Video in print

The moving image is coming soon to books and magazines
September 23, 2009

Subscribers to the US magazine Entertainment Weekly expect to read about television shows, but in the issue of 18th September, some of them discovered that they could watch the shows themselves. Inside the magazine was a little screen, slightly smaller than a credit card and held within a cardboard insert on the printed page, showing—in full colour and with sound—new and old shows made by the CBS Corporation. Buttons on the surround controlled the clips, one of which was an ad for PepsiCo, which helped pay for the insert.

It sounds like something from a Steven Spielberg film, but this “video-in-print” is a strange hybrid that involves little novelty: the technology is familiar stuff, similar to that used in handheld, lightweight devices that display video. Those are now commonplace enough—and seem set to become more so with the imminent launch of Apple’s touch-screen Tablet mini-computer, which is the size of a paperback novella. So why put a video screen into a paper publication, at a cost of $20 per insert, at all?



It may be a one-off publicity stunt, though a moving, speaking ad in a magazine is far more likely to grab readers’ attention than static, silent words and pictures. The move also hints at the resilience of print. It’s too early to say whether digital books such as Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle will replace the paperback in the shoulder bag, although it seems unlikely for older generations brought up with paper books. And if we’re not yet ready to abandon paper for video-capable screens, the IT industry will bring video screens to paper in the meantime. Besides, print still beats screens for black-white contrast that remains readable in bright light, as well as for page-flicking searchability and general easiness on the eye.

It is for these reasons that the future of video-in-print might lie with a different technology: “electronic paper,” which promises to combine electronically controlled images with the flexibility and readability of paper. Crucially, too, it’s potentially far cheaper, more robust and flexible than the miniature video screens of the Entertainment Weekly ad, being based instead on a kind of “electronic ink” that responds to electrical currents. Leading the field is the US-based E Ink Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which supplies the screen displays for Amazon’s Kindle reader. The tricky part is not the ink but the electronics that control it. E Ink has teamed up with companies making electronic circuitry from plastic materials, including the Philips spin-off Polymer Vision and Plastic Logic in Cambridge, Britain. The latter arose from pioneering work on polymer electronics—carbon-based “plastic” materials that conduct electricity—at Cambridge University in the 1980s, a discipline that won its early pioneers the 2000 Nobel prize in chemistry.

At the moment, the display capability of electronic paper is nowhere as sophisticated as the Entertainment Weekly screens. But it is a commercial reality and has already been seen in print publications, such as October 2008’s Esquire magazine, which celebrated its 75th anniversary with a front-cover E Ink screen that flashed the message “The 21st century begins now.” Inside, Ford ran a car advert using the same technology to create an illusion of movement. And it is rumoured that E Ink will announce colour displays very soon, while Samsung is developing colour, video-capable “paper” displays that combine both liquid-crystal and E Ink technology.

In fact, the technical know-how in this field currently outstrips our sense of what to do with it. It is easy enough to think of gaudy new options—movie clips that run alongside the texts of books, newspapers that carry newsflash updates, computer games or software magazines that let you sample the products—but it is still far from clear whether consumers will welcome this fusion of media. At present, the ingenious technology remains shackled to a level of banality, clunkiness and intrusiveness that we associate with internet “flash banner” ads. MIT’s media lab is exploring more inventive, even dizzying, possibilities, such as graphic novels made with programmable ink. Or how about touch-sensitive paper for creating animated art? Paper cameras and camcorders? The real payoff will only come when a company with the foresight of Google or Apple sees how to combine what is possible with what people actually want.