In the mid-1970s Nick Sheridon, a physicist working for the Xerox company, developed a digital paper system consisting of millions of tiny spheres, black on one side and white on the other, sandwiched between two layers of thin plastic. Placing portions of this sandwich in an electric field caused the black sides of the spheres to rotate toward the viewer, "printing" whatever was desired; changing the area affected by the field would change what was printed. However, the complex circuits necessary to control the image were, by necessity, rigid boards. The best "paper" that could be produced using the technology of the day was therefore a sort of electronic clipboard. Sheridon's project was shelved until the mid-1990s, when interest in electronic paper resurged. Xerox revived the Sheridon concept, and today at least two other corporations are working on competing versions of digital paper. The invention of plastic transistors by Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in 1997 (work which won a Nobel Prize) has made the creation of cheap, flexible screen-driving circuitry feasible for the first time--an essential step away from the rigid circuit boards of the past. In 2000 the first true digital paper was demonstrated publicly by Lucent in collaboration with E Ink, Inc.
Presently, the same challenges are facing electronic paper (e-paper) that plagued early cathode ray tube displays for desktop computers and, later, liquid-crystal displays for laptop computers. Resolution must be greatly improved, costs greatly reduced, and some way of displaying color devised. These goals will probably be achieved soon, however, and when they are, our print culture-all that aspect of our lives which revolves around books, newspapers, and other printed material-is liable to be affected in ways that cannot now be foreseen.
A closely related phenomenon is the advent of the e-book. This term broadly includes any book published in any electronic format. When one downloads the text of a Shakespeare play, say, as has been possible for some years, one is downloading a form of e-book. Commercial publishers, best-selling authors, and textbook publishers are increasingly selling e-books online. However, reading a book on a computer screen has all the disadvantages listed above, and more. Paging back and forth to specific passages is more cumbersome on a screen than in a book, and even the slimmest laptop computer is apt to be heavier and clumsier than a printed book. (It is certainly much more expensive to lose or to spill a milkshake on.) Nor can the specialized handheld devices that have been developed so far to display e-books yet compete, in terms of reader comfort, with the paper book.
E-paper may change all this. In five or ten years one will (if manufacturer's promises come true) be able to purchase anobject that resembles a hardcover book yet can display on its pages any text whatever. Such an e-book would match the readability of a paper book while providing access to a whole collection of texts. If such devices do become affordable, students will no longer need to lug heavy piles of textbooks from place to place, and any book--bestseller, technical work, or public-domain classic--will be available in a reader-friendly medium without a trip to the bookstore or library. Since printing and distribution costs would be greatly reduced in such a system, costs to publishers and therefore to readers might decline. It is no wonder that the e-book has been hailed as the greatest advance in book culture since Gutenberg invented the printing press--even before it is widely available.
As so often in computer affairs, however, one must filter the hype. The desktop computer itself was once thought to herald the "paperless office," a work environment where all codocuments would be handled on video screens; in fact, computers hooked to printers have enabled us to waste more paper than ever. It has been similarly claimed that e-paper and e-books will make paper obsolete. However, putting all one's textual eggs in one digital basket may have disadvantages as well as advantages; the e-book may make it easy to lose an entire personal library at one go. More fundamentally, e-books, being extremely complex electronic devices, are certain to lack the stubborn permanence of paper books. Paper books 100 years old are commonplace, and books hand-written on vellum exist that are over 1000 years old. Paper books that have already been sitting on the shelves for generations are therefore sure to still be sitting there, still ready to "function" when exposed to light and a literate eye, many decades after the e-books of tomorrow, along with all the contents of their digital memories, have vanished into landfills or recycling bins. The future of our print culture will, therefore, probably be a hybrid one: e-books for some purposes, paper books for others.
