'Electronic ink' would turn paper into a changeable display

Imagine opening a book, leafing through its changeable pages and turning to a picture of a tiger ... that lunges out at you from the bindings.

'One day, this technology could be incredibly cost-efficient for the publishing industry and for the environment.' -- publisher Lachlan Murdoch

That flight of fancy could be just a few years away from reality. Researchers are working on technologies that combine the best of flat-screen displays and good old ink-on-paper.

A venture known as E Ink hopes to have the initial commercial application - rewritable sales placards - at a department store near you sometime next year. E Ink, based in Cambridge, Mass., was established last year to capitalize on new concepts in electronic displays dreamed up at the MIT Media Lab.

The basic idea is to spread tiny encapsulated dots over a layer of paper or plastic. Depending on the electrical charge, the dots could be rotated to appear black or white - or perhaps even red, green or blue. All those dots could be individually controlled to form text or an image, like pixels on a screen or tiny dabs of ink from an inkjet printer.

The beauty of the technology is that you could get an image that looks like ink on paper rather than a flickering computer screen, and you wouldn't need continued power to maintain the display ... just like books. What's more, you could quickly change the image on each page by reprogramming it ... just like computer screens. One minute you've got "Moby Dick," the next minute "War and Peace."

What's your take on this new technology? Add your comments to the bottom of this page.

So far, the concept has been getting a lot of good ink, so to speak, with positive mentions in Fortune, Scientific American and Popular Science. "One day, this technology could be incredibly cost-efficient for the publishing industry and for the environment," Australian publisher Lachlan Murdoch (Rupert's son) said during a recent newspaper conference.

Questions, questions
But how do you make electronic ink with a resolution fine enough to rival ink on paper? How do you make it as malleable as pixels on a screen? And how do you make the whole enterprise profitable? The last question in particular is of great interest to E Ink and its multimillion-dollar backers, including Motorola and the Hearst Corp.

E Ink's vice president of business development, Russ Wilcox, said the company aims to roll out a low-resolution product next year. "We've identified the retail environment as an area that needs a nice large-area display solution," he said.

Department store trials
Currently, he said, department-store sale signs have to be printed weeks in advance, and the signs are sometimes outdated by the time they get to the stores. In contrast, signs with electronic ink could be updated nationwide or areawide instantly, using pager technology to beam the new prices right onto the paper.

"If you compare our material to an LED [light-emitting diode] or electromechanical or incandescent solution, we're lower-cost, we're thinner and we have a nicer look," Wilcox said. "It turns out for some of these other displays, the amount of power they need each month far outweighs the cost of the display itself."

But how do you make the displays? Wilcox didn't get into the specifics but said, "We are able to use a lot of known technology and known art in our processes. ... There are eight different ways to do the connections."

In some of the possible processes, the dots and their connections could be rolled onto sheets, just like ink on paper, he said.

He said the electronic ink was "more than a laboratory product, but it's not commercially available." E Ink was in the process of setting up a pilot production facility, he said.