So I was watching Angel on Netflix. And a character named Wesley was holding a large book which he called a "Template". What Wesley would do is tell the Template what book or text he wanted to see and it would appear in the Template.

Now with bankruptcy of Barnes & Nobles and recently Border's, the thought of not having bookstores freaks me out. But it lead me to think, "what if instead of books, you had Templates?". There are some new (relatively) tech such as e-paper. I have no idea if they have the feel (or close to) of real paper. But if you made a "book" from sheets of e-paper and had a place to load a flash drive or chip (MMC, etc), you could still get the book experience (touch, feel, flipping through pages) and have a hundreds of books --electronicaly-- at your fingertips.

Personally, I think this would be a viable competitor to the tablet (Nook, Kindle, etc) as far as book reading is concerned.

Thoughts?

there are three problems with this currently:

a) technology. people want it lightweight, but have color and yet long battery hour. what you're saying is expensive.
Quote : "[color=#1C2837][size=2]But if you made a "book" from sheets of e-paper and..."
[color=#1C2837][size=2]

[color=#1C2837][size=2]how many sheet? why not just reuse the same sheet/screen? cheaper, isn't.
[color=#1C2837][size=2]

[color=#1C2837][size=2] i can't say much about current e-book, even kindle isn't available in Malaysia, yet. but from what i heard, it's suffering from music in it's early days - too many format (mp3, wma, real, whatnot, too many codec, limited to certain hardware, blah blah blah. just like drm for games (what if - like B&N, goes bankrupt, and the server down, and you cannot reinstall / reactivate the book you bought?
[color=#1C2837][size=2]

[color=#1C2837][size=2]i could go on and on, but a lot of thing have to improve before we can get there. but the cost of each e-paper is expensive ( i tihnk) to build multiple sheet for each book isn't cost effective. better single screen and just refresh i.

I don't really see a reason to have more than one 'sheet' of E-Paper. A sheet sounds like something that would be prone to damage, especially if you are flipping them. I have a Sony Touch, and transitioning between paper books and it was a breeze for me.

I would much prefer to have the resolution increased, and the draw time decreased, rather than having multiple sheets. I could see the value in having a dual screen book style clam-shell, where you get extra display real estate and the bonus of the unit being its own cover to protect the screen.

But more than two sheets? I rather have more independent readers that I can simply sync up with each other.

As a writer, I would love a high res e-ink screen that includes an ultra-high res pressure sensitive stylus input, so I can write notes and edit text by hand. But for it to be effective, it has to be very fast in updating, otherwise I'll just stick with printed paper manuscripts.

I don't think it's necessarily a terrible idea. However, it would need to be the case that the screen itself is cheap enough to warrant having roughly a thousand of them, which I can't imagine will happen any time soon. The other problem is that real books get damaged pretty quickly, and in that case each book you read is a separate book. With what you're proposing, you'd be reading the same book over and over again, not to mention that the technology might make it even more delicate than a real book. Taking steps to make it durable would only increase the cost, and probably make it less "book-like" as well.

I also really don't see why you would want the digital paper to be 'book like' anyway. Books are, frankly, an awkward format for reviewing information, especially when you compare it to something like a pad/slate style e-reader. I only have one point of information which can be displayed to, rather than having hundreds of pages. This means if I set it down, the e-reader can't close on me or flip to a random page on me when I don't want it to.

We don't still read off scrolls, as the book/codex is so much superior. The modern E-reader is even better than the codex as we don't have to manually flip through pages, we can just jump to the one we want.

(A better bookmark interface would be very welcome.)

Hanging on to tradition for the sake of tradition is a bad way to innovate. As a rampant "paper" book lover, I wouldn't see any advantage of a template over the current ebook readers. They seem to do a pretty good job of making information available in an easy to read format, they are just a little expensive.

I love bookstores and I love going to Borders to see what's out there, but it's just not going to be cost effective going forward. The same with Blockbuster in an era of mail order and streaming rentals. No one wants to pay more money for the overhead of the convenience of having a physical location. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in each store to warehouse a massive inventory of books, that could be held on a hard drive the size of my Bose computer speakers. Think about how much money they could save by cutting real estate by 90% and having some couches with free kindles/nooks lying around for browsing. When you want to buy, you just download to your reader.

For some reason I really don't like ereaders. I feel like I don't know where I am in a book. It's like I don't have a sense of physical attachment or a physical appreciation of location. If that makes any sense. I miss the feeling of the pages and even the smell of an old book.

Electronic paper is awesome, but it's not a Pareto improvement, for the reasons nilkn mentions. In textbooks and reference books that I regularly use, the physical position of something within a book can help me retrieve it faster than in an electronic edition. Of course this doesn't apply to all kinds of searches: keyword based search in an electronic document can also be really useful. I doubt that physical books will ever disappear completely, but the advantages of electronic paper are so great that we will probably see significantly fewer physical books in the long run.