Paper, one of the oldest information-display technologies, continues to have many advantages over even the most advanced video displays. It is lightweight, thin, and cheap; draws no power and never becomes incompatible with new technologies; can display higher-resolution images than any other medium; may last for centuries; and can be recycled. Video displays are heavy, expensive, draw power, and go to the landfill after a few years of use. Paper can be held at any distance from the body and examined at any angle of view, whereas video terminals require the user to sit at a desk and stare at a fixed distance, causing eyestrain and backstrain. The one great advantage of the video screen is that it can display an endless series of different texts and images. If a material could be developed which had the advantages of both paper and the video display--some form of affordable digital paper--it would find a large market.
In the mid-1970s Nick Sheridon, a physicist working for the Xerox company, developed a digital paper system consisting of millions of tiny spheres, black on one side and white on the other, sandwiched between two layers of thin plastic. Placing portions of this sandwich in an electric field caused the black sides of the spheres to rotate toward the viewer, "printing" whatever was desired; changing the area affected by the field would change what was printed. However, the complex circuits necessary to control the image were, by necessity, rigid boards. The best "paper" that could be produced using the technology of the day was therefore a sort of electronic clipboard. Sheridon's project was shelved until the mid-1990s, when interest in electronic paper resurged. Xerox revived the Sheridon concept, and today at least two other corporations are working on competing versions of digital paper. The invention of plastic transistors by Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in 1997 (work which won a Nobel Prize) has made the creation of cheap, flexible screen-driving circuitry feasible for the first time--an essential step away from the rigid circuit boards of the past. In 2000 the first true digital paper was demonstrated publicly by Lucent in collaboration with E Ink, Inc.
Presently, the same challenges are facing electronic paper (e-paper) that plagued early cathode ray tube displays for desktop computers and, later, liquid-crystal displays for laptop computers. Resolution must be greatly improved, costs greatly reduced, and some way of displaying color devised. These goals will probably be achieved soon, however, and when they are, our print culture-all that aspect of our lives which revolves around books, newspapers, and other printed material-is liable to be affected in ways that cannot now be foreseen.
A closely related phenomenon is the advent of the e-book. This term broadly includes any book published in any electronic format. When one downloads the text of a Shakespeare play, say, as has been possible for some years, one is downloading a form of e-book. Commercial publishers, best-selling authors, and textbook publishers are increasingly selling e-books online. However, reading a book on computer screen has all the disadvantages listed above, and more. Paging back and forth to specific passages is more cumbersome on a screen than in a book, and even the slimmest laptop computer is apt to be heavier and clumsier than a printed book. (It is certainly much more expensive to lose or to spill a milkshake on.) Nor can the specialized handheld devices that have been developed so far to display e-books yet compete, in terms of reader comfort, with the paper book.
E-paper may change all this. In five or ten years one will (if manufacturer's promises come true) be able to purchase anobject that resembles a hardcover book yet can display on its pages any text whatever. Such an e-book would match the readability of a paper book while providing access to a whole collection of texts. If such devices do become affordable, students will no longer need to lug heavy piles of textbooks from place to place, and any book--bestseller, technical work, or public-domain classic--will be available in a reader-friendly medium without a trip to the bookstore or library. Since printing and distribution costs would be greatly reduced in such a system, costs to publishers and therefore to readers might decline. It is no wonder that the e-book has been hailed as the greatest advance in book culture since Gutenberg invented the printing press--even before it is widely available.
As so often in computer affairs, however, one must filter the hype. The desktop computer itself was once thought to herald the "paperless office," a work environment where all documents would be handled on video screens; in fact, computers hooked to printers have enabled us to waste more paper than ever. It has been similarly claimed that e-paper and e-books will make paper obsolete. However, putting all one's textual eggs in one digital basket may have disadvantages as well as advantages; the e-book may make it easy to lose an entire personal library at one go. More fundamentally, e-books, being extremely complex electronic devices, are certain to lack the stubborn permanence of paper books. Paper books 100 years old are commonplace, and books hand-written on vellum exist that are over 1000 years old. Paper books that have already been sitting on the shelves for generations are therefore sure to still be sitting there, still ready to "function" when exposed to light and a literate eye, many decades after the e-books of tomorrow, along with all the contents of their digital memories, have vanished into landfills or recycling bins. The future of our print culture will, therefore, probably be a hybrid one: e-books for some purposes, paper books for others.
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