Showing posts with label e-paper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-paper. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

E-Paper: A Precursor to Protean Paper

In my previous blog post on "accidental plagiarism," I included the full text of the story "How to be a Fictionaut, Chapter 19: Safety Check" by Ian Watson; the story was originally published in the April 1996 issue of Interzone. And if you hang in there with me on this blog post, you'll find the text of yet another story included in its entirety.

I was going to include the following entry in my month-end Links & Things, but I decided, instead, to dedicate an entire blog post to the subject....

As reported in the Asian journal Tech-On!, Sony Corp exhibited a 13.3-inch flexible electronic paper (e-paper) device at Eco-Products 2010, a trade show on green technologies held in Tokyo, December 9-11, 2010. This was the first time that the e-paper device had been displayed publicly. Sony evidently had little to say of this new device. However, Alan Henry, in an article for Gearlog.com, writes: "The [device] is designed to be a prototype for a gadget that could display images and text in high resolution and possibly someday replace traditional paper in a thin, flexible, and portable way.... Sony also didn't note whether the technology would be coming to any future product, but we can assume they wouldn't put it on display if they weren't thinking about it." Alan states in the article that he used to work in lab "helping design and test thin-film circuitry" that could be used to create "flexible displays that could be mounted on clothing or on other malleable surfaces like backpacks or briefcases."

The Silver GryphonSony's e-paper, and Alan Henry's comment about flexible displays mounted on surfaces like backpacks and briefcases, all reminded me of a story by Paul Di Filippo entitled "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" This story was Paul's contribution to anthology The Silver Gryphon, which I co-edited with publisher Gary Turner (Golden Gryphon Press, 2003). The Silver Gryphon marked the twenty-fifth book -- as in the silver (25th) anniversary -- from the press and included contributions from all the authors who comprised the first twenty-four books. These authors included Kevin J. Anderson, Kage Baker, Michael Bishop, Andy Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, James Patrick Kelly, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop, and others -- 20 authors/20 stories, with cover art by Thomas Canty.1