From the Kindle to the Book to the Sony Reader, it seems that e-Readers are everywhere we look these days and why shouldn’t they be? These little devices have revolutionised the way we read and absorb information so their ubiquity should hardly be surprising. What is surprising is that very few people know how e-Readers actually work, or what makes them so revolutionary.
A basic lesson first: e-Readers screens use what is called e-paper, a display technology that is designed to look just like ordinary ink on paper that you would see in a book. Because it lacks a backlit display, e-paper reflects light the same way as ordinary paper allowing it to be read in bright light. Its pairing with handheld devices has been revolutionary as reading e-books on backlit screens for any length of time is uncomfortable for the viewer and uses a lot of electricity, making their usage somewhat untenable.
Thanks to e-paper, now reading a book on an e-Reader is just as comfortable on the eyes as reading a book on paper and because the device only uses electricity when the image on screen changes (by, for example, turning a page) they have a vastly superior battery life than backlit displays.
E-paper has been around in its most rudimentary form since the 1970s when it was pioneered by Nick Sheridon at the Xerox Palo Alta Research Center. Since then the concept has come on leaps and bounds and there are now several different types of e-paper.
Gyricon was the first enabling technology behind e-paper developed by Nick Sheridon. The ‘paper’ is made by sandwiching millions of tiny spherical beads in miniscule plastic, oil filled wells in between two thin pieces of plastic sheeting. Each bead has a black side and a white side and rotates inside the wells to have either the black or white side facing up and display that colour. It’s a little bit like a very modern, electrified Etch-a-Sketch.
E Ink’s e-paper is quite similar in that it is made by sandwiching millions of little wells filled with white and black particles suspended in clear fluid in between two sheets of flexi-plastic. The white and black fluids have opposite charges so when an electric voltage is applied to a well the particles can separate to opposite sides – this allows words or pictures to be created on the screen.
With the emergence of color e-Readers and growing consumer demand, it seems e-paper has quite a way to evolve yet, but for the time being most e-paper works using the methods described above.
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