CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – “Electronic paper” has long been hyped as the future of newspapers and books, but products like e-books have been slow to take off. That may soon change, say executives involved in the pioneering technology.
While Internet companies are scanning libraries of books and making them available online, E Ink Corp., which emerged out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, is seeing a surge in orders for its portable, foldable displays that mimic conventional paper to carry such books.
“Nine different companies launched products last year based on the technology,” said Russell Wilcox, E Ink president. “In the last nine months we’ve gone from manufacturing tens of thousands of parts to millions of parts.”
Among those products are Sony’s
Reader
tablet, whose black-and-white displays can be read in bright sunlight or a dimly lit room from almost any angle — just like paper — without traditional back-lit screens that chew up power.
While the displays are becoming more flexible and conserve power, they face other limitations such as working only in monochrome and failing to display video — areas critical to attracting advertisers and consumers to the technology.
Wilcox said E Ink, whose revenues have grown at a rate of 200 to 300 percent annually in the last three years, is testing a color prototype that could be launched next year, potentially opening the technology to e-magazines and e-newspapers.
E Ink holds more than 100 patents on its “electrophoretic” ink technology in which electric charges are sent along a grid embedded in the paper that cause tiny black and white particles to move up and down, creating text and images.
James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said E Ink needs the technological leap into color and ability to show video before it can reach the masses. If it can achieve that, McQuivey said, E Ink could threaten to displace the cheap and ubiquitous liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), while revolutionizing how we think about reading.
“It’s so clearly apparent when you use the technology that it could revolutionize so many screens in our lives and it could put screens on things that don’t have them but could or should,” said McQuivey.
Extracts taken from;
“Electronic Paper” Edging Toward Reality by Jason Szep
Reuters, Apr 5, 2007