e-Paper

‘New York Times will publish the last written newspaper in 2018’. Dick Brass, vice-president in the department of technical development at Microsoft, predicted the end of hard copy paper at the ‘e-book world’ conference last November.

It looks like that e-paper, which is under development, will replace the existing print media, such as book, newspaper, and magazine. e-Paper can be carried around like a rolled stationary because it feels like paper. It is a revolutionary technique which one can repeatedly write and rewrite hundreds and thousand times.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) recently reported that the e-paper development project team (Bell Institute & E Ink) created the archetype of e-paper by putting e-ink, which changes from black and white, into the 0.5 mm size of plastic transistor.

Newly created e-paper can express only the big the latters due to the low distinction capacity. However, Piere Wellchius of Bell Institute is confident that e-paper, which has 100 dot distinction capacity per inch, will be developed within 3-5 years. With this development, it becomes possible to read newspaper and book through e-paper.

How will book that is made of e-paper look like? According to ‘Technology Review’ (March), published by MIT, it is expected that book made of e-paper will look as same as the book which is a binding of hundreds of papers.

However, electric circuit, wireless data-port, memory, and electric pencil are hidden in the edge of the e-paper book. The number of books which this e-paper book can download from the internet is over thousand. When user writes down ‘Charles Darwin’ with electric pencil, the title of the books like ‘On the Origin of Species’ and ‘Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle’ comes up. When one click on the title, the content of the book is printed immediately into the hundred pages of e-paper.

The future newspaper that is made of e-paper is already designed by Robert Steinberg, chief Design Strategy Team of IBM.

This paper is made of 16 page e-paper, which is a little shorter than the existing newspaper. The only difference is that battery, big memory chip, wire & wireless data-port, and button are attached in the edge of the newspaper. If one pushes the button, the economy section changes into sports section and one can read the various newspaper at the same time.

The introduction of e-paper books and newspaper are expected to bring a tremendous change in printing culture.

Nick Shariton of Xerox Palo Alto Research Institute, which developed the e-ink in the 1970s, said ‘Because no cost will be charged for paper, printing, distribution in publishing e-paper books and newspaper, anybody can have one’s own library. Therefore, publishing companies will disappear and the author and the editor will have a larger share of the profits from the book selling income’.

e-Paper is superior to the existing screen or LCD screen in many ways. LCD screen strains the eyes due to its flickering lights and the flat picture is best viewed only from the front.

On the contrary, e-paper has exact same effect of reading letters in the real world since has clear black and white contrast and it causes no eye-fatigue. e-Paper can be folded and unfolded like real paper and has only one thousandth of LCD electricity consumption.

dongho@donga.com