.
What excites me about things like e-paper is that I could have different books for different needs.
For travel or general fun reading (in the park, on the couch, etc.) I could have an e-book the size of a normal paperback (hopefully with pages that have similar weight and feel to paper) that I could dock, load with content, undock and take with me anywhere.
For harsher conditions like maps you take out hiking, I could have a more rugged version of the paper that would stand up to wear and weather.
If I wanted to prop up a table, I could have a hardback version of e-paper that I fill up with something like "War & Peace" or "The Breast" (wierd Kafka ripoff, or at least it seems that way to me!). Ok, someone out there might like the hardback form factor. It is better for tech books, hmm...
Anyway, I could have a choice of form factors and load what books I liked into whatever size and shape I like.
As for the person who said a book full of pages of e-paper was a waste, my argument against that is that spatial memory is very powerful, and there are a LOT of times when I've wanted to refer back to some exact spot in the book and the quickest way really is to turn right to the page where you remember it being - you might think some sort of search mechanism could do the same but I think it would be slower. Plus I am in agreement that turning pages is pleasant way to scroll forward through a book.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason why I personally would much rather have a real book full of pages for most reading needs is that I like to refer back to particular spots - sometimes to look back at an earlier plot point, sometimes to go to a particular page to look up some reference.
.50c each with no distribution or printing costs, but are too worried about the 1% of people that would hoard the content to grab the gold ring.
Spatial memory is quite powerful, and I can often turn to the exact page I'm looking for, or I can't quite remember exactly what I'm looking for textually but know where it was spatially. It might seem like you could just runa search for the same thing in a PDA style reader, but I'm dubious that could ever be made as fast as simply turning to a page when you know where it is.
The great thing about digital books is that for times when a computer-style search is called for, you could use a PDA unit to do that - but when you wanted to read a book in a traditional manner without having to worry about a battery source throughout the period of time you use a book (like while travelling) a book full of e-paper would be amazingly useful.
Even better if when you get your hotel room or other destination if you could upload a new book into your e-book from the PDA.
I'm not going to touch the issues you bring up regarding digital books and ownership - all I can say is that companies seem to be too stupid to see an opportunity for tenfold growth in profits to be able to grab on. They could be selling new books in airports for
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even if the electronics to drive a piece of e-paper were somewhat expensive, it wouldn't matter if used ina docking station senario.
Basically, you'd have a book of e-paper which you would hook to a docking station of some sort - that would render all of the e-paper for the book. It could even take a bit (a few minutes) and people wouldn't mind.
You could have a rnage of ebooks with different form factors and lengths. Seperate from that you could have a range of e-book docking stations with different capbilities - some could be more customized to render in different point sizes, have better fonts or support diagrams. You'd only have to buy one docking station but you could have a variety of e-books to write to, as long as they are made as cheaply as possible I think it would all work out well and be pretty affordable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You try placing footnotes on the correct piece of paper with HTML.
You can do them at the end of a document, sure, but HTML isn't precise enough to guarantee that that matches the end of the physical page on all devices. There's a reason publishers use PDFs instead of HTML, y'know...
A wireless HTML browser on e-paper would be cool, yes, but it alone won't replace books. Actually, the other problem that screams out at me here is annotations. From what they're talking about I can't see a clean, simple way to annotate your copy, which means you instantly knock it out for academic books and quite a lot of non-academic, too. Or end up with a situation similar to the old joke about tippex on the monitor...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
You don't need nearly the power of a matrox card. You're not managing 32 million colors, or 3d effects, texture loading, or any of that. Just black and white, a video card to handle epaper would be very simple , very cheap and very small.
I read an article in Scientific American a while back that made a disturbing point: all through the later half of the twentieth century, and all of the twenty-first, the trend has been towards storing data in electronic media instead of paper. The problem is that computer media become obsolete very quickly, so you end up with data stored on tape drives that don't have players made anymore, for example. The question I have is: qhat will historians of the future do when they don't have 3.5 inch floppy drives, or CD-ROM drives, because they've been replaced with newer technology? How will they access our data?
The nice thing about paper, from a historian's point of view, is that anyone can obtain data from an actual dead tree or sheepskin.
I'm the stranger...posting to
But aren't hyperlinks (you know, from the 'H' in HTML) appropriate for footnotes. Just a stupid idea, I suppose.
You're right in that HTML was never intended to be a layout tool although it has been coerced into being one, but IMO, in and of itself HTML can be a very reasonable way to display information. However, footnotes are placed on the same page to allow the user to see them without flipping around the book. If you are using hyperlinks, you get the same effect.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Far worse is the level of revisionism that will be possible a la 1984 (everyone read it if you haven't). Already when I go to MS' web site, I have a helluva time finding information on anything earlier than the current product, and we won't go into how they redefine 'innovation'. (I don't theenk that word means what you theenk it does. -- Princess Bride)
At least paper books can't be changed remotely to display something different than they did last week.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
"E-paper, on the other hand, is a single layer of circuits on plastic. The process of making e-paper is is very different than the highly expensive process of making an lcd screen."
Yes. However, there seems to me to be a lie in this. Actual e-paper display panels will, in practice, be rigid and complicated because of all the transistors and interconnects involved.
LCD displays are difficult to make, not because laying down layers of liquid crystal is difficult, but because the layers must be integrated with transistors. Addressing pixels separately is a bear of a problem. Having simple display cells reduces the complexity of only the element that was already quite simple.
It seems to me that attaining flexibility is also a huge problem. Flexible things achieve flexibility by being alloewed to pull themselves apart internally. Only things that are very thin achieve durability while being flexed.
I don't see how e-paper can be e-paper. I think that, for the forseeable future, "e-paper" will always be "rigid black-and-white display panel in a world that increasingly demands color".
That's where I see the lie. I think the developers of "e-paper" know what I've said here. A usable product is a lot further away than they are implying. Also, it is likely that, by the time e-paper is reduced in overall cost, color LCD panels will be reduced in cost, also.
Bush's education improvements were
Might it be possible to place some kind of electronic grid upon the face of the EAS, so that, by activating any given intersection (similar to a telephone "bar-type" switching network) a "dot" of iron filing might appear? Of course, the resultant picture would be fairly low-res, but it *might* be adequate for print. I think that one could achieve at least 320 * 240 pixels, perhaps similar to an old C64 screen.
I am presuming that the grid would connect out of a conventional serial or parallel port from a conventional computer. Any thoughts on the feasability of this?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.