Slashdot Mirror
ePaper To Be Used For Newspapers and Magazines
rustbear writes "The Guardian reports that cheap, paper-thin TV screens that can be used in newspapers and magazines have been unveiled by German electronics giant Siemens. The firm says the low production costs could see the magazine shelves in newsagents come alive with moving images vying for the customers' attention as they move along the aisle. The Siemens spokesman said that one square metre of the material costs around £30, and scientists working on the screens said they should be available by 2007."
From TFA: These could be short film clips or flash animations like those found on the internet.
The internet, being the innovative medium that it is, has pioneered the annoying distracting ads amongst mediocre content. Now we will be able to get moving ads in newspapers too. Are we also going to get Bonzi Buddy, and that money tree thing too? Put a little piezo-electric device in the newspaper (think the musical birthday cards), and we could even recreate things like those Jamster ads. The possibilities are endless!
nineteen eighty-four.
Making the screen paper thin doesn't solve the rest of the problem : getting images on the screen. How is a magazine going to contain the power supply en processor needed to actually display something on the screen? More detail in the article would have been helpfull, now it just sounds like some scifi hype story.
... and they will self-destruct after you read them once. Welcome to the DRM world!
Also, Stallman's "Right to Read" may be sadly so true...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I can't think of a situation where an eNewsPaper would require more than one page of ePaper... isn't that the whole idea?
How about applying that to product packaging? Movies could have the trailer on the back, games a few seconds of gameplay footage. Instead of a TV playing those ad videos for some stuff it could be printed right on the back.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I think advertisers must read Slashdot - not long ago people were saying how "if I could block newspaper ads, I would," and now they're releasing Flash based ads in newspapers.... Because they can!
Anonymous Coward
Take the batteries out of them.
These screens sound more and more like the novelty cards, and will need a switch on the page otherwise the batteries will flatten before you buy them.
So... just wait a couple of hours with the page open, and then carefully start hacking.
I think you could have a usable display soon afterwards.
One other thing, I went looking at their methods and this paper is not the same as e-ink, they say on the website (link below) it doesn't hold its display without power.
(On the Siemens
website, they talk more about it, the method they are using involves electrochromic substances, and there is an example of one such film being built here)
liqbase
True, but that's exactly why I think this will ultimately fail. They will try to control it to that extent and people won't go for it. So then they will try to shove it down everyone's throats. But others will produce freeware or even open source alternatives, and the more they try to shove their ePaper down out throats, the more those free or open source alternatives will catch on. Or maybe the ePaper won't catch on much at all - wasn't the wma hyped to completely replace the mp3?
Now if only there was an open souce alternative to the pdf and Acrobat Pro.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Does anyone know why this guy seems to think completely backwards?
He works for the company that will be selling the screens, and you're wondering why he wants to sell as many as possible?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You have to remember that this technology will not result in anything resembling your highly advanced ebook-readers with a lot of memory, rechargable batteries and wifi. Atleast not in 2007 and propably not in 10 years either. Instead these will only have as little memory as needed to show something like an animation or a scrolling textmessage. They will have batteries built to last only as long as you would want to keep a newspaper, milkbox or whatever they are on. And they will not be reprogramable from the outside teh overhead for this is to costy. What you want you can get today already, I have hear a company called Palm makes pretty nice ones.
Besides these are soupposed to be really really cheap. So where do you think the money is? Selling one device to every customer or selling one device every day to every customer?
Think about what you said in your first paragraph - "only the front page would be used"... actually you'd only need a single page of ePaper anyway...!
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
While there are a lot of things you could do with a slow-refresh display device at this price point, such as animated vehicle paint, billboards, constructing a video dance-mat 300ft wide to play pacman 'for real' and making disneyland look even more like a bad acid trip, producing a newspaper that sells for less than the price of a hardcover book isn't one of them.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
A digital newspaper can be subjected to revision the same way those Soviet Party photos were doctored.
One day something is in the paper, the next day there is no mention of it in the same exact edition.
With the way government is intruding on PC hardware why would digital paper be an exception?
To broaden your point a bit: do we need more moving pictures? I'm not advocating against the technology, just saying that I see enough images moving about daily as it is.
With TV and the internet, there are plenty of videos and animations to take in with, or as part of your information diet. The permanence and patience of newspapers and magazines is a nice diversion from the visual bombardment of those other mediums.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
"... dynamic, constantly updating. Don't judge a book by it's cover: especially since it was something else five minutes ago. Some error in publication? It's been recorrected. Information becomes a wiki, constantly edited..."
There's something to be said for permanence. Even if an event is misreported, it is not without value: it shows us what people were saying and/or thought about the event at the time. We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, and getting into the habit of erasing those mistakes is a very bad idea.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
This is just gonna kill the scrap book industry.
What will we line our bird cages with?
I don't get it -- the technology will be used initially only on the front page? It's electronic and writable - why is there more than 1 page? And if there's only 1 page, why does it need to be paper-thin?
If this is just like paper, there is no UI. That means there is no way to STOP the stupid flash animation from looping? That would be torture - imagine trying to read an article with a never-ending animated dancing monkey in your (not so peripheral) field of view.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
But what about the cost/bulk of the supporting electronics? Even if the screen costs $0.10 to put on a box, the electronics to play the video would certainly add much much more. That isn't economical for disposable distribution.
MadCow
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Note the line "To date, the engineers have been using silicon switching elements to control the device. The objective now is to use a printing process to manufacture the entire display, including the appropriate control electronics, from conductive and semiconducting plastics." The idea of making semiconductor arrays in a printing press has been around for years, but nobody has done it successfullyin production. Siemens hasn't done it either. They're still making the substrate for this in a wafer fab, and it's a big chip. So this is still an expensive technology. It might get cheap, but we've heard that claim before about "e-paper" type technologies.
The "printing semiconductors" idea has been applied to solar cells. There are plenty of announcements of breakthroughs in this area, but somehow, nobody actually seems to be shipping product.
So this requires another breakthrough, and in an area where there have been few successes. It's not here yet.