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."
Cant wait to see the top shelf in that newsagent
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
This is, of course, after The Guardian invested 80 million quid on new, hamburger-format-oriented printing presses. Of the non-e-paper variety!
Oops...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
It's about bloody time. It's hard to imagine, but newspapers will be modular, 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, by thousands of hands. The transition into paying for the content-makers, continues it's eclipse, while content becomes even less brick and mortarish.
is anyone else thinking wallpaper here ???
colour your livingroom to your mood, no more painting...
give room-wide slideshows...
Oh joy. Flashing ads in newspapers. I can't wait.
Oooh! Maybe they can attach a speaker so we can hear what Bill Gates and 75 other people have to say about Windows XP Media Center edition.
My question. How the hell am I going to block popups in my magazines?
...can you squash flies with it?
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
nineteen eighty-four.
How about selling blank screens to customers, then have them download content? I mean, we don't throw away our computer screens at every page update. Does anyone know why this guy seems to think completely backwards?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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.
How old were you when people stopped reading and started watching?
I admit I don't read much anymore except off a monitor, but reading requires thinking. A dog can watch and listen.
On a less serious note, this was already tried on cereal boxes in Minority Report, with mixed customer acceptance.
> scientists working on the screens said they should be available by 2007
Translation: 2025
Now my newpaper will have fucking pop-up ads for pr0n, male enhancement cream, and wieght-loss pills.
Or is the resolution/refresh rate too poor?
...just got alot more interesting
While the Harry Potter style pictures mentioned in the article sound cool, a low power, lightweight ebook reader could conceivably change publishing for the better. Maybe after high end advertising subsidizes the development of the technology enough, someone will release an environmentally conscious magazine format that can be refilled RSS style.
Since the pages only need to be powered when their updated, solar power might not be completely unrealistic. Would definitely face hurdles with the pulping industry . . .
I suspect these screens will have some sort of battery power. How long will that last, how am I supposed to m save a newspaper clip of some important peace of news? How can I be sure that the information doesn't change over time. E.g. there could be an offending but selling headline, but when I try to sue for libel a couple of days later I can't prove it as it by then have changed to something less offending.
What about historical research? Even with ordinary paper/ink based information future generations will probably have much less knowledge of our culture than we have of e.g. the culture of the ancient Rome.
With this kind of technology the historical horizon will move even closer to our own time.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
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.
It looks like at the moment its B&W, but colour is probably quite a quick upgrade. Resolution looks high, but with the electrode approach there will be a tradeoff I'm sure. Since it looks like the aim is a totally printed technology it should be possible to bring the cost right down.
The main market they seem to be targeting is the fast moving packaging market - fast moving so that printed batteries don't wear out. I would guess that they will seriously be looking at those large billboards as well. However, if you really let your imagination go to town there are many more opportunities for a cheap, large scale, printed display technology. When paired with the other devices which can be printed (chips, antenna, batteries, solar cells, keyboards, and flat panel speakers) you have the possibility of really putting computers anywhere and everywhere for the cost of the materials and a bit of printing. Think smart environment that your PAN interacts with as you move through it.
Techie heaven
It has an invisible ink. re-read it after using it, and it will all make sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And this link should take you to the Siemens page about it, which has a photo too.
Looks like the reason they are targeting it at packaging initially is because the images change slowly.
I can't wait for the first remote root hack for one of these ePapers.
Picture it. It's 2013. You're sitting on the Tube on your way to work reading the paper. A hundred other people are doing the same thing. At the other end of the carriage sits a geek with a laptop and some wireless kit. He's tapping away and grinning.
Next thing you know the page contents change.
... All copies of the Times on that carriage just became goatse. All copies of the Sun just became tubgirl. And the Mail? Lemonparty.
