Electronic Paper Makes Reading a More Diverse & Flexible Experience

Researchers at MIT have been working for years now on a wide range of variations on the changeable visual text formats that might replace many of the backlit screens we now use to read and interact with electronic documents. ‘Electronic paper’ refers to a number of these technologies, able to reproduce encrypted files in visual text form, as if they were computer monitors, some touted as having “the look and feel” of real paper.

The benefits of this advance are various:

1. paper is an ancient technology whose ease of use is difficult to match, one of the pillars of civilization;
2. electronic paper may help eliminate the strain on forest environments that comes from increasing consumption of paper worldwide;
3. the texture of paper makes viewing a document less challenging to the eyes;
4. adding touch-response makes it possible to read “on-screen” with the feeling of flipping pages, visually and physically;
5. advances in storage capacity mean being able to store huge amounts of readable text and images in a very small space

The potential for streamlined storage and portability of large amounts of reading material is one of the most important functions of the e-paper phenomenon. The ability to not only store thousands of books, or hundreds of magazines with full-color imagery, or to view video or even browse the world wide web, from a paper-thin device, makes exploiting the resources of the information age a far more comfortable experience for the everyday commuter, or news reader.

At MIT’s Electronic Paper project, the fundamental challenge regarding e-paper is stated as follows:

Books with printed pages are unique in that they embody the simultaneous, high-resolution display of hundreds of pages of information. The representation of information on a large number of physical pages, which may be physically turned and written on, constitutes a highly preferred means of information interaction.

A key element in the quest for a less massive, but more flexible format for text reading, i.e. electronic paper, follows: “An obvious disadvantage of the printed page, however, is its immutability once typeset.” This is a major issue when relating to informaton that is not necessarily transcendent or in itself immutable, and commercial applications, as well as everyday news and information uses for paper, make it attractive to create an alternative that is precisely mutable, or rather, programmable, modifiable, able to be updated when the information itself has changed.

MIT’s Technology Review explains the hardware that makes e-paper work, in devices like Amazon.com’s ‘Kindle’ reader:

At the front of the screen is a layer of transparent electrodes. Below it are millions of microcapsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles, and below them is a layer of nearly a million more electrodes. A negative charge on one of these bottom electrodes pushes black particles to the top, and a positive charge does the same with the white ones. Each microcapsule acts as a pixel that can thus be made to appear black, white, or gray.

The gist is to achieve ease of use, visual stability, paper-like quality, and high-resolution text imaging, in a device that allows for interactive navigability and mass storage. Amazon.com has added a wireless download functionality that is designed to promote spontaneous purchase and on-the-spot access to e-paper-ready e-books sold through its store.

In October 2005, Sentido.tv reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, “told a London audience that the static format of paper would be replaced by paper-thin digital wireless devices which would be constantly downloading huge amounts of information from the internet. He predicted we would all be connected all the time, within 10 years.” Electronic paper provides some brave new frontiers for niche media to grow their markets exponentially, with new editorial methods and distribution mechanisms never before possible.

If e-paper and wireless internet meet in the coming process of hyper-convergence of media, we will find that text is at once ‘liberated’ and ‘filtered’, and we will need to implement mechanisms that ensure consumers have as much access, on a permanent and private basis, to information as with the standard purchase of a book, which sits comfortably in one’s home, in one’s private space.

This issue of privacy is vital to the entire question of electronic information, because of the fact that a press that is free to produce and distribute according to its own editorial choices tends to produce far more reliable information and helps protect the rights of individuals. A lack of privacy in the media sphere, by contrast, would have a chilling effect on what sorts of content some major media outlets would be willing to provide.

The standard for e-paper should also be maximum possible user-enabled modification (a standard that is the rule in paper publishing: readers can write, cross out, highlight, rewrite and reproduce section by section, by hand, and at will, what is meaningful to them, by their own standards, and without paying a licensing fee). The problem of technical specifications as minimum requirements for accessing information continues to be a nuisance in computing and web-browsing, but would be far more severe if there is a massive migration of text publishing from printed pages to e-paper.

Customization is essential to the long-term success of e-paper as a new, beneficial medium for authors, publishers, web-content providers, bloggers and readers alike. E-paper essentially constitutes an event horizon after which information may be fundamentally changed and questions of accessibility, credibility and longevity (conservation of format and re-accessibility), become central to the question of informational freedoms.

• MIT: “Electronic Paper project”
• E Ink Corporation: “Lower Power, Electronic Paper Displays” [commercial site]
• MIT Technology Review: “Amazon Kindle: The online giant hopes it’s created the ipod of digital books”
• eMedia Wire: “Self Published Book Achieves Top 1 Percent Sales Rank at Amazon.com’s Kindle Book Store”
  
• Washington Square News: “New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn’t replace my old book” [opinion]
• Sentido.tv: “GATES ANNOUNCES PLANS TO REPLACE PAPER WITH SILICON”