The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A few years from now, The Reminder you hold in your hands may be very different from the one you have today. How would you like to purchase a newspaper that has regular news stories in it, but also short videos of the events you are reading about, audio interviews, or an animation showing how to install a new muffler on your car? In a few years this is going to be possible. The idea of digital or electronic paper has been around for several years, but researchers proved last month that it will be used very soon. Electronic paper is basically a thin sheet called a TFT (thin film transistor) with three layers: a backing layer, a centre layer filled with pixels like a computer screen, and a protective top layer. The result is a very thin (0.3 mm), flexible sheet which can be rolled up like a sheet of paper, but which can be filled with written text, video or audio files. A user would subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and be sent a sheet of digital paper at the beginning of their subscription. Whenever the subscription begins, a signal would be sent to your house which would activate your digital paper. This signal would be pulsed into your house like satellite television and would direct the pixels on the paper to form themselves into the news stories or video files you have paid for. You could then "flip" through and read your paper, listen to the interviews and watch the videos. After reading your newspaper each day, you would simply set it aside, and over night it would receive another signal telling the paper to change to the stories current for that day. Researchers proved last month that digital paper could be produced cheaply, that it could display pictures and text in full, sharp colour, and could be reused indefinitely. It is tough enough to be rolled up and put in a backpack, and cheap enough that it isn't a disaster when your three year old uses it for a place mat for their Play-doh. Digital paper is only the latest attempt to reform the book. Over the last few years, the sales of ebooks have been dramatically on the rise. Ebooks are just that, books which have been converted into electronic files for use on computers; usually laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as Palm Pilots. These books can be downloaded off the Internet for a fraction of the price of purchasing them in the store and a number of them can be stored on your PDA at one time allowing you to save your back by not having to lug around a list of the latest hardcovers. The problem with these books is that we aren't used to them. When surveyed about using ebooks, the biggest problem that people have with them is that they don't "feel" like the books we're used to. We like the feel of paper under our fingers, we like to see an entire page at one time and have the ability to flip back and forth quickly to find something we missed the first time around, and you have to admit, it's tough to curl up in bed with a PDA. This is why we are seeing the next hottest thing coming out; ebook players. They are shaped, sized, and weighted to be just like a paperback book, but when opened, what you find inside is a small digital screen and a memory chip allowing for literally an entire library to be installed and carried around at any one time. Cheaply made, capable of massive storage, and similar to real books, these little computers are just hitting the market and should drive the sale of ebooks through the roof. When these small devices are combined with wireless networks like those that are currently used for cell phones, the ability to have access to information at any time, at any place, will become a reality. Imagine having one of these small devices in your backpack and being able to download the headlines of the day, the latest bestseller, or the piece of information you desperately need to finish your essay for history class at any time. How will this change what we think of as education? As news? When information is available any time, will we memorize anything? Will we remember anything? Or everything? ([email protected])
