The End of Paper?
How many trees are wasted just to fulfill our daily paper needs? I don’t know, and I would hate to be the person in charge of finding out. No matter what the number, waste is waste. A few companies are working to change that. Digital readers like the one in the following video have the potential to evolve into devices that dramatically cut back on our printer’s duty cycle.
E-ink is a generic name for the revolutionary technology powering these devices. Using an electric field, particles of pigment that have been given a certain charge are brought to the top or bottom of its respective ‘environment’. When these minuscule points are duplicated, placing millions on a single page, you have a piece of e-paper!
Each ‘point’ is similar to the pixels found on a common day LCD screen.The primary difference is that these consume no power when displaying images. E-paper’s power consumption is relative to ‘page-turns’, not the time it can display an image. The electric field is applied to the millions of particles in a way that displays text or images on screen. They, the electric field is turned off, and the image stays there. So, ‘turn a page’ and the reader scrambles the small pixels into the new image. Once it’s there, it’s there. Very efficient!
For more information on what your textbooks will look like someday, check out Wikipedia’s entry on electronic paper.
Yes. I am a staunch supporter of Wikipedia, and proud of it. :]