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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 company has secured $100 million in venture capital and is set to build its first facility in Dresden, Germany
:-)
Yep, looks like a contradiction to me. You're 100% wrong
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.
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
As the owner of one I really couldn't be happier with the device itself(the software that came with it is another story). I recently did a trans-atlantic flight and the device was a hell of a lot easier to take with me than even one book, let alone 2 or 3. Sharp display, and very readable text.
Sony's software sucks, but there are plenty of ways to get around having to use it, and they REALLY need more books in their bookstore. BTW, it costs $350USD.
Monstar L
Yeah the cost is what puts me off eReader (although I'm not sure if they're even available in my neck of the woods yet).
If the reader could be made available relatively cheaply say $100USD (around $130 NZD atm) then titles could be sold at current market rates - eventually as the technology becomes more widespread then even title prices would drop
ACK NAK RST
Electronic paper is a display device, not storage.
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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
I, too, have one of the new Sony e-book readers (QReader) and I can say the screen is simply outstanding for book reading. The screen is as easy on the eyes as reading on regular paper. It is a vast improvement over the PDAs I've used in the past for e-book reading.
Due to the backlight, I've found that using a PDA for e-book reading becomes hard on the eyes after several minutes, plus the size of the screen is a disadvantage when reading e-books. Besides the screen quality of the QReader, another advantage is that the screen is larger than a standard-paperback-book page, allowing you to put a large amount of text on a single screen.
Although the $350 price tag seems a bit high, it is the same price range as some PDAs, and some Compressed Digital Audio players like the iPod. Two of the less-noticed features of the Sony QReader is that it can also display pictures and play MP3 and AAC files (I think by AAC files it means AAC files without the Apple DRM attached). I think that, like with the iPod, more players will appear and the price will drop in time.
The battery life on the device is terrific. I've been using mine every day for about two months and I've only had to charge it (meaning the battery was near empty) one time. Often, the charge the device receives when connected to the computer gives you a day or two of use. I've found that the battery life is so long that I don't worry about leaving the device on by mistake since it will turn it will automatically turn itself off after an hour.
I agree that the desktop software and the QReader could use improvement (such as the an automatic method of syncing between the computer and the reader, and the ability to use playlists when playing MP3 files) but it is functional and fairly easy to use, it just requires you to manually move the files from the computer to the reader. But this is the first version of both the reader and the software and I'm sure that it will be improved in future versions.
One of the best features of the reader, and the reason that I bought one, is that I can put my own content (such as my address book) on the reader: I'm not limited to what I purchase from the Sony Connect Store. In addition to the Sony e-book format it supports the following formats: PDF, text, and RTF. One of the problems I've had with e-book readers in the past is that the displayed formatting tends to be unpredictable (such as a blank line between the paragraphs in the source document disappearing when displayed on the reader). With the Sony QReader, the standard formatting of my documents (such as bold, underline, line spacing, indents) is predictablity rendered on my reader.
Returning to my original point, I've been very pleased with the QReader. It was good buy for me. Thanks for reading.
I assume you mean the plastic used to build e-readers.
But imagine if e-readers take over. Less newspapers and books. Less logging and distribution of paper products - daily newspapers and magazines. Shipments from Amazon.com. Less factories set to refine paper and recycle it (our biggest export to China is used paper so they can print their newspapers). Less printers to print crap. Less storage cabinets to store paperwork. Less oil and other materials used all around.
I also imagine companies like Amazon.com should be eager to get on the ebook boat early on - they rather missed the chance to have an iTunes like store even though they sell CDs. The writing is on the wall for companies whose business model revolves soley around shipping data on a physical medium - like Netflix. They'll be viable for another 15 years no doubt - but after that, if they haven't set themselves up as the goto place for electronic distribution of the same products early on, they'll won't survive IMO.
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? ;-)
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.
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.
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Electronic paper is not made of paper. It's a marketing term for flexible displays made from charged two-colour particles that can be realigned. Electronic paper is infact (confusingly for you) made from plastic. So there is no contridiction in the title, it is an electronic plastic plant that will be used to make "electronic paper".
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"Electronic Paper Plant to be Built in Germany"
So, is this an electronic plant that makes paper, or a plant that makes electric paper?
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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.
What the summary is missing is that the polymer electronics built in this factory will be laminated to electrophoretic imaging materials made by E Ink Corporation to form flexible electronic paper displays. Thus, the final output of the factory will indeed be electronic paper.
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
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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.
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.