In the future, the whole of the world's literary works of art and collection of knowledge may become universally portable, easily personalised, widely distributed, and rapidly accessible to all. Ever since creative thinkers such as Vannevar Bush started conceptualising these ideas decades ago, we've slowly but surely made progress. Some would argue that we've arrived. Among our current options are the Web, e-books, portable computing, PDAs, and wireless networking, so we must be there, correct?
On the content front, progress has mostly been in the form of the Internet: Project Gutenberg has been putting classic literature online for 30 years, M.I.T. has announced that the university will put all its course materials online for free, and numerous commercial publishers and entities are experimenting with different publishing paradigms beyond paper. Books24x7.com, for example, licenses technical books over the Web to colleges as well as Stephen King's failed "pay as you go" experiment. I agree that some of the pieces are there, but we haven't quite put them all together.
Assembling the parts
One of the biggest hurdles to widespread adoption of e-books is the hardware that's needed to read them. When compared to the ideal--which is still the paperback book--desktop monitors, laptops, and PDA screens still can't give us an enjoyable reading experience. After all, a paperback fits in a backpack, a purse, or a coat pocket; is flexible enough to sit on without breaking; and unfolds to twice its size. In the digital realm, a stylus-driven, flexible PDA that unfolds in the same way comes close to this dream, but we'll still need advances in printing circuits on plastic and paper to revolutionise display and computing technologies as we know them.
Electric ink
First, let's examine the new display technology, called electronic ink or electronic paper, depending on whose Web site you go to. These flexible sandwiches of plastic contain conductors and electronically charged balls. Xerox spin-off Gyricon Media has balls colored black on one side and white on the other. When the charge is manipulated, the individual balls flip and show either their black or white side, thereby creating the effect of black-and-white printing. E Ink makes displays with charged white balls floating in a blue, inklike fluid. Manipulating the charge causes the balls to float to the top of the sandwich (making the "white paper effect") or down to the bottom to let the "ink" show. Both companies claim that they will soon produce affordable, flexible, reusable, low-power, high-resolution, and high-contrast displays that rival or exceed the readability and contrast of the printed page.
Flexible electronic books with either a traditional computer-style display or one filled with numerous pages of E Ink or Gyricon Media reading material are technically possible. With cell phones continuing to shrink, connectivity for these devices wouldn't be much of an issue; just build a tiny wireless modem inside. Inexpensive storage media, such as DataPlay disks (quarter-sized optical disks that store 250MB to 500MB of data and cost between US$5 and $12) or any of the variety of storage options sticks could fit into the mix as well to create not only an e-book reader but also the ultimate PDA.
