Imagine carrying a slim, light, foldable plastic epaper along with a tube-like eprinter. Connect the printer to your PC or cellphone. And 'pass' the epaper through the eprinter. And voila, you have an eprintout !

Your eprintout is visible at virtually any angle - just like paper. It can have a black & white, 'ink-on-paper' look with a resolution in excess of 170 pixels per inch and will not get erased until you pass it into the e-printer again. Just like paper !

Sounds fantastic? Not really. From all indications, this technology is likely to go into commercial production by 2005.

The Daily Newspaper
Nobody will deny that the daily newspaper has no substitute when it comes to in-depth coverage of local news, world events, business & finance. Just as nobody will refute that people are getting more mobile every day !

Now bring that potent medium called the Internet and your local newspaper can keep up with your pace, and be available anywhere in the world.

Add the imminent (inevitable? - the U.S. ABC has already recognized this) acceptance of paid online subscriptions as valid newspaper circulation, and you have a definite business model.

And the limitations? Display technology of course. After all there is nothing as yet, that can replace the look & feel of a newspaper. But a look at recent developments in e-paper and e-ink will confirm the long term strategic value of this model.

Driven by Software Technology
Today, most newspaper pre-production content is available in PostScript or PDF formats - so it is easy to produce an online (web) edition from the the same content files, with minimum production costs. In fact, it should be technically possible to 'post' online editions on web-sites before the newspaper is printed, and well before it reaches the reader !

As usual, the quick-to-react dot-com portals were the first to demonstrate the efficacy of this technology by creating newspaper-portals which offered readers their favourite newspapers on the web. Initial formats did not 'replicate' the offline newspaper format - but new software made it easy to display exact replicas of the respective individual newspapers. Newspapers naturally saw no harm in trying out the new medium.

Soon, some portals even offered to print & distribute copies in different markets via local tie-ups.

Meanwhile, the software vendors which 'powered' the web-sites started packaging their products. And started marketing the software to newspaper owners as a means to extend their presence on the web. Their ready technology solution offered newspapers the easiest path to host replicas of newspapers on their web-sites.

With options to carry the same ads on the epaper at an add-on cost. (One Indian newspaper even applies a surcharge for NOT carrying the ad !) And options to make the online ads interactive by linking to web-sites / special pages. And further, keeping track of the 'click behaviour' of readers.

It was not long before leading newspapers hosted their own epapers while simultaneously being present on newspaper portals.

The New Generation Ink & Paper
Over the past few years, vigorous efforts have been on to develop new generation ink and paper.
Gyricon (spawned by Xerox Corp) has created Electronic Reusable Paper - a portable display technology, comprising of a thin layer of transparent plastic with millions of toner particle-like capsules.
While E Ink Corp (with strategic investors like Philips Electronics & Toppan Printing Co) has developed a concept of "electronic ink microcapsules", each capsule with a diameter of a human hair.
In both technologies, individual electric charge decides whether a particular capsule will be black (or red or green) on top and white below. And a combination of such appropriately charged capsules, arrayed over a "electronic paper" forms the picture. LIBRIé, Sony's new Ebook reader is the world's first application to offer electronic paper display (from Philips) with E Ink's electronic ink technology - giving a near-real paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint.

Habits change with Experience, Expectations with Technology
Some readers may feel that the experience of reading a newspaper cannot be replaced by any epaper. But it is equally true that today's generation prefer Sunday morning television over radio programs !