E-PAPER, E-INK
AND TOMORROW'S PUBLISHING

Two professional forward-thinkers displayed projects during Monday’s Hot New Technologies session aimed at capturing the "paper-like reading experience" in electronic form. The surprise was just how far these developments have come in a few short years.

SHERIDON IULIANO

Nick Sheridon, senior research fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California, predicted that within three years, major publishers will market some form of news product displayed on e-paper.

On the other end of the process, James Iuliano, chief executive officer of E Ink Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., said his group will be the first to commercialize the use of electronic inks this spring when the technology is applied to large-area signage.

Sheridon demonstrated Gyricon, an electronic "paper" made up of tiny balls, black on one side and white on the other. The balls are suspended in oil within the sheet and react to electronic charges to direct their placement, thus rendering images and type. The technology's current dots-per-inch capability of 110 will soon be improved to 220, he said, and could eventually increase to 300 dpi or so, though the technology for this last development is not yet in place.

Recognizing that few people will be willing to cart around an 80-page paper made of the new material, which is three-to-five-times heavier than conventional paper, Sheridon also showed a wand that captures data, then delivers it to the paper one page at a time. Scan the wand across a sheet, and content appears; scan it again, and it is replaced with new copy and images. This technology is available now and at reasonable prices, he said. The wand costs less than $100 to manufacture, and a single sheet of paper, which can be used over and over again, costs less than $5 to make.

Iuliano, meanwhile, discussed the development of an ink based on electronically charged titanium dioxide containing a dye (see picture, at right). Apply a positive charge to a sheet containing the ink and a bright white appears; apply a negative charge, and you see the dyed titanium. The first application, already tested in a retail environment, will focus on promotional signage. The goal is to create a network of signs that can be instantaneously and simultaneously updated. The other prime areas of development are for information appliances and the publishing industry.

Both technologies promise many of the benefits of paper: legibility, flexibility, portability and relatively light weight, while offering the real-time advantages of electronic delivery systems. They also use far less energy than current monitor technologies, tapping the source only to set the page, then holding the content without using any additional power.

-Terence Poltrack