My birthday is coming up and although I'm not sure what you should get me, I know what you shouldn't get me: a Kindle, or any other electronic book. I don't care that they're lightweight or easy to read outside. I don't like them. I like book books. Regular books. The kind made of paper. I like shopping for books, browsing in a bookstore and lingering over the possibilities.
But wouldn't it be cool if you could combine a regular book with an electronic book? My idea is this: a paperback that's about 250 pages long, give or take. It would be made of paper. You could leaf through it and read it the way one reads books. But the whole thing would be electronic. The cover might have a touchpad interface not unlike the iPhone. The user could scroll through the list of books stored in memory. Once they chose the book, the 250 pages of electronic paper would automatically fill with the words and/or pictures (for those of you less inclined to read).
Booksellers could design these books to come in different shapes and sizes. Imagine for example a coffee table electronic book -- a large-sized format that contains perhaps 10 other coffee table books in one. You see where I'm going with this?
It's just an idea, but researchers over at Queen's University Human Media Lab in Canada are on their way to making my dream a reality (little do they know). They've invented a thin film computer with a flexible E Ink display.
"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen," the creator Roel Vertegaal, director of lab, said in this press release.
They're unveiling the computer next Tuesday at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 in Vancouver.
This is not the first flexible screen prototype using E Ink. But it's definitely an example of where handheld electronics are moving. It's not hard to imagine that five or ten years from, we'll be carrying around super lightweight and flexible phones and/or electronic books. They use little to no power and the possibilities of of future electronic books resembling ones from the past has me all excited. I can't wait.