The Future of Documents

As we look for suitable replacements for paper for displaying and interacting with documents, a technology that is often mentioned is Electroinc Paper or e-Paper.

This technology is basically a new kind of media intended to replace the paper document, which can be re-printable at will. Just like paper, and unlike other displays, e-Paper uses natural light and the material’s reflectivity to display the images and text; it does not require power (except for printing) and can keep a printed image for a theoretical endless period of time, but can then be re-printed as many times as possible. Most importantly, e-Paper was meant to retain some of the affordances of paper-foldable, lightweight, and inexpensive.

The initial research actually started back in the 1970’s at Xerox PARC – but it is not until the last few years that the technology has matured enough to hit some (niche) concrete applications. The first products are now appearing,with around 15 companies prototyping e-Books, 10 of which are expected to commercialize them from late 2007 to early 2008:

• e-Ink has been one of the oldest players in that field, and provides one of the major ePaper technologies;
• iRex technologies’ iliad is a portable book reader that can be taken anywhere, and even include annotation capabilities (see video);
• eRead Technologies has a portable book reader called STAReBOOK
• Sony has its own e-books;
• NemOptic is manufacturing bistable ePaper displays, including a color prototype;
• Samsung exhibited the largest color e-Paper models at SID 2007;
• Bridgestone Corp. prototyped another A4 color electronic paper;
• Philips demonstrated the first a e-ink rollable display (see youTube video); Dupont also demonstrated another e-Ink rollable display.
• And there are many others…

A few newspapers are planning to deploy e-Newspaper pilots. Les Echos in France, or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the US are among the companies planning to have some live tests of the technology. Some reports even predict that e-newspapers wil account for 10% of the newspaper market in 2010, or even 25% in 2012.

So will e-Paper replace paper ? It will certainly take a few years, but I can imagine myself reading newspapers on an e-book. As of today, the e-paper or e-book readers have more of a PDA / tablet PC form factor than a real piece of paper. But to build a truly interactive notepad, with annotation capabilities while being really portable, this will take longer.

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• Philips
• Trials will even be ran in the US with Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer in the US, with a select group of readers.