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Electronic Paper Plant to be Built in Germany
Aqua_boy17 writes "BBC News is reporting today that Cambridge based firm PlasticLogic is set to build the world's first manufacturing facility dedicated to producing plastic circuits. In particular the company is focused on developing flexible plastic circuits that cost much less than silicon and would soon enable electronic paper devices that could be used to store large amounts of text and other data. The company has secured $100 million in venture capital and is set to build its first facility in Dresden, Germany. Construction of the facility should be completed by 2008 according to the article. Industry experts expect market demand for this technology to approach $30 billion by the year 2015."
The summary contradicts the headline :-S
what's a picture worth now? I can't keep track...
Have technologists made that wonderful electronic paper where you can store your entire porn collection on one sheet?
Recently, I was viewing a TV program reviewing a number of cell phones (which are the current craze in India). And their findings was in terms of cost effectiveness and design, the Motorola MotoFone F3 was their choice. This cellphone is sold for just around $25. And how did they cut the cost so much ?
Enter their unique display which uses Electronic paper which is developed by the US based E-Link. This cell phone doesn't need power to constantly display an image on the screen. It only needs a little charge when the text (or whatever) needs to be changed. The display stays on even when the battery is pulled out! And more over it is a beautiful phone sleek and thin.
I believe more and more gadgets are going to be manufactured using this new technology. Sony has already released its e-book reader which has the same effects of reading a real book. So PlasticLogic the company is on to a good thing.
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I already store my entire porn collection on one sheet. Well, 1/2 actually.
An electronic paper Airplane!
Do you have any idea how many millions of electronic trees are going to die to feed this plant???!
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Although I never read the information in that format since I can rely on copies that are kept elsewhere.
I know a few people, myself included who dislike reading e-books due to the nature of the screen. Also it's not easy to curl up with a good e-book on a computer (laptops are too bulky and pocket pc screens are too small)
If this works and can link with eInk screens to create an easily held, clearly visible book format then I'd be happy to switch away from the dead-tree format.
And we'd save a few trees along the way
ACK NAK RST
This may be a tad off topic, but I still think it's interesting to imagine the effect on style and design ultra-cheap electronic paper could have. Remember the breakfast Tom Cruise had in Minority Report, where a cartoon played on his box of cereals?
If price drops enough, this may lead to inventions such as memory-cards with previews of the content showing right on the card, elecronic labels right in store shelves, changing walls in buildings, floors with directional arrows flying around, guiding you in unfamiliar places, electronic wallpaper for your appartment... add a few giftet artists to all this potential, and I'm sure the world would never look the same again (:
More and more, I think Clarke's third law holds true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
Of course the real problem with eReaders is the cost; even these "cheap" new Sony ones still cost around $450.
I thought the world wanted to become less dependent on oil and not more dependent?
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Electronic paper is a display device, not storage.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, East Anglia. There must be something about those freezing cold winters that encourages people to stay indoors and invent things.
Pining for the fjords
There's this thing that's still popular... NEWS PAPER. Yea, imagine just downloading the days news paper so you can read it wherever you go on a few pieces of paper. it's to take a bookcase and fit it into a filing cabinet. They are working to turn this into something with a refresh rate fast enough for video... Image unrolling your monitor, or putting this stuff on your wall so you can watch movies on it... imagine the porn, or changing the wallpaper in your house with a touch of a button. There are lots of things outside of the computer that could be improved by it. Billboards, shit like that.
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." - Voltaire
You're crazy! Electronic paper doesn't grow on trees!
add a few giftet artists to all this potential, and I'm sure the world would never look the same again (:
Yes, I can imagine how it's going to be: World's Worst Website. Walk trough Walmart low price products will be a unforgettable experience.
My city: Barcelona.
I look forward to reading Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" on that material.
If the content of electronic paper could be changed remotely, it would be the ultimate cheating method for written tests :)
....and I can't wait for the headaches I'm going to suffer when people start trying to fax me electronic paper documents at work.
Make America grate again!
"Gulfstream" is an executive jet. The "Gulf stream" runs down the West side of the country (the side I now very sensibly live on...) Cambridge is on the East side (the side I grew up on.) I can assure you from in-depth personal experience over a number of years that Cambridge, East Anglia has cold winters.
Pining for the fjords
But will this new electronic paper combust at 451F like the old stuff? Or will the thought police simply be able to turn off electronic paper which displays ideas they don't like? ;-)
Well that's going to make the whole "Ihre Papiere, bitte!" question a bit difficult to answer, no?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
This must be the beginning of the Digitial Dark Age they always warned us about. All of our information will be moved to electronic devices and archaelogists in 10,000 years will think we all lived in caves and hunted deer.
What we need is a way to store all of our information in a stone computer that is powered by a volcano or even better, the sun.
Fax?
We stopped using that 5 years ago
This is blinging
There are still people like me that still found unpleasant reading articles or books from pdf files on your LCD (or anything with light on the back). What they propose is a display that looks like paper. I was recently in a seminar from e-link and I found it really nice.
Try look for the Sony Reader. They are recently going with color screens that look amazing as portraits and the power consumption is really low.
i can preprogram my cheat sheets onto a blank sheet of paper
The state of eBooks has been the same since the year 2000. It's never been a technology issue. I'm glad your new Sony is nice, and I'm sure it's a significant improvement over the Rocket eBook, but the Rocket eBook is more than good enough.
The problem is, was, and for the foreseeable future will be, as you say, "they REALLY need more books in their bookstore." (By the way, how are those books priced? There is also a problem with overpricing and greed. Circa 2000-2001 I had numerous conversations with interested onlookers about my Rocket eBook and there was always mounting interest until they said "What do the books cost?" I'd answer "Same as hardbounds for books that aren't in paper, otherwise same as a paperback." Their jaw would drop in disbelief and that would be the end of the conversation).
