As I sit here in Penfield waiting for several Zombies from the Humans Vs. Zombies game to stop waiting for me outside the front door I decided to sit down and share one of my absolutely favorite technologies lately.
Some of you may know what electronic paper is but for those of you who don’t here’s the lowdown. Imagine having a computer screen as thin as paper itself that can be folded, rolled up or treated as any regular sheet of printer paper. The only exception being it could display changing text or video, ala Harry Potters Daily Prophet. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Well the primitive version of this technology is already on the market today!
Electronic-Readers such as the Sony Reader or Amazons’ Kindle display books, newspapers, blogs and other electronic documents on a screen that resembles paper almost perfectly, using a patented technology called e-ink. This past year numerous other vendors have also introduced a much wider variety of e-readers to the market with a variety of other e-ink type technologies. 2009 promises to be “The year of the e-book” as a much larger variety of these devices are slated for release with much lower prices including the first full color e-readers.
Why is this so important? Why does it interest me so much? I believe this might be the biggest technological advance for the print medium since movable type. The ability to carry around 30-50 books in a device weighing less than a pound is such a leap forward and holds so many promises for it’s use.
After two years of carefully watching the development of the technology I was confident within the decade we’d see books that looked and felt like traditional books but the text and pictures could be “reloaded” to be any book or paged document you wished it to become. Then Esquire magazine released a special edition displaying an electronic ink cover. Though primitive and in my opinion mildly tacky it was the first periodical to implement the technology. Now I’ve had to revise my prediction from ten years to perhaps no more than five before we see the above mentioned technology. You can see a copy of the E-ink Esquire issue in the window of The Oswegonian offices in the Campus Center.
The possibilities are almost endless. Imagine being able to carry one textbook around with you and “load” each book you need for every class once you sit down in that class. With the addition of touchscreen for every page and the ability to play video on the paper you could create an “Active-Textbook” in which are audio lectures, video clips and interactive “widgets” similar to online flash games and such all built into the book itself.
This development also makes for the possibility of less expensive textbooks. If you merely download the book files to book-reading device there is no printing or shipping to add to the price of the book. The environmental benefits of one book capable of being any book or newspaper or magazine I would imagine will add up quickly over the life of the device.
All things considered the future of Electronic Paper is an exciting one and I am looking forward to seeing future advances in this area as they develop. In the next article I will be showing you places to get free or almost free movies/music/media in general in a completely legal and ethical way that won’t get you in trouble with the dreaded RIAA.
