A few paper thoughts, triggered by a couple of recent reports…
While ePaper products, that’s electronic paper-like displays, have been threatening to go mainstream for some time, Xerox went ahead and approached things from another angle with the announcement of real paper that’s erasable. This experimental project aims to enable printing on paper that can be reused by being printed again – presumably with something different – and again, and again. Interesting environmental implications, and if this gets to be a shipping product be very careful about what pieces of paper you sign in the future.
An interesting example of how the new world of social interaction on the web and the old world of printing something tangible onto paper is JPG Magazine. JPG is a real magazine – as Michael Arrington put’s it: “It took me a couple of weeks to get over the fact that they are actually printing a magazine, on paper, just like people used to do in the last century.” – but the interesting twist is that the content is submitted by users to the JPG site and the photo’s that are included in the magazine are the ones that get voted for by the community. The pay back for getting a picture published? You get a years subscription to the magazine. The fact that this approach can have a viable business model demonstrates that there’s still a high perception of value in the features that Paper version 1.0 can provide.
Talking of the social web, something I hadn’t expected. Publishing pictures on crossoak has led to friends and family printing them (okay, no surprise there really) and incorporating into presents for us (thank you!). That’s something that wouldn’t have happened in the old days of 6×4 inch prints stuck in albums in the back of dark cupboards. Yet another example of the change in where people spend money, or not, on printing photographs. There’s a number of people trying to figure out the business model for online photos, sharing and printing. But so far none make it as easy as it should be or turn it into a pleasurable experience of creating something unique from the raw assets.
Circling back around to electronic alternatives for paper, the BBCs Digital Planet had a recent update on the $100 laptop/One Laptop per child project. What I hadn’t realised from earlier reports is that they’ve managed to get a daylight viewable 200dpi greyscale display into the thing. As display technology keeps pushing the resolution and contrast ratio boundaries, the reading and general viewing experience is going to keep getting better. In many ways that’s just as well, because with rights management increasingly being applied to documents we’ll increasingly be reading from screens and not paper. (Aside: my dim lighting preference is already gaining ground in the office as a nicer environment to read long documents from displays).
Of course, once someone figures out how to combine rights management with Xerox’s experimental erasable paper we’ll have a solution for protected real paper… now that would be fun 
tags: paper | print | epaper | | printing | rightsmanagement