Does this mean that printed-and-bound books will have a long and distinguished history yet to play out in our world? Will we remain chained to the bonds of paper (and its attendant cuts and slices) forever?

Well…yes and no. Paper is such a wonderful medium, and so handy, and so inexpensive, that it will continue to play a large part in both publishing and business. The thing is, however, that it’s going to be subject to a major impact in the next few years. And the ultimate outcome is hardly in doubt. Yes, I have spotted the future, and it’s going to hit the market in 2003.

It’s called "electronic paper." One variant is being developed by a partnership of an American company, E-Ink, and a Japanese company, Toppan Printing. And a division of a European company, Royal Philips Electronics, has already bought exclusive global rights for a period of time to manufacture and sell displays based on that technology for PDA’s and electronic books for a $7.5 million investment.

Electronic ink printing consists of using a plastic sheet with millions of tiny "microcapsules" suspended in a clear fluid inside the sheet. One variant has each microcapsule—about the diameter of a human hair—being either white or black. The white particles are positively charged, and black particles are negatively charged, and all can be moved about by application of an electric current. The other variant has each of the tiny particles sporting both a black side and a white side; they can be caused to rotate or spin based on applying electrical current.

Either way, see the possibilities? You apply a negative electric charge to the back of the sheet and the black particles recede and disappear, or the two-tone particles turn or spin. Apply an electric charge to the front of the sheet in places and the black particles appear, or two-tone particles spin again.

The two-toned, rotating particles are being pushed by Gyricon Media, headed up by Nicholas K. Sheridon, who invented the "spinning" version of e-ink as early as the 1970’s. But Xerox wasn’t interested at the time, and the research was shelved until more recently. Sheridon called his invention "Gyricon" (a Greek term for "rotating image").

The "dual particles" type of e-ink—i.e. all-black particles and all-white particles floating around together—was invented by Joseph Jacobson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. He called his discovery "electrophoretic ink" because the process is based upon electrophoresis---the movement of charged particles in liquid when impelled by an electric current.

Either way, "e-ink" sounds like a reasonable moniker.

One of the big advantages of e-ink is that it can approach the legibility of the printed word on paper and be visible in low light (no backlight needed). Another is that it takes very little power, and can retain its "state" when the power is turned off (meaning AA batteries could run a reading device).

So it was no surprise when E-Ink and Toppan recently demonstrated an e-ink reading device at the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) eBook 2001 Conference in Washington, DC in November 2001. Their prototype "dedicated reading device" weighed 9 ounces, ran on two AA batteries, was about a centimeter thick, and had a seven-inch diagonal screen. The device also included a memory card slot and had the ability to synchronize with a desktop PC. It’s going to cost about $300 and will be on the consumer market by the end of 2003.

Bingo: End of bound-paper books, yes?

Well, not quite. One problem is that the idiots who control much of manufacturing and publishing today (may I engage in name-calling for a moment?) have concentrated most of their energy on devising ways to control intellectual property—that is, copyrighted material—both before and after it has been purchased. They don’t want people to be able to share books with anyone else (unless your ability to read the book is disabled), and they certainly don’t want you to be able to copy it. In some cases they even have schemes afoot where you won’t be able to read a piece of writing more than once without their permission. (And how do you get permission? Why pay them more money of course!)

Thus, with most of the publishing industry concentrating on restricting access to information, there hasn’t been a lot of real innovation to be had. A light, handy, energy-conserving appliance that enables everyone to download and trade digital materials freely hasn’t appeared yet. In fact, many of the presently available reading device companies have worked closely with publishers to make sure that no sharing is allowed, resulting in ebooks that are being marketed with prices equal to or higher than printed paper books. Ridiculous? Sure. Didn’t I tell you these people were idiots? In striving to protect their information monopolies and precious profit margins, they’ve retarded the nascent ebook market.

But help is on the way. All we need in order to stop chopping down so many trees, and having to laboriously haul tons of books and magazines from one side of the country to another, is a reasonably priced reading appliance that works with all or most of the competing ebook formats (think Acrobat .pdf files, the Linux open-ebook standard, Microsoft’s Reader format, Glassbook Inc.’s Electronic Book Exchange [EBX] format, HTML, XML, and even regular old .TXT file formats).

That’s what E-Ink and Toppan look like they’re going to come out with (while Gyricon Media is currently concentrating on large signs being marketed as "SmartPaper"). And while the e-ink technology can now only show black and white and shades of gray, color is on the horizon. Thus, while the advent of "smart paper" and "electronic ink" won’t mean the immediate end of printed-paper books and magazines, e-ink reading implements will start eating into the traditional printed-paper markets, and eventually supplant them.

Interestingly enough, both companies working on the microcapsule-based printing can espy a competing technology on the horizon, even as we speak. That competing technology will be based on light-emitting semiconductors made from carbon-based compounds (think about reading "self-lit printing" where the ink emits its own light, like little neon letters). And that technology has some Very Big Guns behind it: Labs at both Eastman Kodak and IBM are working to perfect it, and the thinking is that it will be a viable alternative to the electrophoretic printing processes explored above.

Does it make any difference which sci-fi technology eventually wins out? Not really. The important thing is that portable-reading devices with long battery lives, sharing capabilities, and good utility be widely and inexpensively available to everyone. And that’s what E-Ink, Toppan, Gyricon, IBM, Kodak, and others are aiming at.

Just give it a year or two. And then prepare to see the gradual phasing-out of printed-paper books and magazines. Trees are rejoicing. u