‘Electronic Ink’ Could Turn Printed Page Into Work That Never Ends

What if these words disappeared tonight, and a different story filled this space tomorrow morning? What if that book on your table told a different tale next week?

And what if your favorite hiking jacket had an ever-changing map on the sleeve--with a moving dot to tell you where you are?

These are the kinds of things researchers and marketers talk about when they ponder electronic ink.

Like regular ink, it’s printed on an ordinary surface. But, like a chameleon, it can change the patterns it shows. And that’s attracting the attention of some major publishers, advertising executives and retailers.

After all, electronic ink means never having to say you’re finished. There’s no final edition of an electronic newspaper; it just updates its stories. If a store’s sign is advertising picnic supplies when dark clouds roll in, it can switch to touting umbrellas.

This may sound futuristic, but a company called E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., hopes to start marketing changeable signs next year. With letters 2 inches to 4 feet tall, signs would cost $100 to $5,000, depending on the number of letters to be displayed, says E Ink Vice President Russ Wilcox.

Books and newspapers that can change their contents would come later, he says. Maybe four to five years from now.

Electronic ink isn’t the only high-tech way to post information, of course. Some hotels already use indoor changeable signs somewhat like the liquid-crystal displays on electronic calculators.

And for years, scientists have studied an array of very tiny balls, half black and half white, embedded in a surface. The balls rotate on command, each showing the black or white surface, and the eye blends all these tiny dots into an image.

The E Ink approach draws on research by Joseph Jacobson and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It too uses tiny dots, but they are transparent spheres in the ink itself and only about the width of a human hair.

Inside each sphere is a bunch of tiny particles in a dye. These particles dash from one side of the sphere to the other when they’re exposed to an electric charge.

Say the particles are white and the dye is black. If the particles are hidden by the dye, the sphere looks black. But when the particles hustle toward you, crowding against the near side of the transparent spheres like children’s noses at a candy store window, the sphere turns white.

By controlling that movement sphere by sphere, scientists can change the image on a sign or a printed page. The electric charge that moves the particles comes from two arrays of transparent electrodes, one on each side of the ink layer.

Black and white won’t be the only options. E Ink says it will be able to provide a range of colors.

J.C. Penney Co. Inc. is eager to test the signs, says Edward Sample, the retailer’s manager of systems support and technology. He already has seen a prototype that changed from blank to the words “J.C. Penney” and back.

He looks forward to printed signs that present eye-catching moving messages or count down the days to the arrival of a new line of sportswear.

From his many years behind the sales counter, Sample also appreciates the value of a sign that advertises different things at different times: hosiery and cosmetics for emergency shoppers on a lunch hour, and a coordinated outfit or fragrances for more leisurely shoppers in the evening.

Why not just have employees change regular signs? Because, Sample says, that would take them away from their main job of helping customers.

Back home, those customers may someday read books with ever-changing stories. Once they finished “The Red Badge of Courage,” they could plug into the Internet and replace Stephen Crane with Stephen King. Pages might include animation or even video clips; users could adjust the type size and style as they wish.

Electronic books are available, but they present words on screens. People might prefer to read on paper, says Kenneth Bronfin, senior vice president at the Hearst Corp.’s new-media group. Hearst, which publishes books, newspapers and magazines, is among companies that invested a total of $15.8 million in E Ink this year.

“This is something people can curl up in bed with, whereas they won’t curl up in bed with a device that looks like a computer,” Bronfin says. “This . . . will actually look and feel a lot like a book.”

Similarly, people might buy one electronic newspaper of perhaps 24 pages and simply update the pages with new stories by computer or radio transmission.

Even magazine ads might be tailored to specific readers by using electronic ink, says Gil Fuchsberg, corporate director of new media at the Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. Interpublic, a holding company for ad agencies and marketing communications companies, has also invested in E Ink.

For example, if you last bought a General Motors car five years ago, GM might order up an ad for a new car for your copy of a magazine. “Every advertisement could be relevant to stuff you’re interested in,” Fuchsberg says. “This can be the ultimate in direct marketing.”

Some observers question just how popular electronic ink will be.

Aris Silzars, president-elect of the Society for Information Display, is skeptical that it would spread beyond specialized uses like books that give portable access to staggering amounts of reference material. In that case, he says, some people might prefer a book to a laptop computer with CD-ROM.

For books in general, Silzars questions whether an electronic-ink version would be handy, durable and inexpensive enough to lure people away from traditional print. And signs that light up, he says, might be more eye-catching than changeable printed ones.

But Robert Wisnieff, manager of the Advanced Display Technology Laboratory at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., believes the high-tech books could find a big market if they prove technically feasible. For example, he says, an electronic textbook that could follow a student’s interests for years would be a good investment.

It’s probably premature to judge how big a deal electronic ink will be, Wisnieff says.

Most likely, “it will be picked up and used in ways we really haven’t thought of.”