Despite a chequered history the world’s first e-paper production plant will open for business next year and an innovation that has been talked about for decades could finally become a commercial reality. But do printers and paper manufacturers really have anything to fear from e-paper?

E-paper technology was originally conceived in the 1970s at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the US. However, the e-paper technology was never developed fully and e-paper went unexploited until Joseph Jacobson co-founded the E Ink Corporation in 1997 with a view to developing and marketing the technology.

Since Jacobson’s intervention, a number of technologies that use e-paper have come and gone. All of these products have boasted a certain ‘wow’ factor, but none seems to have the staying power or the affordability of good, old-fashioned printed paper products.

For example, in 2004, Sony launched the LIBRIé, replacing it in early 2006 with the Reader and in April 2006, iRex Technologies launched the iLiad e-book reader. Then there’s the eFlybook, a product aimed at the aviation market that comes pre-loaded with maps, charts and manuals and is little more than a rebadged iLiad. Belgian daily broadsheet De Tijd, has even experimented with e-paper versions of its business daily.

Yet to make an impact
Despite these innovations, as yet they have failed to dent the dominance of the printed word. When PrintWeek’s sister title, Printing World, asked four book industry printers in November 2006 whether they thought the growth of e-books would see printed books suffer, the answer that came back was “maybe”. In addition, the general consensus among those surveyed was that production might dip, but paper books offer a tactile experience that e-book readers were unable to offer.

The one major advantage that e-paper, which has a paper-like thin appearance, ultra-low power consumption and a light form, holds over the printed form is that it has the power to display updatable information whereas print remains static.

And it is in this area that companies like Gyricon (a firm spun out of PARC), Philips Electronics, Kent Displays, Prime View International, SiPix Imaging, NTERA and Nempotic are all working.

New manufacturing plant
Another firm banking on the future growth of e-paper is Cambridge-based Plastic Logic. The company, which uses E Ink technology, has attracted more than £50m in venture capital funding to build a plant in Dresden, Germany, from where it will manufacture electronic reader products.

The global e-reader market is predicted to be in excess of 41m units by 2010 and when Plastic Logic’s Dresden plant opens in 2008, the firm predicts an initial capacity of more than 1m modules per year.

Plastic Logic’s products will rely heavily on E Ink’s technology which, in essence, is relatively simple. Each display is made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, each containing positively charge white capsules and negatively charged black capsules. When a negative electric field is applied, the white capsules move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the viewer.

To create a visible black, just reverse the polarity of the charge you are applying. For greyscale, the electricity passes with a shorter waveform, making the black go half way up and the white go half way down. This type of display is known as an ‘electrophoretic’ or ‘EPD’ display. To give an idea of scale, the microcapsules are between 20 and 80 microns in diameter – a human hair is between 70 and 110 microns in diameter.

To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid ‘carrier medium’ allowing them to be printed using existing screen printing processes onto virtually any surface, including glass, plastic, fabric and even paper.

Nemoptic, manufacturer of the main rival e-paper product, uses a different technology to E Ink, namely Bistable Nematic (BiNem). In this technology, Bistable means that content appearing on the screen stays on the screen without using power due to an internal memory effect. Nematic means that it uses nematic liquid crystal materials that are standard, inexpensive and robust.

Financial viability
For both manufacturers, the key development in recent years has been the driving down of costs of some of the materials used in the production of e-paper, which in turn helps to drive down the cost of the product. In addition to these cost reductions, a further appeal of e-paper technology is likely to be environmental issues. With an ever-changing and easily updatable product that could have myriad applications in the office, school or home, removing the need to print documents, recycle newspaper and magazines and eliminate many of the other printed products from the home, e-paper manufacturers argue that their product could have a beneficial effect on paper consumption.

But Jacques Noels, chief executive and president of the management board at Nemoptic, believes that for the time being, at least, hype about things like e-books could be a false dawn. “It [an e-book] does have applications for students and others who are carrying lots of books, but it’s not the best application of e-paper technology right now,” argues Noels.

For Nemoptic, the largest growth market at the moment is electronic shelf labels for use in a supermarket retail environment. In a typical department store, for example, there are likely to be between 20,000 and 40,000 labels and retailers want control over these labels without the headache of having staff manually change them.

Bright future
With supermarkets queuing up for a piece of the action, Noels is unsurprisingly bullish about the future potential of e-paper. “We have the market for e-paper now, we have the technology and we are able to overcome many of the problems that earlier e-papers had,” explains Noels. “The market is exploding exponentially in front of us.”

Despite this optimism, currently there are no UK outlets selling the Sony Reader – the much-hyped e-book reader. But for the UK domestic market to embrace this technology, consumers need to be able to use and grow accustomed to e-paper technology and then start making demands of developers for additional functionality. For this to occur, we first need to be able to buy it.

It’s inevitable that within a few years, the venture capitalists that have invested so heavily in the future of e-paper will be looking for a return on their outlay and will increase the pressure on manufacturers to deliver affordable products to market rather than laboratory gimmicks. Only when this happens will e-paper start to eat into printers’ work but at the moment, at least, that future seems a long way off.

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TIMELINE E-PAPER
1970’s Electronic Paper developed by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Centre. Other developments from the centre at this time include: Ethernet, graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse
1997 E Ink Corporation founded by MIT professor Joseph Jacobson
1999 Nemoptic founded. The company has its headquarters in Magny les Hameaux, France
2004 Sony launches the LIBRIé, the first e-book reader, which utilises E Ink technology
2006 February De Tijd, a Dutch business newspaper, trials e-paper technology with limited subscribers
April iRex Technologies launches the iLiad e-book reader
September Sony replaces the LIBRIé with the Sony Reader. PC World calls it “one of the most innovative products of the year”
November Motorola uses E Ink technology in its low-cost Motofone handset
2007 January Cambridge-based firm Plastic Logic raises over £50m in funding to develop world’s first e-paper product factory due to open 2008
February 3GSM World delegates vote Motorola Motofone best ultra-low cost phone Nemoptic launches low-cost prototyping kit for those seeking to evaluate and develop e-paper applications