Inaugural conference for the digital book industry launched

New display technologies panelled at TextOneZero

May 23 2001

Over 70 speakers were involved in the inaugural two-day TextOneZero conference in Brooklyn, New York including executives from the Association of American Publishers, The Open eBook Forum, Microsoft Research, CDT, Gyricon Media, eMagin, E Ink, Xerox PARC, eBrary, Night Kitchen and Kodak Eastman.

Display technologies were arguably the hot topic of the first day’s proceedings, with representatives from six display technologies companies involved in the panel discussion on new displays as well as being the main focus of the first two keynote sessions.

Introducing the two keynote speakers from display manufacturers E Ink and Kodak Display, Roger Sperberg, Assistant Executive Director, Electronic Publishers Coalition said of those who do not presently like to read on screen "…familiarity is acquired through osmosis. If you walk in the mist … you will get wet."

Like their competitor Gyricon Media, E Ink has developed a low power monochrome display that seeks to emulate the desirable properties of paper being portability, readability, high contrast, and relatively low cost. Both companies’ products have the significant feature of being bi-stable, that is, they do not require power to retain their contents.

James Iuliano, President and CEO of E Ink, said during his keynote, "Paper-Like Displays and the Future of Publishing" that E Ink have enabled a new class of device by fusing paper with a display technology.

Calling this a "game changing" technology Iuliano believes that this will change the way people communicate visually and that colour would be the next step for E Ink. Iuliano also reaffirmed E Ink’s joint agreement with Philips to develop for electronic books suggesting that by 2003 these will be available as second generation displays.

The second keynote speaker, Leslie Polgar, President and General Manager, Kodak Display, Eastman Kodak, focussed on a technology that catered for the much more visually rich publications. Representing an organic light-emitting diode technology capable of showing high-quality content where form is sometimes inseparable from the content itself, Polgar recommended that conference participants read Pat Coyne’s article "PDF and eBooks: Linking Form and Content" at our sister site, Planet PDF.

A technology with a similar intended use is that of Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) who has developed Light Emitting Polymers (LEPs) which allow for display of fast-moving content with a very wide viewing angle. Stewart Hough, V.P. Business Development with CDT, explained that this technology could be integrated into 3G cell phones providing a videophone capability.

Both of these technologies are self-luminous and do not require backlighting making the overall display package thinner than their non-luminous liquid crystal counterparts.

A licensee of the Kodak OLED Technology, eMagin demonstrated a Star Trek-style monocular microdisplay that when viewed through a lens, can be made comparable to viewing a full-sized SVGA computer screen.

Of course, display technologies were just one of many areas covered by the unique collection of speakers recruited by organizers of TextOneZero. Other speakers addressed a wide-range of eBook-related topics including The Future of Publishing, Digital Rights Management, Niche Markets, New Revenue Models, The Music Industry experience and New Display Technologies.

The Digital Rights Management session proved to be contentious as always showing that the community is still divided as to where to draw the line between protection and encumbrance.

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