Proud of your new e-reader? Hah! It’s just a step on the path back to the past. Not the future. Because paper — that old-fashioned thing you thought you might one day be able to do without — is the future.
Paper is the future because nothing does its job better. You can’t scribble a phone number on a torn-off piece of LCD, fold it and stuff it into your shirt pocket. You can’t flip through an ebook in four seconds to locate the passage you liked three weeks ago. You can’t fold your e-newspaper under your armpit in the Metro, or use it to mop up a coffee spill. You can’t use your iPad to wrap your lunch and provide reading matter at the same time.
Paper is portable, printable, flippable, foldable, tearable, chewable, cuttable, scribblable, rollable, stackable... and practically immortal. E-readers and other paper replacements are in their infancy. They lack the affordability, hard-wearingness and infinity of purpose of paper. Your Kindle or Nook will show you a page of text, but it won’t do anything else. The screen resolution is still not good enough for detailed pictures, or even some Asian characters. The technology is not fast enough to show moving images, or advanced enough to show colour.
For every improvement in electronic paper, engineers work hard to better approximate ordinary paper. Nicholas K Sheridon, the Xerox Corp. employee who first thought up “electronic paper”, said in a 2007 interview that he realised in 1989 that computers were not going to produce a paperless office. “Any document over a half page in length was likely to be printed, subsequently read, and discarded within a day. There was a need for a paper-like electronic display — e-paper! It needed to have as many paper properties as possible, because ink on paper is the ‘perfect display’.”
It’s not just books that await this new, ideal material. Early last year LG Electronics showed a prototype display that was large, flat, bendable, and not much thicker than ordinary paper. One day you might own such a sheet and on it view every newspaper you pay for. You might even be able to roll it up and tuck it into your armpit.
“I like to tell people,” Sheridon said, “that the holy grail of e-paper will be [...] a cylindrical tube [...] that a person can comfortably carry in his or her pocket. The tube will contain a tightly rolled sheet of e-paper that can be spooled out of a slit in the tube as a flat sheet, for reading, and stored again at the touch of a button.” A scroll, like those in ancient libraries!
Just imagine the variety of other things that can be done with a flexible text-, image- or video-carrying sheet of paper-like material. You could cover your tabletop with it, or your handbag, your car, your windows, walls, floors... You could even wear it. Give it a decade at the outmost.
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We already face information overload. How stressful to have more choices to make: what should my kitchen counter show this morning? Will TV and monitor makers go out of business? What if any handy surface can function as a keyboard-and-screen?
Class will come into it. When e-paper is expensive, the rich will fill their homes with it. When it becomes cheap, they will go back to traditional materials that don’t want to interact with you — brick, stone, tile, wood.
As far as paper goes, new technology may well point us back towards the past.
(rrishi.raote@bsmail.in)