Oh, this is going to be fun!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
Seriously, I can see it now: some enterprising young hackers (in the tinkerer sense of the word) are going to hack those flat screens, add a bunch of electronics and a standard VGA/S-Video connector, improve the resolution, write an open-source driver and turn them into the largest high-res black and white screen ever seen. Think humonguous, wall-to-wall X11R6 display for 100 bucks, folks.
... And the next morning, all the newspapers concerned are going to sue the poor schmucks, invoking the DMCA and saying, in effect, that the users have a license to use these screens, but do not really own them.
The original website will be promptly slashdotted to death, 13 seconds after the project is released into the wild.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Not really. The kind of ePaper they're talking about in the article is the kind of ePaper that looks like paper. I'm not even sure why they'd want DRM in such a situation, because after all... where do you plug into a piece of paper?
More to the point, ePaper wouldn't have any new restrictions built into it that regular paper doesn't already have. Wanna copy it? Photocopy it. This isn't new restrictions being put into media, this is having the same exact restrictions we have always had.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
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
Of course, who wouldn't want e-paper? However, there are several problems with it I could imagine:
1. As others have posted, flashing ads are the least I wanted to see in a physical newspaper.
2. DRM issues. I, for one, wouldn't want to pay for information on a per-minute basis without being able to store it.
3. Archivation. Digital storage standards evolve, and so, without a physical copy, archiving old content will be increasingly more expensive and difficult because of keeping up with the latest storage technology. Also, new storage technology may compete and create uncertainty which will prevail (e.g. HD-DVD vs. blu-ray)
4. Information credibility. Most people don't double-check the information they consume, either online or offline, but at least they are generally as smart as to not pay too much attention to most online content. With e-paper, your newspaper essentially becomes an extension of your computer monitor, with all credibility issues attached.
5. Information quality. If everybody can dump their printing presses or never buy them in the first place, internet journalism standards will come to a reputable newspaper near you. That doesn't have to be bad, but in many cases it will be. The internet is regarded as pearls in an ocean of shit, and when entrance barriers to creating newspapers are lowered to the point where one only needs a computer with internet access, then the relative modest creek of shit that is today's print media just might turn into the same ocean.
The upside to all this is that e-paper probably won't take off as long as it isn't as cheap as and more fragile than carbon paper (for example, can you roll up e-paper to a tight cylinder and swat flies without damaging it?), because if it tries to compete with dead trees, it has to be as expendable and durable as them.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
"We think that at the moment the screens will appear first in more expensive magazines in the form of high-impact adverts. But as the price sinks we expect them to appear in papers as well, possibly as a really attention-grabbing front page."
Newspapers and magazines, and any print media company for that matter, are all struggling with technology. Proprietary technology is the norm. There is rarely anything standard between one and the next. The advances in printing technology notwithstanding, no publisher could implement this without the help of a third party. It is extremely doubtful that we will ever see anything like this on a news shelf coming directly from even the "more expensive magazines." They are looking to reduce their distribution costs, which may be upwards of 50-70% of the total, not increase them.
The Admin and the Engineer
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
Wealthy individuals used to (still do?) have servants iron their newspapers to set the ink so that the newspaper wouldn't soil their clothing. If this new technology gets used in newspapers for advertising, people will have to start microwaving their newspapers in order to shut off the annoying flash ads.
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.
Real size porn.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
You muggles get excited over the oddest things...
Yes - Neal Stephenson really got into his nano-driven paper in Diamond Age.
One of the things that stuck with me from that book was the individualized newspapers the gentlemen of his neo-Victorian society read in the morning, and how the editions became more and more similar the higher up in the hierarchy of power the reader was.
"We are no longer content to stimulated only by flashing internet and TV ads," said Mark Vinciento, president of the World Association of Epileptics. "With this new technology, we step into a brave new world where merely walking past a news stand can induce fantastic, life-threatening seizures."
The flurry of flash photography following Vinciento's statements caused him to collapse twitching from his podium, to the enthusiastic applause from the onlooking crowd.
"He likes it," said Jane Fitzgerol, association secretary, "why do you think he took the job?"