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Electronic Paper Advances
ke4roh writes "Electronic paper comes a step closer," says a Reuters article today. The paper, made by E-ink bends and makes for a higher contrast display, perhaps for e-books and cell phones. It reminds me of Jim Willard's Paper Computer, but their web site is history. Slashdot previously discussed color electronic paper."
My fav quote from one of my fav business men, Mr. Dyson: "A paperless office is about as likely as a paperless toilet." ;-)
always makes me chuckle...
Dave
Whatever happened to print on demand publishing. It seemed to be a promising technology, much more promising than "epaper" but I can't find anyone using it anywhere.
It seems like it would be a sweet deal for publishers and book sellers by cutting out a major cost source: the distributor. You go to a bookstore, find a paperback you like and take it to the counter. While you are paying for it, your copy is being printed in the back room. It's spit out onto the counter and the copy you picked up from the shelf is put back. This would be great to keep from being overstocked in a pulp-fiction title or technology book past its useful life.
Digital copiers (even digital color copiers) are not expensive anymore, so I just don't get why we don't see this.
For the same reasons, I don't understand why retailers have stacks of CDs in bins. Just have a dupe machine in the back room with a digital color copier for the liner notes. While you are paying for your CD it's being created in the back room. Again, you cut a major expense by knocking out the distributor.
I thought the Internet was supposed to enable exactly these types of situations, but they are no where to be seen.
What's up with that?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I do wonder about the power supply though. Seeing that I can barely get a day's worth of stand-by on my cell phone with a tiny text screen it seems keep these things powered up might require an equally revolutionary energy store.
The thing to remember when talking about e-ink is that power will not be needed to keep information displayed. Power will be required for the wireless data reception, and for changing what is displayed, but various e-ink technologies that have been mentioned all have means of showing information that are not energy intensive.
I'm not sure offhand exactly how it works, but usually involves some sort of small particle or such with, say, black on one side, and white on the other, and they are rotated to show a particular pattern of 'pixels', and then take no energy to remain in that pattern.
This is one of the big wins of e-ink - along with the fact that done properly, it should look little different from plain old paper. (though it is definitely not there yet)
If you equipped an 'e-ink newspaper' with the ability for the user to query for updates, instead of the paper constantly checking a wireless frequency, then power consumption could be quite minimal.
I do look forward to fully interactive e-ink, so that, say, you could have a notebook with e-ink paper, you jot down notes with a stylus, the paper shows the proper marks so it feels just like regular writing, but with the options to save notes, recall them later, and memory that allows one notebook to keep the information that a whole stack of real notebooks couldn't hold. Can you imagine having an e-ink journal, for example, that could hold a lifetime's worth of data in it, so you could recall anything you've ever written/drawn on the e-ink pages?
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
E ink homepage
E-Ink boost for mobile electronic reading
E-paper moves a step nearer
E-Paper Here Sooner Than You Think
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
A friend tells me they already have something like it in Japan. He has several shopping cards that keep track of "points" you have. They are made of laminated paper, and are flexable. When you use it, the numbers written on the paper change to reflect your "point" balance.
I havn't seem it for myself though.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still haven't seen an ebook interface that is as intuitive as a real book or paper. It's pretty easy to see a paperclip (or whatever) in the top of a book. Having to press a few buttons to "mark" a place, then press a few more buttons to get back to that place is a PITA.
I wonder if it would really require such a PITA to deal with this. You read the page that you were last reading.... nothing else in the way. When you need the next page hit the page + button.
And the difficulty of moving around books and papers is greatly exaggerated.
I think the point made was more about the difficulty in composting/landfilling/recycling the old editions.
One, it's more difficult than "just" sending a new graphic to them. How do you get the graphic there? Two, keeping an e-paper sign lit up costs a lot more in electricity than paper-paper.
I believe the system is designed to include wireless networking. Anyplace that would have sufficient people moving past to warrant advertising should definitely by the time this is implemented have WiFi in abundance.
Whoopdy-freaking-do. If that's a problem, you have bigger problems.
This is such an intelligent point I had to say something. Like perhaps the Banks would offer access to a complete statement and cancelled checks etc... all on the card itself.... 'the portal to your financial world' the point being that the options boggle the imagination for a lot of people. Some would rather shoot it down.
It's called "recycling". Which is much easier to do with paper than electronics.
How much do you know about recycling? Do you realize the amount of energy that must be put into the recycling process is enormous. Very little recycled material actually gets back into the flow of goods as a lot is landfilled and we see no problem with just cooking another batch of plastics out of oil. The use of this type of paper would make buying your newspaper pointless... you bought the newspaper and it updates every morning with the new edition and every evening with the late edition. You would not need to produce another piece until yours broke. Or the new model came out with the chrome finish and the ipod interface design. While you find the arguments aren't compelling. I would like nothing more than to see people finally realize they can have a paperless office. Unless you are legally obligated to the SEC or some other regulatory agency to keep hard-copies lying around, why waste the trees? Now if we could just start using hemp for paper the argument gets quite different.... we'll save that one for another time.
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