But it wasn't the price. It was lack of titles. An electronic bookstore with a thousand titles may give the impression of plentitude, but it's less than a good airport bookstore and it doesn't even compare to a plain old brick-and-mortar mall bookstore.
At one time, I went over the list of books chosen for Oprah's book club. At the time there were about forty titles. Something like thirty of them were available as audiobooks, yet only about six were available as eBooks in any format whatsoever. For no eBook format were more than three or four of them available.
There are numerous ways of reading eBooks that are good enough to provide a comfortable, enjoyable, "ludic" reading experience, but until you can buy the books you want at a reasonable price, it ain't gonna happen.
I own approximately $300 worth of content I purchased for my Rocket eBook which is locked down to the particular serial number of my physical device. Nuvomedia and Gemstar are long gone, the servers are shut down, there's no customer service available, the battery life on my device is now down to a couple of hours... and when the device fails I'll be the proud possessor of expensive content which is completely inaccessible to me.
I hope you have better luck with your Sony.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Electronic Paper Plant to be Built in Germany"
So, is this an electronic plant that makes paper, or a plant that makes electric paper?
Q: How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?
A: Two: one to decide what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The point of this will be downloading magazines and your daily paper via wifi while you're on the bus (with near zero distribution costs, most papers could go free since the ads will make them more money), and having your favorite reference materials at hand, plus a book or two would be a real boon. I'd probably even start to read again away from the computer.
The thing is, the cost of content will have to drop. If I no longer get a physical copy, I shouldn't have to pay for the printing process, and all the overhead that implies. Lower prices might well mean a higher readership because more people would buy more books if they were cheaper and they had the time to read more than they currently do. Well known authors wouldn't have to go to a publisher anymore. They'd write their book, pay an editor out of pocket, and Amazon will let you sell a book download for 3-5 bucks, and take 2 or 3 dollars for themselves. Amazon could host a million books in the size of a small data center, and each book would pay for itself in Amazon's eyes in the first 10 copies. A hundred thousand in sales would be a quarter of a million in profit for the author. Dozens of niche authors would come out of the woodwork because the cost of self publishing would drop through the floor, and we would see an American Idol type of situation in literature, because there are all kinds of talent out waiting to be found. Further, in episodic type literature, an author might even let you download the first 2 books of a series to entice you to read books 3-4 after the first couple have been out a few years, since your downloading the first two books would cost him nothing. Hopefully, this sort of situation would yield higher quality material as well, since the author's current and ongoing sales outlook would depend directly on the number of units sold instead of getting a large contract up front before the book is even written.
Obviously, I've been looking forward to electronic paper for a while now. Just a while longer until it's really affordable.
*sigh* Ya know, I knew no matter how carefully I worded and proofread this some grammar nazi would get me for something. So as a public service to Slashdot readers around the world I'm fixing the title:
:p
"Electronic Paper Plant to be Grown in Germany"
There, happy now?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
electronic circuits (without LEDs) don't work as displays, displays like plasmas, LCDs, and CRTs work as displays. And it specifically says "electronic paper devices that could be used to store large amounts of text and other data" so like I said, they can't seem to decide what it does...but it's gonna be big! lol
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
In theory, that works beautifully. In practice, look at what's happened now that we no longer have to pay for the CD manufacturing process. Yes, there's been some improvement, but the situation is far from what anybody would call ideal. Granted, it's not a perfect analogy, but you see what I'm getting at. I'll be among the first to rejoice, if everything goes as you predict. But I'm not confident that it will.
I've heard many good things about Baen and I'm sure they're admirable, but unfortunately they are not the company that publishes the books of Barbara Kingsolver, or Mark Kurlansky, or Erik Larson, or Elizabeth George...
I can name any particular song I'm interested in that there's at least a 90% chance the iTunes Music Store will have it. Not just Ashlee Simpson, either. I was watching the Sopranos, and an Artie Shaw tune called "Comes Love" is playing in the background, and I think "hmmm... that's interesting..." and four minutes and $0.99 later I had it. Ten years ago I would have had to drive half an hour to Tower Records, shuffled through the bin for Artie Shaw CD's, and had to pay $13.95 to get the one song I wanted and fifteen others I was only marginally interested in.
That's why I buy music electronically, even if it doesn't have the little CD booklet, or the LP album art, or whatever.
But I can name any particular book I'm interested in reading, and even during the period when Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, and Gemstar's own store were all selling Gemstar-format eBooks, there was probably less than a 10% chance that it was available.
Baen can't do it by themselves. Enough of the book publishers need to get on board to create a store comparable to iTunes.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
One idea would be to turn the business model of book selling on it's head.
Cheap downloads of titles for you're e-reader, then if you really like a book you'd go and buy the hardback version to put on you book-shelves.
Or another way would be like DVDs with 'presentation' sets, you could sell books on a memory stick in a cute little box, the user just plugs the memory stick into the side of thier e-reader and transfers the book onto it.
Totally agree though that the thing that's most likely to make or break the e-reader is not the technology, but the content that's available
/usr/bin/loonie
The only problem I have this system is that publishers usually act as a detriment to a lot of mediocre "talent" out there.
With this mechanism, you would also have a lot of noise:signal ratio, which would be kind of sucky.
And while free-market may determine who comes out on top, do remember that most people are not particularly bright and would much rather read brain dead stuff than something that makes them think, analyse and question.
That is what worries me. Finding the wheat from the chaff would be hard.
Electronic paper has a color-changing surface that resembles paper. I suppose the storage would refer to the fact that you'd need only one sheet of that "paper" to display however many pages of text you want. Since it's usually used on devices meant to display books it would probably come with some form of mass storage to store the books. Knowing journalists and marketin that's probably what they meant.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.