When Gutenberg set his first lines of moveable type, he probably thought, “Well, this is it.” Light-years advanced from silent monks scribbling texts to infinity, Herr Gutenberg most likely imagined his moveable type books as the apex of printing technology. Of course, there is no apex to technology. With images of Harry Potter and The Daily Prophet in their heads, today’s tech monks have given paper an electronic makeover.
E-paper technology gives the look, feel and readability of actual ink and paper because it uses actual ink. Each pixel of a standard e-paper display is a magnetized disc, with one side being black and the other white. Run an electric current through the pixels and you can flip from white to black and vise versa. Unlike current LCD displays, e-paper only uses power to flip the pixels as an e-page turns, meaning not only is e-paper eminently readable, but also energy efficient.
E-readers (handheld devices which display e-books) have long been heralded as “book killers,” with tech wizards expecting Muggles to exchange their books for bits and bytes. Amazon.com’s Kindle is touted as the greatest of its kind. The Kindle offers a six-inch e-paper display and a plethora of available titles, making it an excellent gadget for readers-on-the-go. However, the Kindle’s price ($400 for the unit and $10 per book), lack of PDF functionality and a tendency to accidentally flip handfuls of pages sour some consumers. On the other hand, user reviews at Cnet and Amazon.com glow with praise and demand currently surpasses supply.
E-paper isn’t just about books, though. Polymer Vision, a Dutch tech firm, will soon release its Readius mobile phone. The phone comes with an extendable e-paper screen which, when reading PDFs, online news or text messages, can fold out to a five inch display. Market gurus see the Readius as a torrid love child between an iPhone and a Kindle, and expect it to cut into the profits of both.
And in a revelation that would make Harry Potter shout “Holy Muggle Magic,” LG-Phillips recently announced production plans for a full color 14-inch e-paper display. Their proposed device works much the same as black and white e-paper, except with more pixels and many more colors (16.4 million colors, to be exact). The possibilities for a full-color e-paper include smart ID cards, which would display multiple pictures of a person and the Harry Potter style ‘magic photo’ which animates and moves. Made of durable and bendable polymers, the color e-display could then be rolled like one of Professor Snape’s scrolls and jammed into a cloak pocket.
So if Gutenberg thought “this is it,” when he moved type, today’s tech market and e-paper responds with a resounding “not quite.”
