E-Book, E-Paper Story Not Yet a Good Read

This article first appeared in the July 2002 issue of The Convergence Report

By Chris Manners

While the digital revolution has had some impact in the way we distribute and share information, one industry that has yet to take full advantage its promise is the publishing business. There are certainly over-hyped expectations for e-books and e-paper that have been, to some degree, been driven by over-zealous consulting firms who have generated media buzz with their grand predictions. Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting), for example, has looked into its crystal ball and determined that the consumer e-book market will reach $2.3 billion by 2005, with 28 million people using e-book reading devices. Not all consulting foirms are so ambitious, though: Jupiter Communications has found only 50,000 e-book hardware devices sold in the U.S. to date, and has provided a much more reasonable estimate of 1.9 million sold by the end of 2005.

The background to all this "analysis" is two-pronged - there are reasons why traditional publishing operations could benefit from digital publishing, and there are also explanations why e-books have yet to take off with the consumer. The arguments against physical books are pretty straightforward: it's expensive to purchase the paper to print them on, bind the printed pages, ship them to retailers and store them on shop shelves and in warehouses. Typically, print runs are too big, which means large numbers of books are returned to publishers, who then ship them out again at huge discounts. Some markets are too small to make a print run worthwhile - so specialty books, like academic books that have an audience of only a few hundred, don't get published. Concerned parents have complained that school children have huge numbers of textbooks to lug around and these books are barely read in full, and are infrequently passed on to next years' students or more commonly often thrown away. In fact, some pediatricians are recommending that school students use a rolling suitcase-style of bag to avoid back injuries. Yet another argument against traditional printing operations involves the fact that books can go out of date quickly, particularly technology-based books. Who hasn't seen a copy of "Windows 3.1 for Dummies" at a local garage sale?

E-books are supposed to circumvent all of these issues: you'd own a small handheld device with an easy-to-read screen, download the books you wanted, read them, and then erase them after you're done. However, this all remains a pipe dream. Today's handheld devices don't have sufficient battery power to last long enough to read a whole book, aren't that easy to read anyway, and cost between $200 and $400. Even if you are an early adopter, you can't share the e-books easily with friends and family. To make matters worse, the books you are probably most interested in reading aren't available in electronic format because publishers aren't exactly jumping to deliver books in this format. On top of this, there's the argument that the form that novels take is as important as the medium itself. In other words, people are so familiar and comfortable with the standard printed book that there's consumer resistance to anything that's new or different.

In the meantime, those publishers who are considering distributing books electronically are worried about the "Napster" effect - free copies of e-books being passed around. Consequently, they're focusing their efforts on digital rights management schemes. But this in itself goes against the grain for books - once you've bought a paperback, people commonly pass it on to friends or family members to read. And you don't have to pay for the book a second time.

Still, all is not lost in the world of e-documents. Adobe Acrobat and PDF files have quickly become the standard for easy distribution of everything from software manuals (they're typically included on a programs' CD-ROM) to newsletters such as The Convergence Report. For short-form documents, PDFs are a useful way to electronically distribute words, but they do require a computer for the reader software to operate on. This doesn't meet the requirements for an e-book, given that most laptops weigh at least 5-10 lbs and are nowhere as portable as a book. Some might argue that PDFs can act as a fine distribution medium for books (most notably those software companies providing their computer manuals in this format), but in reality, these documents are often printed and then read. This really isn't an issue for smaller and more managable pieces that can fit on a dozen or so pages, but when a computer manual runs into the hundreds of pages, it becomes clear that all that has happened is that the software companies have avoided the print costs and passed them directly onto the consumer. Not exactly the future of e-books, then.

However, there are some companies who are moving forward to the next level and trying to create an alternative type of book. Gyricon, a Xerox PARC spin-off, has created a technology which allows signs (characters and images) to be created by displaying electronically charged balls which are half white and half black. The first commercial application for this technology has been for in-store displays connected via a wireless link. Using this technology, a flexible piece of plastic that could display words and text could be as portable and easy to read as a standard newspaper or paperback.

E Ink, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm, has invented just such a device that can display simple words and images while being flexed by hand. It uses oil-filled capsules in which particles of titanium dioxide are suspended. A charge to selected particles creates the onscreen image. The device runs for several months on a small battery pack and the enabling technology for this creating prototype is a simple manufacturing technique called microcontact printing. An early demo by E Ink and Lucent showed a flexible display based on E Ink technology and Lucent's plastic transistors (which were be printed onto the sheet of plastic). The display components are actaully stamped on to a thin, flexible sheet of plastic less than a millimetre thick, with the actual transistors measuring around 50 microns across. One advantage of this manufacturing technique is that the expensive clean rooms used to build today's electronic components won't be needed to develop this product and therefore should mean that the costs can be controlled.

These technologies could provide the basis for the lightweight, flexible, low-power displays that will be necessary for e-books and e-paper to take off in the marketplace. As long as the device is inexpensive, it's entirely possible that it could wirelessly download newspapers, entertainment news, reference materials and educational works, as well as Stephen King's latest book. However, even if these technological hurdles are overcome, there remains a great deal of scepticism about and resistance to replacing a technology that has served the human race well for thousands of years with a digital piece of plastic paper. Perhaps the best test will be how well it can display bathroom reading material.

This article first appeared in the July 2002 issue of the Convergence Report