Enlightened Librarian: Chasing e-paper

Chasing e-paper · Mar 31, 11:05 PM

This essay appears in the April 2005 issue of Quill & Quire magazine:

Remember e-books? If you thought they were an aberration of the late 1990s, like new Volkswagen Beetles or Ricky Martin, you’re wrong. They’re coming back – and this time, driven by a new format of reader-friendly electronic paper, they’ll be here to stay.

If the Dutch electronics giant Philips and other manufacturers have their way, we will soon enter a new era of electronic scrolls. These will be cheap, plastic screens that will look and feel much like paper; they will unroll from a pen-sized holder or cellphone and download the day’s newspaper (or a new novel) through a wireless Internet connection.

Such an era is still five years away or more, and there are still some major technical hurdles for e-paper to overcome. But with newspapers and magazines desperate for young readers, and signs that e-paper textbooks would be a hit among college students, a critical mass for e-books could be just around the corner. If marketed properly, e-paper could even lead to a revitalization of mass-market and backlist publishing.
The concept of e-paper – a bendable screen with rewriteable electronic ink – has been around for years, but a flurry of recent developments suggests that the phenomenon could go mainstream by the end of the decade. Last April, Sony’s Japanese division launched a first-generation version of e-paper technology, the Librié e-book reader. Although its rigid plastic body can’t be rolled into a pocket, the device quickly earned kudos from reviewers for the newsprint-like clarity of its six-inch display.

The Librié’s display, which is licensed to Sony by Philips in partnership with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based E-Ink, replaces the LCD screen typical of Palm Pilots and cellphones with a plastic membrane containing thousands of tiny black-and-white particles. An electric current creates a static charge that aligns the particles to create text or monochrome images on a whitish background. The Librié boasts a resolution of 170 dots per inch, over twice that of a standard computer monitor, and features one of e-paper’s main advantages over other electronic displays – the screen image remains in place when the power is turned off. Sony claims that the Librié’s three triple-A batteries should last through 10,000 page views.

Sony’s device is seen as the first major market test for e-paper, which is expected to appear in flexible versions in the coming years. Philips has spun off a dedicated research unit to pursue further applications, and early last year the division announced it had created a five-inch screen of 85 dots per inch that could be rolled into a tube two centimetres wide. (The company’s website features photographs of several fanciful-looking concepts, including a wrist-sized GPS locator with an unrollable map, a pen-sized reading strip, and a cellphone scroll.)

Philips is not the only electronics megacorp working on e-paper technology. Fujitsu and Epson have both announced efforts to release flexible e-paper, next year and in five years respectively. E-paper is also a hot topic in academia, with numerous projects in North America, Asia, and Europe reporting progress in creating flexible displays in colour and speeding refresh rates to accommodate video transmission.

For now, though, e-paper is not without technical problems. It’s sluggish to use – Philips’ Librié screen takes half a second to update – and it has durability issues as well. In existing flexible prototypes, for example, the more the plastic sheet is bent, the faster its circuitry will degrade. Epson estimates that its own flexible e-paper would only last a few months before wearing out; the company’s betting that Japanese consumers’ appetite for newspapers and magazines will keep them buying replacements. (Just how pricey e-paper would be remains to be seen. In a December story in PC World magazine Epson estimates that a letter-sized e-sheet would cost “well under $100 [U.S.]”) The long-term effectiveness of the e-ink itself is also untested, and the drive to improve resolution and to introduce colour means increasing the complexity of the microcapsules that control the image.

Certainly, e-paper’s development has been relatively slow. The concept of charged-particle electronic ink was invented in the 1970s by Xerox, whose spinoff company, Gyricon, has since concentrated on developing a line of e-paper-based commercial signage. Electronic ink for reading devices has been spearheaded by Gyricon’s main rival, e-Ink, which was spun off from MIT in 1997. With no shortage of chutzpah, the company’s founder, Joseph Jacobson, made waves at that time with his ambitious plan for a “last book,” a bound collection of several hundred e-pages that could be used to download an entire library’s worth of titles.
Such a book is still a long way off, but the current pace of research suggests that the basic challenges of e-paper will be resolved in the next few years. Should charged-particle ink prove too complex to refine further, for example, flexible e-paper may emerge from another technology, such as Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED), which, like e-ink, also retain an image when the power is off.

Once the technological glitches are worked out, a number of factors suggest that e-paper readers could succeed where first-generation reading appliances, such as Gemstar and Rocket eBook readers, did not.

