- What if these words disappeared tonight,
and a different story filled this space tomorrow morning? What if that
book on your table told a different tale next week?
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- And what if your favorite hiking jacket
had an ever-changing map on the sleeve -- with a moving dot to tell you
where you are?
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- These are the kinds of things researchers
and marketers talk about when they ponder electronic ink.
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- Like regular ink, it's printed on an
ordinary surface. But, like a chameleon, it can change the patterns it
shows. And that's attracting the attention of some major publishers, advertising
execs and retailers.
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- After all, electronic ink means never
having to say you're finished. There's no final edition of an electronic
newspaper; it just updates its stories. If a store's sign is advertising
picnic supplies when dark clouds roll in, it can switch to touting umbrellas.
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- This may sound futuristic, but a company
called E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., hopes to start marketing changeable signs
next year. With letters 2 inches to 4 feet tall, signs would cost $100
to $5,000, depending on the number of letters to be displayed, says E Ink
vice president Russ Wilcox.
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- Books and newspapers that can change
their contents would come later, he says. Maybe four to five years from
now.
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- Electronic ink isn't the only high-tech
way to post information, of course. Some hotels already use indoor changeable
signs somewhat like the liquid-crystal displays on electronic calculators.
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- And for years, scientists have studied
an array of very tiny balls, half-black and half-white, embedded in a surface.
The balls rotate on command, each showing the black or white surface, and
the eye blends all these tiny dots into an image.
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- The E Ink approach draws on research
by Joseph Jacobson and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It too uses tiny dots, but they are transparent spheres in the ink itself
and only about the width of a human hair.
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- Inside each sphere is a bunch of tiny
particles in a dye. These particles dash from one side of the sphere to
the other when they're exposed to an electric charge.
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- Say the particles are white and the dye
is black. If the particles are hidden by the dye, the sphere looks black.
But when the particles hustle toward you, crowding against the near side
of the transparent spheres like children's noses at a candy store window,
the sphere turns white.
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- By controlling that movement sphere by
sphere, scientists can change the image on a sign or a printed page. The
electric charge that moves the particles comes from two arrays of transparent
electrodes, one on each side of the ink layer.
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- Black and white won't be the only options.
E Ink says it will be able to provide a range of colors.
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- J.C. Penney Co. Inc. is eager to start
testing the signs, says Edward Sample, the retailer's manager of systems
support and technology. He already has seen a prototype that changed from
blank to the words "J.C. Penney" and back.
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- He looks forward to printed signs that
present eye-catching moving messages or count down the days to the arrival
of a new line of sportswear.
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- From his many years behind the sales
counter, Sample also appreciates the value of a sign that advertises different
things at different times: hosiery and cosmetics for emergency shoppers
on a lunch hour, and a coordinated outfit or fragrances for more leisurely
shoppers in the evening.
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- Why not just have employees change regular
signs? Because, Sample says, that would take them away from their main
job of helping customers.
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- Back home, those customers may someday
read books with ever-changing stories. Once they finished "The Red
Badge of Courage," they could plug into the Internet and replace Stephen
Crane with Stephen King. Pages might include animation or even video clips;
users could adjust the type size and style as they wish.
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- Electronic books are on the market, but
they present words on screens. People might prefer to read on paper, says
Kenneth Bronfin, senior vice president at the Hearst Corp.'s new-media
group. Hearst, which publishes books, newspapers and magazines, is among
companies that invested a total of $15.8 million in E Ink this year.
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- "This is something people can curl
up in bed with, whereas they won't curl up in bed with a device that looks
like a computer and has glass and plastic and batteries," Bronfin
says. "This is a device that will actually look and feel a lot like
a book."
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- Similarly, people might buy one electronic
newspaper of perhaps 24 pages and simply update the pages with new stories
by computer or radio transmission.
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- Even magazine ads might be tailored to
specific readers by using electronic ink, says Gil Fuchsberg, corporate
director of new media at the Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. Interpublic,
a holding company for ad agencies and marketing communications companies,
has also invested in E Ink.
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- For example, if you last bought a General
Motors car five years ago, GM might order up an ad for a new car for your
copy of a magazine. "Every advertisement could be relevant to stuff
you're interested in," Fuchsberg says. "This can be the ultimate
in direct marketing."
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- Some observers, however, question just
how popular electronic ink will be.
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- Aris Silzars, president-elect of the
Society for Information Display, is skeptical that it would spread beyond
specialized uses like books that give portable access to staggering amounts
of reference material. In that case, he says, some people might prefer
a book to a laptop computer with CD-ROM.
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- For books in general, Silzars questions
whether an electronic-ink version would be handy, durable and inexpensive
enough to lure people away from traditional print. And signs that light
up, he says, might be more eye-catching than changeable printed ones.
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- But Robert Wisnieff, manager of the Advanced
Display Technology Laboratory at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center
in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., believes the high-tech books could find a big
market if they prove technically feasible. For example, he says, a single
electronic textbook that could follow any student's interests for years
would be a good investment.
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- It's probably premature to judge how
big a deal electronic ink will be, Wisnieff says.
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- Most likely, "it will be picked
up and used in ways we really haven't thought of."
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