E-Ink maker PVI of Hsinchu poised to become tech giantSCREEN READING: A Norwegian reading specialist is studying
the differences betweem reading on paper and reading on computer screensby Dan Bloom
Contributing ReporterForget pens and pencils, and forget reading books printed on paper.
The name of the game in the global e-reader industry is E-Ink, and the
magical "ink" comes
from inside a corporation in the Hsinchu Science Park. This is a story
about what reading might be like in the future, say in 2050, when even
the Taipei Times might come to readers via sleek electronic readers
using a complex technology managed by a Taiwan outfit.
Anne Mangen is a reading specialist at Stavanger University in Norway, and an
academic paper she published last year -- on the
differences between reading on paper and reading on screens -- has
catapulted her to the forefront of an ongoing debate on these issues.
Taiwan is part of this debate because the E-Ink technology used in the
Amazon Kindle e-reader is owned by Prime View International (PVI), the
world's highest-volume supplier of ePaper display modules. Last June,
PVI's president Scott Lui announced that the Hsinchu firm acquired E Ink Corporation, the leader in electronic paper display
materials.
While most Kindle owners in the U.S. probably don't know what PVI is,
the makers of Kindle and the Sony Reader certainly do. And PVI is poised now to
become a world leader in the evolving technology field.
Nicholson Baker, writing about the
Kindle in a recent issue of the
New
Yorker magazine, explained how the E-Ink in the Amazon Kindle works.
"Instead of ink on paper, there’s something called Vizplex. Vizplex is
the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s
display — i.e., the six-inch-diagonal rectangle that you read from.
It’s a marvel of bi-stable microspheres, and it took lots of work and
more than a US$150 million dollars to develop, but it’s really still
in the prototype phase."
Vizplex, in slurry form, is made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a
company called
E Ink. E Ink layers it onto a film, or “frontplane
laminate,” at a plant in western Massachusetts, and then sends the
laminate to Taiwan, where its parent company, PVI, (itself a
subsidiary of a large paper company), marries it to an electronic
grid, or backplane. The backplane tells the frontplane what to do,"
Baker added.
As Kindles become common place, along with the SONY E-Reader, and even
as schools start using digital textbooks instead hardback and
paperback books in classrooms, the way we read is being studied by
researchers on several continents. Mangen, who received her PhD in the
U.S. and is an internationally-recognized reading specialist, is
watching these developments with fascination.
In a recent interview with the Taipei Times, conducted by phone and
email,
Mangen talked about the differences she has found in how people
read on screens and how they read on paper surfaces.When asked if
there was that much of a difference, Mangen said: "Yes, the experience
of reading on a screen is different from reading on paper, although in
what ways and to what extent must be specified in each
instance, situation and purpose of reading. However, whether reading
on a screen is better or
worse than reading on paper depends on a range of variables -- the
reader’s prior experience with both formats, the purpose and situation
of the reading act, the type and genre of text, the disposition of the
reader, and other variables."
[Mangen did her Ph.D. in Norway at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU, www.ntnu.no), and was a visiting scholar during the
last year of her Ph.D. at San Jose State Univeristy (and, during the first year,
at Xerox PARC).
Her most recent academic paper is a book chapter to be published in November 2009, in
Advances in Haptics (an open-access publication, see
www.intechweb.org). Together with a French neuroscientist, I have
written on the changing haptics of writing (from handwriting to
typewriting; the ways we use our hands differently when typewriting
compared to when handwriting, and what implications this might have
for writing acquisition). Her dissertation was published this year by the German publisher
VDM Verlag:
http://www.borders.co.uk/book/the-impact-of-digital-technology-on-immersive-fiction-reading/1563039/]
When asked if she agreed with American futurist Paul Saffo's assertion
that a vast
literary shift is washing over the Western world now, Mangen
said: "Yes, I would say that the current shift from paper to
screen represents a vast literary shift, the implications of which --
short-term and, in particular, long-term -- we are not yet aware of."
When asked if reading on screens might
hamper or hinder the critical analysis skills readers need to use when
understand text, Mangen said: "This question is a too general – but
very important also–and it
cannot be dealt with in such a general, either/or manner. The precise
reading situation, context, purpose, kind of
text, reader dispositions, device characteristics, and other
vairables, would have to be specified in order to yield any
constructive and interesting answers to your question. So the
question is too general, but it's an important one."
When asked if most reading in the future is done on screens, from
computers to iPhones to Kindles
to even textbooks on screens, could such a development hurt the
critical thinking
skills of young people to think, analyze and assess information, Mangen said:
"It’s tempting to answer with the cliché, and say
that only time will tell, but I do think it is appropriate and
important to raise these critical questions, over and over -- even at
the risk of being marginalized as a Luddite. Maryanne Wolfe at
Tufts University in Boston raises this issue, too, from a
cognitive/neuroscientific point of view, in her excellent book "Proust
and the Squid", which I highly recommend. It's been translated already
into Chinese for the Taiwan market and is avaible there now."
At the end of our interview, this reporter asked Mangen if she was
willing or ready to say goodbye
to Mr. Paper and greet the Screen Age with a completely open-minded
welcome.
"No," she said, adding:" At least not when it comes to the educational
aspects of reading."
