Last month E Ink, a small Cambridge, Mass., start-up, took a step along the long road to the e-book. It unveiled a sample of changeable display of alphanumeric characters on a flexible page of plastic transistors, made by Lucent Technologies. It was proof that its “ink” could one day be the basis for “pages” of an e-book that rivaled paper: readable, low-powered and, above all, bendable.
E Ink’s electronic ink consists of plastic microcapsules that contain a certain ratio of dark dye to white paint chips. The substance looks like real fluid ink to the human eye, and its properties offer some real advantages over current display technologies. First, it’s real pigment. This means it has the nice contrast and readability of regular ink-on-paper. Second, it’s low-powered. The ink needs only a tiny electric charge to change from a white background to a dark-text-like color, and then it remains stable. An LCD or PDA screen can’t hold its image without a constant supply of energy.
E Ink’s first product was big banners in stores that can be controlled remotely. The company’s next project is small display screens for handheld devices. Lucent’s new plastic transistors gives E Ink the technology it needs to achieve its farthest-reaching vision: electronic ink on a paper-like medium that is flexible instead of rigid and tabletlike. E Ink vice president Russ Wilcox describes what this futuristic e-book might look like: “It might have multiple pages, each page about as thick as four pieces of paper. It’s attached to electronics, which by then are very small, and they have a receiver that enables you to connect to the Internet. So when a newspaper or magazine wants to transmit the next issue, they upload it to a satellite and it goes out to a lot of local antennae. Then everybody’s electronic newspapers or magazines are updated wirelessly.” This is years away, says Wilcox. We’ll be waiting.
