E-paper and the future of electronic publishing

Imagine the day when your newspaper arrives as an email attachment which you download into a series of ultra-thin plastic sheets the same size as a conventional broadsheet newspaper. Welcome to the future of electronic publishing, indeed publishing as we know it may cease to exist entirely.

Your weekly magazine could arrive in the same way. A few clicks and the old magazine is dumped or stored, and the latest edition is in your hands. And the whole idea of the e-paper format is that you download into a set of plastic sheets and it stays there, just like a printed magazine, without being plugged into a power supply.

Solomon Systech is based in Hong Kong's swanky new Science Park and responsible for production of one in five Integrated Circuit Displays on mobile phones globally. Here its technical experts are working to perfect the e-paper display.

Interesting most of the major developments in display technology have come out of Asia in recent years, such as LCD TV and its predecessor plasma TV. E-paper is the next step forward and considerable resources are going into this major prize.

For e-paper has the potential to stop the wholesale destruction of forests to produce paper and perhaps more significantly in commercial terms will make reading material much cheaper for the consumer. You would only need to buy one plastic e-newspaper manifold, for example, and maybe another one to download your magazines. With mass production these items will become much cheaper than hacking down trees.

The experts at Solomon Systech say e-paper is a decade away in its fully functional format. But this might be a little pessimistic. AME Info was able to touch and feel an early prototype and it does not usually take this long to get a product to market in the IT world.

You only have to think back a decade and remember that Bill Gates was saying that the Internet was a passing fashion, while today the Internet is a part of our daily lives.

E-paper would certainly be a challenge for conventional publishers but those with active websites would not find it so hard to adapt. For journalists the complete elimination of all delays due to printing and publishing would mean that their news could be as up-to-the-minute as radio or TV or the Internet.

Eventually the production cost advantages of the e-paper would surely result in a contraction in conventional newspapers which have already been losing circulation to competition from their own websites. Similarly magazines would also have to promote an e-magazine version to survive but the lowering of production costs could prove a major advantage.

It is always curious to see into the future, and e-paper will soon be with us. As usual what appears a ridiculous idea at first sight in the electronic world has some amazing applications given a little imagination and a bit of thought on the cost-saving implications.