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The ultra-thin screen developed by E Ink revolutionized e-readers because of its advantages over LCD displays.

The product eventually developed by E Ink is composed of a thin layer of plastic film coated with gold, capable of conducting electrical current. Layered onto the film is a coating containing millions of tiny capsules, or micro- capsules, filled with oil as well as floating black and white pigments. The pigments in the oil react to the electrical current that passes through the film, forming the charac-ters of the text the e-reader user commands the device to display—in other words, the pages of a book. “I think this is extraordinarily significant,” says Jacobson. “The real dream has been to have . . . electronic books that are manufactured in the way that you would manufacture a regular book.”14

e-paper, but no e-readersAn important feature that E Ink built into the technology was a sort of electronic bookmark. Just as a reader of a print book

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the e-reader revolution 35

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MASTER FinalProject Editor: AGProduction Coord: DGB

Copy Editor: JBProofreader: DC

leaves a bookmark between the pages where he or she has left off, the e-paper designers knew they had to find a way for e-readers to display the same page after the user turns off the device. The e-paper designers were able to engi-neer the microcapsules so the pigments would stay in the same positions even when the current is turned off.

Book publishers recognized the sig-nificance of e-paper and its capabil-ity for revolutionizing their industry. Among the first investors in E Ink was Hearst Corporation, a media company that includes a book publishing division. Hearst invested nearly $16 million in E  Ink, helping provide the company with the capital it needed to develop e-paper. “This is something that 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,” said Kenneth Bronfin, a vice president of Hearst, who envisioned the development of e-readers. “This is a device that will actually look and feel like a book.”15

E-paper represented a tremendous step toward the devel-opment of e-readers but in 1999, when e-paper was ready to be marketed, there were no devices capable of utilizing it. At the time, the Bookman and other e-readers on the market were engineered to feature LCD displays—they could not simply change their screens to accept e-paper. Essentially, E Ink had developed a product which, at the time, could not be applied to e-books.

Moreover, E Ink executives conceded that while the cre-ation of a new type of e-book was the ultimate goal, e-paper probably was not ready to serve as a vehicle for displaying literary text. The resolution of the characters still needed to be refined. E Ink realized that consumers would expect the next generation of e-readers to be portable, which meant the screens would have to be small. At the time, e-paper was not yet capable of producing characters that could be shrunk down to a small size and displayed on a tiny screen while still remaining readable.

Bits & Bytes 100 micronsDiameter of a single microcapsule employed in e-paper—roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

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