Digital Paper

Researchers at Xerox and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have recently woken up to the fact that they still don't know what they're really doing ... doh, sorry ... have developed "electronic ink and electronic paper" which some analysts say, "may make traditional paper obsolete". I'm not sure which anal-ysts these are, but they sure are on something far stronger than what you get from the coffee machine down the corridor.

Electronic paper, we are encouraged to believe is "easier on the eyes than a computer screen because it has a higher contrast [to burn through your retina more effectively], and it can display millions of different images in the same space." So can an Etch-A-Sketch.

To back up their findings they provide an example: "Analysts say[can these be the same ones as before? we hope so] that a paper newspaper could easily fit onto electronic paper, and information could be changed every morning by deleting yesterday's news and downloading the current news with no loss of print quality." Wow, that's fantastic, I have one of those and it's called a PowerBook, bursting with.

Some former MIT students have already created a company called E Ink, which has developed electronic ink and paper products and is testing the prototypes commercially. The company recently hung "an electronic sign in a Boston department store, where the display is controlled by a computer from within the store's main office." It gets better, they assure us that: "These electronic posters can have text changed instantaneously." What will they think of next ... touch screens for kiosks that try to sell you Class A drugs, maybe that was last year's project.

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