The idea of electronic paper tends to appeal to a generation that has grown up with newspapers. At the Future of Science Journalism symposium at MIT this week, one of the presentations was about E Ink by the company’s director of marketing, David Jackson.
The talk was full of information about how E Ink’s technology could be used for flexible displays, mimicking paper. Most of the examples were small form displays.
This prompted one of the journalists in the room to ask if these displays could ever be the size of a broadsheet newspaper, so that she could open the pages and scan the information.
As Mindy McAdams, who was also speaking at the conference, put it:
The journalist was thinking about imitating a dead format that most people find awkward and inconvenient.
For those of us working in what we still call new media, this sort of question is shocking. But it should not come as much of a surprise.
It is an example of how people tend to adopt new technologies based on existing practices and norms. In this case, how print journalists look to e-paper to replicate what we already do with real paper.
This is a misguided approach to new technologies. Paper is very good at what it does, so why would we want to replicate it with an electronic product?
Instead we should be looking to how we could use something electronic paper to offer new experiences in consuming content.
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Ultimately, I think e-readers and electronic paper is a fantasy with regards to newspaper content and I think how we envision our future shouldn’t be completely modeled after what we understand.
I’m thinking, specifically, of these visions of future newspapers in science fiction and the cartridge-based Teleputers in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. When these stories were created, they modeled themselves after extensions of current technologies, rather than thinking about new technologies that could arise and disrupt the further development of old technologies (such as the Internet).
Electronic paper versions of the newspaper don’t yet innovate in any sort of meaningful way and certainly don’t provide any value over current digital media (which has proliferated on a multitude of devices, like phones for example, whereas current e-readers have only a singular, limited purpose).
So, yeah, these are completely misguided visions of the future (but aren’t all they all? In 10, 20 or 30 years time, I’m sure we’ll be talking about the demise of the Internet to something newer and better in ways).
For books, yes, e-paper is an innovation because one device can hold many, many books and doesn’t strain the eyes when reading for long periods of time like back-lit screens can do. But there’s a very small market of people that want locally-stored archives of their favorite newspapers.
I agree with Zac that the paper is doing a great job so why change it, but we need to think of the world in 20 years. Will we be able to cut down trees for the papers and books. Electronic paper seems to me to be a start to a solution of a problem we have had for centuries. I also invite you to think about the children of the information era that would like to read papers online since they read thousands of other blogs and emails each month. We can read papers from all over the world depending on our interests if they are located on the internet. Just a thought, no one knows what the future holds. I just thought I would give my perspective. Thanks for letting me share.
[...] blog about the newspapers becoming electronic. Check it out if your interested. IT is located here. [...]
[...] 24 February 2008 by newscrucible http://reportr.net/2008/02/22/a-misguided-approach-to-electronic-paper/ [...]
E-PAPER IS NOT THE SAME AS SMALL-FORMAT WEB-BROWSING
I propose a different view on e-paper. I have grown up with Mac computers, and the internet, I run a small publishing company and adore the physical aesthetic of the printed and bound book. I write journalistically and literarily and run a new research and development site, taking a hard look at cutting edge technologies.
Occasionally, I read actual printed newspapers, and the newspaper format (printed or online —online they work best when they try to do something like the broad-scope content presentation that broadsheet provides [considering that hyperlinks can help save space and therefore designs don't necessarily resemble the print format]).
I think it’s vital to take into account that print journalists want to see the broadsheet format, in part because they are people who understand both the production and the consumption elements of the newspaper marketplace.
The key to this particular question by a reporter is whether scanning significant amounts of information simultaneously would be possible. We tend to think of on-screen reading (i.e. digital) as an exercise where size is counterproductive and the goal is the most minuscule. However, as graphic designers understand, there is something liberating about surface area, depending on your intentions.
E-paper could serve exactly that function. Imagine a sheet of e-paper the width of two human hairs, but which is more or less the size of a broadsheet newspaper. It can fold or unfold, and the outer surface will show digital contents either way, adjusting to the size you have “requested” to see, based on the folding.
Due to its extreme light weight, such a format would be ideal for expanding the usability and user-freedom of browsing digital content. You could see multiple pages (either of contained pdf-type documents or eventually real-time online browsing — limited at present by e-paper’s low computing intensity).
This provides for a much richer end-user experience and the possibility of presenting a broader array of information to the reader. A Google search, if one could work on an e-paper single-sheet foldable display, such as I describe, could have 80 or 100 “first-page” hits, instead of 10 or 15.
Advertising possibilities explode with this format, and that is precisely why the broadsheet became such a global standard for serious news organizations: it allowed the simultaneous presentation of massive amounts of textual and visual information, in-depth reports, and the advertising necessary to finance the operation in a serious way.
I would like to point out to Zac and Barbara, that if the trees needed to print daily news papers were left standing, that alone would meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Not to mention the energy to process, and distribute that paper.
[...] http://reportr.net/2008/02/22/a-misguided-approach-to-electronic-paper/ [...]
[...] change is scary. But what happens when people are afraid to try new stuff? We end up with ideas for broadsheet style electronic readers instead of recognizing that there are newer, faster, better platforms of [...]
[...] than trying to replicate paper with an electronic product, Sun Media should be looking at how to use digital technologies to to offer new experiences in [...]