Sunday, November 06, 2005

OK, I'll admit it-- I'm e-paper obsessed

Through a series of links I landed on a Guardian article about yet another company's plans for introducing thin, flexible screens. This time it's Siemans and they are promoting it as cheap -- 1 square meter for about £30, which is about $51.10. They are thinking about 'Harry Potter like inserts in magazines' and then maybe some kind of computer game.

That seems like really trivial uses of the technology. I'm still looking for the small pda-like object that you can load up with your books and then read them on the flexible screen.

1 comment:

Susan Payne said...

It's interesting isn't it? E-paper? This article: http://www.naa.org/Presstime/PTArtPage.cfm?AID=7124 sort of explains some present applications of the technology, but I have to think that this epaper has much more potential than watch faces or magazine inserts.

Can you imagine reading your favorite book in an e-paper? Maybe they could incorporate moving pictures, an interview with the authors (extras like you now find on DVD movies?).

Anyway, I wonder if books of the future might be available in epaper? If so, how would we handle it in libraries?

What would be even cooler is an epaper that you could modify. If somehow you could control the size of the font, for example, or if you could upload books to epaper.

Oooh. Think of the space we could save with epaper! Put all those dissertations and journals on that stuff.

Only problem would be migrating it once we moved on to the next big thing.