The Development of Information Carrier

When Gutenberg printed his first books he had no intention that they should be portable. They were made, after all, to compete with very weighty (and often chained) illuminated manuscripts. The idea that you could walk around with a book did not come until 1500 when Aldus Manutius stumbled upon this revolutionary and liberating notion. The first paper light newspaper (Johann Carolus' The Relation in Strasbourg) did not follow until 1609. In the computer world the same revolution from heavy mainframe to near weightlessness is well under way.

Today's portables seem miracles of design and power. But, even as far as they have come, compare them with the ultra light, ultra cheap, ultra high quality information bearing attributes of paper, the only problem is that the information on paper cannot be updated. Imagine a piece of electronic paper which could typeset itself by means of remotely fed data. The key elements of such an entity are already a reality at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Laboratory, enabling the prospect of portable information devices which are essentially weightless and omnipresent. The key breakthrough, which will start to be seen widely in 1998, is a new type of ink: electronic ink. This magical stuff can be coated onto any surface, but, unlike normal ink, it can be electronically set. It is instantly changeable, erasable and resettable. The ink itself, a polymer material, is not expensive and requires no electronic power to maintain its image. This spells the beginning of the end of the published book. The conventional publishing industry is already dying. Books, magazines and newspapers have reached a plateau of sales in America of about $100 billion a year. Sales of Fiat panel displays, the basis of all notebook computers and the super thin screens which are beginning to populate our desktops, are growing rapidly with sales approaching $30 billion, but such screens are still heavy, very expensive and power hungry. Electronic ink enables the two worlds, conventional publishing on paper and electronic information displays, to be merged.

This radical change coincides happily with another: the exponential growth of our ability to store information electronically at a rapidly dwindling cost. The arrival, that is, of compact data storage. Consider this. One book consumes about 1 mb of data in a conventional, uncompressed form. But squeeze the data into a compact form, and a disk drive the size of a credit card holds 350 books.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is the first person to note that books could be portable?
2. Electronic paper can solve the problem that ____.
3. "... portable information devices" in Paragraph 2 refers to ____.
4. What results in the ending of the published book?
5. According to Paragraph 2, it is inferred that the conventional publishing industry will disappear ____.

(Keys.)