First, e-paper promises a far superior and more intuitive reading experience than current LCD screens and computer monitors. That fact in itself should win converts from those who currently view reading electronic text as an eye-straining chore. Sony’s Librié, for example, can be read in low-light conditions at a variety of angles, and it does not require a backlight. The reading experience should also improve as the resolution of e-paper increases. A guru of computer usability, Jakob Nielsen, pointed out in 1998 that existing computer screens cause people to read about 25% slower than printed paper, but that gap disappears when the resolution improves to print-like quality. There’s no reason why E-Ink’s stated goal of “radio paper” – a rewriteable medium with the look and much of the feel of real paper – should not find a ready audience with casual and dedicated readers alike.

Second, e-books have already been selling well for PDAs and similar devices. Granted, the quantities are small compared to overall print sales – less than 0.1 per cent of the $20-billion-plus U.S. publishing industry. But the Open eBook Forum reports that e-books have seen steady double-digit growth quarter by quarter since 2002. So far, e-books are largely an add-on item for multitasking handheld devices, raising the question of whether a dedicated e-paper reader would attract PDA afficionados or be seen to lack versatility. But encouraging signs of e-book growth suggest that the e-book market is ripe for expansion and could “tip,” given the right combination of affordable, high-quality hardware and plentiful, easy-to-access content, a combination that has been lacking in the e-book readers released so far. The stickiness of the iPod is a valuable lesson here: promote the readers not as a tech gadget but a lifestyle accessory, give users a way to network, share booklists, and build insider knowledge, and there’s no reason why a measure of the iPod’s success can’t be translated to an e-book device, especially one aimed at digital-savvy youth. The higher-ed textbook market would be a natural starting point to introduce such readers. Experiments in electronic textbook delivery are becoming more common – witness Pearson’s SafariX e-textbook venture launched last year – and e-paper readers would offer a lower-cost alternative to laptops and tablet PCs for accessing textbook content and other online course materials. Were educational publishers to adopt a licensing model for their electronic editions that would bill institutions by student usage of particular texts – similar to how databases and software are licensed now – publishers’ fears of revenue loss from piracy would be allayed while e-texts would gain a widespread, institutional footing.

Third, the newspaper and magazine industries are increasingly desperate to attract a new generation of subscribers, giving them a strong interest in supporting wireless e-book readers for their electronic editions. (Here, an open e-book standard would be key to take advantage of an e-text market rising on several fronts.) One analyst with the International Newspaper Marketing Association recently called for a downsizing of broadsheets to a newsmagazine format that would be easier to adapt to a variety of electronic displays. Newspapers and magazines also have an incentive to push for electronic delivery both to cut production costs and to boost revenue by creating segmented advertising targeted to specific reader groups. This market will also become more viable as wireless connectivity becomes even more pervasive, which is expected to be a further by-product of the plastic chip revolution driving e-paper itself.

The prospect of widely available e-paper readers for newspapers and textbooks are the best hope publishers have of gaining niche e-book sales for general-interest and backlist titles. Random House veteran Jason Epstein has proposed a national infrastructure of print-on-demand machines to do just that, but mustering the resources to create such a network remains the major barrier to his proposal.

In theory, there should be nothing to stop publishers, either individually or collectively, from serving e-books through the web. That’s the easy part. The hard part will be to create a digital rights scheme that protects creators while fostering demand. That, of course, is the million-dollar question. In Sony’s case, praise for the Librié’s hardware has not blunted reviewers’ disdain for its limited, proprietary content and restrictive 60-day access terms. Perhaps Sony should have taken another lesson from the iPod; users, it seems, will buy into a digital delivery model that is convenient, offers plenty of choice, and is perceived to be fair.

Naturally, publishers will need to weigh security concerns and issues of digital rights management, but they should also factor in users’ perceptions of quid pro quo. Choice will be the most important factor. Five years from now, full-text searching of many thousands of books from one’s desktop will be commonplace (courtesy of Google and Amazon), and users will expect to be able to acquire and to read those books instantly. Publishers would do well to consider the possibilities of broad collaboration with other print media to create a new-style content distributor. They might, for example, offer a database of titles so large that users are willing to pay by subscription for time-limited access (a rent-your-library option), or allow users to purchase long-term access to titles and to be able lend them to their friends (a build-your-library option). The iPod works in part because its infrastructure is impressive and robust. After some disappointing starts with e-book readers and other e-book ventures, such as netLibrary, publishers will have perhaps one more chance with e-paper to build a distribution platform that is sticky enough to draw consumers in.

The potential for e-paper to provide a rewriteable newsprint – and to be potentially as ubiquitous as newsprint is now – could represent an enormous opportunity. It will be up to publishers to work the numbers, but, as with Epstein’s famous introduction of the first quality paperbacks half a century ago, e-paper may also require a leap of faith.

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