Slashdot Mirror
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...
...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.
It better leave ink on my thumbs, and potty train my puppy!
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..
Nope, you won't see those (monetary, at least) savings at all. Why not? Because like all "Intellectual Property" these days, your books will be licensed, not bought. How cheap are CD's to make? How much do they cost to buy? The same will be true for books.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
"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 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.
Cool. I can tell the PHB to turn it upside down and shake to re-boot Windows, right?
:-P
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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 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
how much does your morning coffee "cost," and how much is the price?
At least when I buy my coffee, I own it.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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.
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.