Digital ink meets electronic paper

Printed with digital ink, electronic paper promises an era of reprogrammable newspapers, books,  billboards, garments and even wallpaper.

The Economist Technology Quarterly, December 9th 2000.

Introduction

This text is a good introduction to e-paper, e-ink, e-books and an attempt into imagining a fairly realistic future, not science fiction; you will have to be computer literate to follow the descriptions and simply to feel at ease with your contemporary culture but you will also have to prove a certain degree of more “traditional” culture to prove you are aware of the more literary allusions which are common under the pens of a better sort of journalists.

Questions

  1. What is digital ink? What is electronic paper? Use text, illustration, and websites related to e-ink to answer the question. Do not forget to give all the website references allowing you to answer the question.
  1. What is a portal?
  1. List the advantages of paper books opposed to electronic books or e-books.
  1. Do you agree with the statement “Put a book or magazine back on the shelf and it will still be there years later”?
  1. What is a paperless office? Give examples of already existing paperless offices.
  1. What is “Liquid Crystal Display” (LCD) (see text further down) and what is a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)?
  1. What is a Personal Digital Agenda  (PDA)?
  1. Enumerate the flaws of electronic screens compared to paper.
  1. What are hand-held devices?
  1. What is a laptop computer?
  1. What is a pager?
  1. What is Bluetooth Technology? Where does the word “Bluetooth” come from?
  1. What are Immedia Boards ? What’s the use of them?
  1. What does the abbreviation “dpi” stand for? What can be expressed in “dpi”
  1. Gyricon versus Kent and Hewlett Packard: briefly explain the differences to show you understand the major differences in technologies.
  1. Explain the title of the paragraph “The medium is the message”. Who wrote that?
  1. “Writing on the wall” : do you situate this biblical allusion? Show how a somewhat technical article can borrow from general culture, which means that if you are not aware of it you can make enormous misunderstandings on a text : some of my students answered it referred to “tagging”…so please try and find out the pleasure of “culture”. This is not a “quiz show” but I assume that BA students are capable of -at least if they don’t know- finding out references and elaborate on their relevance.
  1. Give examples of problems related to becoming “paperless”.
  1. Have the promises of a paperless world so far materialized?
  1. What is the general attitude of computer users towards printing? Why do they print their documents?

Your personal notebook

Make sure you are familiar with the following vocabulary if you really want to understand the text and contemporary articles:

Billboard, stack, file, portal, battery, power, monitor, desktop computer, to update, hardly, window-blind, to fade, laptop, pricy, decade, display, actually, collapsible, hand-held-device, to flip a coin, heads or tails, to control, to spin out, switchable, layer, software, hardware, light-bulb, wiring, reckon, on the fly, to lease, be-all, end-all, fledgling, grid, silicon, cloth, chip, spine, bead, shade, slot, wand, array, hence, broaden, strap-hanging, hint, drop-down menu, back-lit laptop display, folded, furled, dramatic